ENGLISH Issue 82

September
2012

Tprofessional
EACHING
The Leading Practical Magazine For English Language Teachers Worldwide

Expect the unexpected

Adrian Underhill and Alan Maley

Managing your classes

Jane-Maria Harding da Rosa

CLIL-ing me softly
Erwin Gierlinger

Please leave a message

Lindsay Warwick

• practical methodology

• fresh ideas & innovations

• classroom resources

• new technology

• teacher development

• tips & techniques

• photocopiable materials

• competitions & reviews

w w w . e t p r o f e s s i o n a l . c o m
Contents MAIN FEATURE BUSINESS ENGLISH PROFESSIONAL

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED 4 TELL ME A STORY 52

Adrian Underhill and Alan Maley instigate Louis Rogers maintains that narrative isn’t just
improvisation for general English

MAY I LEAVE A MESSAGE? 55

Phil Wade offers activities involving voicemail
FEATURES

ENGLISH TEACHING CONFESSIONAL 9

Qiangba Yangjin gets to grips with groupwork TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

CLIL-ING ME SOFTLY 12 CLIL: FROM POLICY TO REALITY 56

Erwin Gierlinger counts his CLIL commandments Christa Mundin and Charlotte Giller help teachers
to cope with a new teaching context
HIGH FREQUENCY HABITS 16
Jackie Fung King Lee is convinced that context
is the key to teaching question formation
TECHNOLOGY
OVER THE WALL 19 PREVENT VIDEOS FROM VANISHING 58
Alan Maley targets translation Gary Collins deals with the ephemeral nature of
online video
THE SPEAKING CHAIN 25
Jane Neill finds speaking leads to writing PLEASE LEAVE A MESSAGE 59
Lindsay Warwick describes a variety of ways
OUTCOMES-BASED LANGUAGE COACHING 29 to use voice recording
Peter Zoeftig relates the coach to the language teacher
FIVE THINGS YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO 61
ART IN ACTION 37 KNOW ABOUT: WEBINARS
María Palmira Massi, Bettiana Andrea Blázquez, Nicky Hockly considers a new method of communication
Zoraida Risso Patrón, María Angélica Verdú and
Paola Scilipoti get visual WEBWATCHER 63
Russell Stannard applauds some new collaboration tools
A SECOND SELF 5 46
Jill Hadfield suggests activities for a motivational
programme
REGULAR FEATURES
TALK AMONGST YOURSELVES 49
Aaron Deupree investigates L1 use in international
IT WORKS IN PRACTICE 34
schools
LANGUAGE LOG 40
John Potts
CHAT SHOW GAME SHOW 51
Richard Hillman proposes a winning activity
SCRAPBOOK 42

REVIEWS 44
TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS
COMPETITIONS 41, 64
MANAGING YOUR CLASSES 22
Jane-Maria Harding da Rosa explains what classroom
management is all about
INTERNATIONAL SUBSCRIPTION FORM 32

Includes materials designed to photocopy

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 • 1

 Editorial Also in the field of CLIL, Erwin Gierlinger outlines his seven

M
any people believe that cooperation and collaboration
– between teachers, between students, between commandments, one of which is that CLIL teachers should
teachers and students – are amongst the keys to not go it alone: successful CLIL involves the cooperation and
successful teaching. collaboration of fellow teachers, students, head teachers,
parents and educational authorities.
In our main feature, Adrian Underhill and Alan Maley remind
us that it is the interaction between teacher and students, all To some, the idea of cooperation and collaboration in the
contributing to the same endeavour, that makes a lesson classroom may seem like a pipe dream. So what can we do
move beyond the confines of a lesson plan to an experience when there is little cooperation from the students? Jane-Maria
that is akin to a jazz performance. Harding da Rosa reflects on the success of Mexican ‘dog
whisperer’ Cesar Millan. By asserting ourselves with the same
Qiangba Yangjin confesses that learning to work with fellow
calm authority he uses to quell a pack of unruly dogs, we have
teachers on a training course and to contribute her own
to become ‘leader of the pack’, which will allow us to lead the
ideas in discussions, as well as taking on board those of
students into more cooperative and collaborative ways!
others, changed her opinion about the value of groupwork in
the classroom, a technique she has now introduced to her Good news! Personal subscribers to ETp now have free
students in Tibet. access to our new website eltknowledge.com. Use your old
username and password to log in.
Faced with the new challenge of content and language
integrated learning (CLIL), teachers often feel the need to get
together to support each other and share expertise. Christa
Mundin and Charlotte Giller describe courses they run in
Spain for teachers, some of whom are coming to English
teaching for the first time. The level of cooperation from the
participants is high: many are voluntarily taking courses in
Helena Gomm
English at the end of a busy day’s teaching and they value the
Editor
new ideas and classroom techniques that they are picking up
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
at the same time as they improve their own language ability.

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2 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 M A I N F E AT U R E
Expect the
unexpected
Adrian Underhill and ost of us seem to lead our
Alan Maley shed light
on the ‘dark matter’ of
M lives somewhere between
the two poles of certainty
and the unexpected. For
much of the time, we crave the comfort
of certainty and view uncertainty as a
education. threat. Yet there are also times when we
delight in the thrill of surprise at the
unexpected.
Control and freedom
These polar extremes are reflected in
virtually any domain we care to think
of. In philosophy, for example, we can
generalise that Western philosophy, with
its strong positivist flavour, with an
emphasis on certainty, is in contrast
with Eastern traditions, particularly
Taoism, which allow a more ready
acceptance of the multiple layers of
reality, the unknowability of things, and
the need to work with, rather than
against, the grain of them.
In politics, we can find examples of
totalitarian attempts to impose various
forms of certainty, and ‘liberal-
democratic’ systems where the freedom
of the individual is prized, at least in
principle, along with the uncertainty it
brings. We can find examples of
command and of free-market economies.
In management, the tendency to micro-
manage every detail of a business can
be contrasted with a more open style of
cooperative management.
The same polarity can be found in
medicine (between interventionist and
‘natural’ forms of treatment), in music
(between strict adherence to a score and
improvisation), in literature and art
(between ‘classical’ and experimental
4 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
forms), in child-rearing practices
(between strict control and ‘laissez-
faire’), in cookery (those who cook by
the book and those who cook by
instinct), in gardening, in relationships
… in short, in almost everything. Even
the way we distinguish between ‘work’
and ‘play’ reflects a division between
control and discipline on the one hand
(certainty) and freedom and spontaneity
on the other (unpredictability).
Most of us seem
to lead our lives
somewhere between
the two poles of
certainty and the
unexpected
Language and education
So we should not be surprised to find a
similar kind of tension in language
education. At one end of the scale,
there are those who believe we are able
to exercise control over learning, usually
by means of tightly-defined syllabi,
terminal objectives, textbooks,
inspection schemes, examinations,
lesson plans, etc. At the other end, we
have those who assert the need for
freedom, autonomous learning, learner
improvisation, ‘natural learning’,
‘cooperative learning’, negotiated
syllabi, and so on. (A caveat is necessary
here – we are not suggesting that this is
a clear-cut division. Most of us find
ourselves somewhere between these two
extreme views, and may even shift
between them at different points in our
careers, in different teaching contexts or
even within one working day!)
Clearly, the ‘control’ position
implies a belief that learners learn what
teachers teach. Or, as N S Prabhu puts
it, that teaching and learning are two
sides of the same coin, that they are
reciprocally related, like buying and
selling.
The ‘freedom’ position implies that
we cannot predict what learners will
learn at any given time. In this case,
teaching is equated with what teachers
do, not with its outcome. And learning
is what learners do irrespective of
results. In this view, teaching and
learning are two currencies and the
exchange rate shifts constantly. The
connection is both tenuous and
unpredictable. Learners may learn some
of what teachers teach, but we cannot
predict precisely what. They may also,
as Dick Allwright points out, learn
things which are not taught, or may not
learn them until well after they have
been taught, or indeed, never.
Prediction and planning
In this article, we take the view that
unpredictability is the ‘default’ position
in the teaching/learning context. This
unpredictability takes two forms:
1 The fact that we cannot predict over
the long term what, or when or whether
any given learner or group of learners
will learn from our teaching. (This is
what Prabhu is referring to in his article
‘Teaching is at most hoping for the
best’.)
2 The fact that, within any classroom
encounter, in the immediate term, we
cannot predict how the individuals and
the group will react to our input – nor
how we will react to their behaviours
and changes of mood and atmosphere.
(This is what we refer to below as the
dark matter of the classroom.)
In the case of 1, perhaps all we can do
is to make our teaching as relevant to
the group as we can, and to hope for
the best. This involves an act of faith:
we do the very best we can in the
knowledge that much of it will not have
the effect we hoped for, but hopeful that
it may have some sort of effect in the
longer term.
But what about 2? This is about how
the teacher, instant by instant, micro-
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
second by micro-second, improvises to
adjust to the unpredictable nature of
the encounter. This improvisation has
been compared by Peter Lutzker to
what a theatre (not circus) clown does
when confronted by an audience. It
involves the ability to wait, to observe
closely, to gauge reactions and to act
appropriately in response to them. The
key to this complex web of sensitivities
is to have no plan, to be completely and
utterly open to what will happen. This is
of course anathema to orthodox views
of teacher training, where lesson plans
figure so prominently, and which act as
the tools for control.
We cannot predict over
the long term what, or
when or whether any
given learner or group
of learners will learn
from our teaching
However, if we think about it, lesson
plans rarely, if ever, work out the way
they were planned. If they do, it is likely
that the teacher has simply ploughed on,
dragging the class along behind them,
with scant regard to the exigencies of the
moment. If we substitute lesson for play,
this can lead to the situation described
by Oscar Wilde, when asked how his play
had gone the previous evening: ‘Oh, the
play was absolutely brilliant but the
audience was a total failure.’
Teaching
What, then, does all this mean for the
reality of teaching a class? When
teaching, we probably start out by
following a plan, developed before the
lesson. While preparing this plan we
may imagine a plausible lesson, but as
things start to happen in the lesson
itself – as the unpredictable starts to
occur – we depart from the plan to
attend to what needs doing (and of
course we may do this well, or less well).
The plan is still there, but the class
becomes a living interaction, not just
the enactment of a script. We don’t
know what different students will do,
say or need – or how we will best
respond to and assist them. We are
inquiring and reflecting on the wing,
thinking on our feet, making
spontaneous decisions as we go along,
according to how we see things (and
fully conscious of the fact that we can
only see part of what is happening).
As in jazz, we are improvising,
leaving behind the written notes, the
sheet music, and playing variations on
the original melody – or indeed new
melodies altogether. At the same time,
we don’t know precisely what will come,
and yet we wish to respond usefully to
whatever does come in a way that will
make meaning for those that are there.
We refer to this as the dark matter
of teaching: rather like the dark matter
that we are told makes up about 80
percent of the universe, but which we
cannot detect or see, only infer from its
influence on the things we can see. It is,
for us, the ‘missing mass of the
universe’. And so the dark matter of
teaching may make up the bulk of the
lesson, yet not be in plan, book or
supporting materials.
Within this, two of the variables are:
1 The extent of the improvisation:
How far are we able, or willing, to
depart from the plan? Is it a variation
on the original sheet music that is still
recognisable as a version of that
melody? Is it a less recognisable
reworking in the light of what is
needed? Or is the original plan/melody
entirely suspended as some prior need
emerges and is worked through?
2 The quality of the improvisation:
With what quality is the first variable
carried out in meeting the learning of
the student? How do we know? And do
the departures from the plan – the
improvisations – fit the learning needs
of the moment? Are they fresh
responses tailored to the moment? Or
are these improvisations more like
teacher habits, well-worn actions,
material from past experiences?
As in jazz, we are
improvising, leaving
behind the written
notes, the sheet music,
and playing variations
on the original melody
– or indeed new
melodies altogether
5
Expect the
unexpected
Training
We propose that this improvisation
makes up the bulk of most lessons.
However, on teacher training courses we
tend to focus on the language, the
methods, the activities and the class
management – on the myriad of
idealised set-piece sequences. Yet even
though we know that in the event they
are going to be improvised, somehow
we never look at it like that. When our
trainers observe us and then give
feedback, we do not usually refer to the
quality of improvisation. Instead, we
talk about meeting goals, maximising
practice, checking learning, minimising
TTT, etc, but not about the
improvisation that is necessary for all
this to happen, nor about the qualities
of such improvisation. And we have a
vast infrastructure of words and
feedback points and criteria for
assessing the worth of the lesson and
the activities, but we don’t really have
an intelligent way of looking at the
performance itself, at the improvisation.
And yet, as we’ve said before, this makes
up the bulk of each lesson. So let us
start to talk about improvisation, about
how to make it as visible and discussible
as it is in related performance arts such
as music and theatre.
Perhaps we rather shy away from
such discussion (‘We’re not actors, we’re
teachers, we deal with topic not
performance …’). But the medium is the
message, the improvisation is the event.
So how come we don’t talk about that
improvisation, the quality of the
improvisation, and whether it is fresh
On teacher training
courses we tend to
focus on the language,
the methods, the
activities and the class
management – on the
myriad of idealised
set-piece sequences
6 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
improvisation or habitual hot licks
(improvisations from the past that
worked, got repeated and fossilised and
entered the habitual repertoire)? The
zone of improvisation is key to most
performance arts, and that includes
teaching. Many trainee teachers are
traumatised – not by the teaching ideas,
the drills, the correction techniques, and
so on, but by the improvisation
necessary to make all this happen in real
time, the dark matter of teaching, the
undiscussed beast with the big footprint.
As in jazz, the questions are: Am I
responding to what is actually
happening here and now, in a way that
fits the contours of the moment? Am I
flowing with the moment as it unfolds,
coming up with new variations that I
may never have used before, yet which
may be the best way to meet the
learning challenge? Or, on the other
hand, am I somehow relying on
Many trainee teachers
are traumatised by the
improvisation necessary
to make all this happen
in real time, the dark
matter of teaching
manoeuvres or tricks that I have used in
the past, stock reactions that may have
quite a useful effect, yet which don’t
follow the exact contours of the present
moment? Are they responses I have
made before, hot licks that may be quite
serviceable, but perhaps don’t quite fit
the shape of the moment? And this
applies equally whether I prepare lesson
plans or teach without them.
Presence
To be present, the teacher needs to be
learning, just as the student is. There is
a learning relationship in which the two
protagonists are connected by learning,
open to the contagion of each other’s
learning. It is like a pas de deux, each
leading, each following, and both on the
same side of the learning fence. Such a
relationship requires full attention and
total presence, and an improvised flow
that relates precisely to what is going on
right here and now. In order to be open
to this kind of learning, the teacher has
to develop the quality of relaxed energy
which permits the ‘effortless effort’
needed to respond in the moment to
whatever happens. Paradoxically, it
often requires action to be withheld
until an appropriate response comes
forth. As teachers, we are compulsive
do-ers. Sometimes we need to heed the
sage’s advice: ‘Don’t just do something,
stand there.’
To respond freshly to the needs of
the moment means:
– reading the situation as it is, seeing
what is a going on (and that includes
the adjustment necessary for our
personal biases);
– responding in a way that is as free as
we can manage from past habits: not to
make it more right, or better, but to be
less in the grip of what was done last
time.
Preparing for the
unpredictable
If we feel that we need to prepare
teachers – both novice and experienced
– for the encounter with the dark matter
of teaching, how might this be done? In
a sense, there is no way to prepare
people for the unpredictable: the very
idea is a paradox.
Essentially, the best we can do is to
raise teachers’ awareness of the issue and
perhaps to develop a few of the qualities
we need to turn unpredictability to
advantage. But whatever we do will
always be more about creating a mindset
than providing a toolkit.
With this in mind, here are ten
suggestions:
1 Offer training in presentation skills:
voice quality, gesture and facial
expression, stance and posture, timing,
use of space, language control, use of
silence, rapport, etc. The advantage of
this kind of work is that, while
experiential, it can be done under ‘safe’
laboratory conditions.
2 Use improvisational theatre games
to develop speed of response to the
unexpected. There are many
descriptions of activities in Keith
Johnstone’s books, and there are plenty
of other sources for theatre games and
drama activities which help develop
sensitivity to others, empathy,
anticipation and group solidarity.
Clowning techniques are particularly
powerful and well-documented by Peter
Lutzker.
 3 Create an awareness of ‘presence’:
learning to ‘be’ in every moment
(without concern for the past, the
future, self-regard, etc). This may mean
learning how to stop ‘doing’. One way
of achieving this is to create a space
every day for reflection/meditation.
Even 30 minutes a day of ‘quiet time’
can help to un-clutter the mind and
make space for allowing ourselves to be
who we really are when all the busy-ness
and bustle are pared away.
4 Reflect on those methodologies
which eschew pre-planning: Silent Way,
CLL, Dogme, etc. What can they teach
us about ‘letting go’, accepting whatever
happens, responding appropriately in
the ‘now’, using the unexpected to carry
the class forward?
5 Set up reading circles where the
group regularly discusses an agreed
book. For example, Daniel Pennac’s
School Blues, Stephen Nachmanovitch’s
Free Play or Timothy Gallwey’s The
Inner Game of Tennis would all yield
extensive discussion of key issues. Of
course, you cannot learn improvisation
from a book, but reading and
discussion can help raise awareness and
develop a new mindset.
6 Provoke unpredictability in class by
applying heuristics. Probably the best-
known of these is John Fanselow’s ‘Do
the opposite’ from his book Breaking
Rules. By deliberately doing the opposite
of what we normally do in class, we
break habits. This does not necessarily
lead to an improved outcome, but to a
different outcome – from which we can
learn. After all, if students can be
unpredictable, why not teachers too?
The element of surprise in unpredictable
moments can provoke extraordinary
reactions from the students, provided it
happens within a secure framework, a
comfort zone based on trust.
7 Work on some of the activities in
books on teacher development and
classroom dynamics, for example those
by Jill Hadfield, and Katie Head and
Pauline Taylor.
8 Include improvisation as a topic in
post-lesson discussions, reflections and
observation feedback sessions, simply
with the aim of putting it on the
experiential map and making it
discussible. In time, useful headings,
concepts and criteria may emerge to
bring rigour to such discussions.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Demonstrate how it is done, perhaps
through the use of wisdom stories or
quotes (‘Doing the thing right or doing
the right thing?’). Perhaps by using
video clips of critical moments. Perhaps
by reflective sessions on recent classes.
Perhaps through simulations.
9 Be open to a teaching mindset that
enables us to teach ‘as an act of inquiry’
rather than ‘in the hope of being right’.
The former allows risk, informed
spontaneity and intelligent
improvisation as a form of inquiry,
which can open up or expose a
situation. Thus improvisation becomes
a way of learning in the heat of the
moment. The hope of being right tends
to close down options in the search for
certainty and control.
10 Try three small experiments:
a) Look for opportunities to spend less
time controlling people (in your class)
and more time connecting people
together – and then watching, waiting
and working with what comes up.
b) Think of yourself as an improviser,
and notice in what areas of life you can
feel your improvisation. What is the
‘jazz of ELT’ for you? Are there
moments when you can find yourself
playing this jazz?
c) Mistakes in jazz are not fatal. They
may even be a doorway into something
new. Can you find examples in your
teaching?

Clearly, the ultimate aim is to create
what Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi calls
‘flow’ states in our classes. In a flow
state, we are so into the activity we are
engaged in that time passes unnoticed
and events take place in a seemingly
effortless way, with all the elements
complementing each other as in a
dance. However, to achieve this state
requires the sort of understanding of
the dark matter of teaching we have
been discussing here.
This article is the result of many
extended conversations we have had
with each other over many months.
What we have tried to do here is to
articulate the essence of those
conversations – themselves examples of
improvisation, where we allowed
ourselves to be carried along by ideas
and experiences that cropped up, rather
than having a plan or vision of a
predetermined outcome. So for us, this
is not an end point. Rather, it is
intended to encourage others to share
their perceptions of this hugely
important, yet so far poorly-described,
area of our work. We welcome you to
join in our ongoing conversation. ETp
Allwright, R ‘Why don’t learners learn
what teachers teach? The interaction
hypothesis’ In Singleton, D M and Little,
D (Eds) Language Learning in Formal and
Informal Contexts Irish Association for
Applied Linguistics 1984
Czikszentmihalyi, M Finding Flow Basic
Books 1997
Fanselow, J Breaking Rules Longman
1989
Gallwey, W T The Inner Game of Tennis
Pan Books 1986
Hadfield, J Classroom Dynamics OUP
1992
Head, K and Taylor, P Readings in
Teacher Development Heinemann 1997
Johnstone, K Impro: Improvisation and
the Theatre Methuen 1981
Johnstone, K Impro for Storytellers Faber
and Faber 1999
Lutzker, P The Art of Foreign Language
Teaching Francke Verlag 2007
Nachmanovitch, S Free Play:
Improvisation in Life and Art
Tarcher/Putnam 1990
Pennac, D School Blues MacLehose
Press 2010
Prabhu, N S ‘Teaching is at most hoping
for the best’ Seameo RELC Journal 1998
Adrian Underhill is a
freelance consultant and
trainer, working on CPD
and organisational
development. He is a
past president of IATEFL,
Series Editor of the
Macmillan Books for
Teachers series, and
author of Sound
Foundations, published
by Macmillan. His current
interests include ‘post-
heroic’ approaches to
leadership in education,
and improvisation in
teaching.
adrian@aunderhill.co.uk
Alan Maley has worked in
the area of ELT for over
40 years in Yugoslavia,
Ghana, Italy, France,
China, India, the UK,
Singapore and Thailand.
Since 2003 he has been a
freelance writer and
consultant. He has
published over 30 books
and numerous articles,
and was, until recently,
Series Editor of the
Oxford Resource Books
for Teachers.
yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
7
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ENGLISH TEACHING
CONFESSIONAL ...
M
y educational background as
Qiangba Yangjin
an ethnic Tibetan who has
reveals how she studied in Lhasa and Beijing
contributed to many of the
became a convert to difficulties I encountered during my time
pursuing an MA in TESOL at the School
groupwork. for International Training (SIT) in Vermont,
USA. However, it was during my studies
at SIT that I came to appreciate the value
of groupwork – though not without a
considerable amount of struggle.
Prior to my time in Vermont, my
educational experience had been very
teacher-centred: the students’ role was to
listen to the teacher and take notes.
When I became a teacher myself, I
simply put into practice what I had been
taught. Rarely did I encourage groupwork
or discussion, and because of my lack of
experience with these techniques, both
as a student and as a teacher, I had a
hard time adjusting to working in groups
when I first arrived at SIT.
Sitting on the sidelines
During the first semester, my role in group
discussions was quite passive. For one
thing, I didn’t feel comfortable talking about
my own ideas, as I thought my ideas might
not have much value compared to those
of others, and I didn’t feel comfortable
speaking up in front of the other students
because of my concerns about my ability
to express myself in English. Also, I didn’t
want to create an impression that I was
showing off in public, which would have
been the likely interpretation of classmates
from Han Chinese and Tibetan cultures.
Even when I had a different point of view
that I thought important, I did not bring it
up because I preferred not to create
conflict in the group. Generally, people
take disagreement as a personal attack
both in Han Chinese and Tibetan
cultures. Often group members use
silence to maintain harmony in the group;
I remained silent during classroom
discussions for the same purpose.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Consequently, there were times when
I felt I was left out of group discussions.
Like other Asian students at SIT, I
complained that groupwork only wasted
time and that I learnt nothing from it. But
as time went by, I came to realise that I
needed to take responsibility for my own
learning and, indeed, that groupwork did
provide opportunities for such learning.
Taking the plunge
From my second semester, I started to
participate more in group discussions as I
wanted to learn from working with others. I
became more comfortable with speaking
up in small groups and interacting with my
peers. Slowly, I began to see the benefits
of participating in groupwork. For example,
I could improve my communication skills
in the target language, develop my skills
in cooperating with other members of the
group and learn new ideas from them.
Other people’s ideas triggered and clarified
my own thoughts. By being forced to
articulate and defend my ideas, I was able
to acquire concepts and clarify items that
I had not fully mastered. I also benefited
from my peers’ explanations when I
didn’t initially understand the concepts
being discussed. I found that my ideas
were often valued by other group
members, which increased my self-
confidence. Even more, I realised that not
everything worth learning is in books.
Behaving correctly
However, since I wanted to make the most
of my chance to learn in small groups. I
was unaware of my own inappropriate
behaviour, such as interrupting when
other students were presenting their
opinions or jumping into conversations in
which I wanted to participate in order to
achieve my own personal learning goals.
I would sometimes cut someone off in
conversation because of a new word I
didn’t know. This slowed down
9
ENGLISH TEACHING
CONFESSIONAL ...
discussions and, because of time
limitations, kept others from voicing their
thoughts. Later, I realised that it was
necessary sometimes for me to be tolerant
of ambiguity in order to serve the group’s
interest. Also I found that I became upset
when I felt I was excluded from the group.
Grasping the principles
When considering groupwork activities, it
is essential to keep several principles in
mind in order to make their use in the
classroom effective. Groupwork should
not just be a time-filler or an ill-thought-
out activity for use in checking homework
or extra assignments. It should not be
used as an opportunity for the teacher to
rest, read or prepare other classes, and
the teacher should not just use it in
imitation of other teachers without really
understanding what it entails. The real
purpose of working in groups in an ELT
class goes beyond the actual command:
‘Get in a group, please, and answer the
following questions’, which, in most
cases, turns out to be thinly-disguised
individual work.
Spreading the word
Aware of all the benefits I have obtained
from groupwork, I have begun to use it as
a teaching strategy in my classrooms at
Tibet University. The dominant way of
teaching here is still teacher-centred, and
the students rarely experience working in
groups. At first, it wasn’t easy for me to
introduce the idea of groupwork because
most of my students reacted negatively –
as I myself had done initially. However,
using my understanding of both Tibetan
and Han Chinese cultures, I carefully
designed groupwork activities, explained
the benefits to my students and prudently
assigned roles. The success of groupwork
largely depends on assigning roles to the
students effectively. As Spencer Kagan
affirms, division of labour is often achieved
by assigning task roles. As time went on,
most of my students participated better
than they did at the beginning, and they
seemed to become aware of some of the
benefits. Later on, the students were able
to take responsibility for assigning their
roles themselves.
10 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Reflecting the real world
It is the teacher’s responsibility to provide
clear instruction to the students. As
Adrian Doff points out, in order to prevent
activities getting out of control ‘it is
important to give clear instructions, to
give clear defined tasks and to set up a
routine so that the students exactly know
how and what to do’.
Since participating in society involves
working in groups, it is vitally important
that students learn to deal with groupwork
at school. As language teachers, we
cannot leave this aspect aside. On the
contrary, we have to incorporate it in our
classes and teach students to get the best
out of it. Groupwork helps both students
and teachers to bridge the gap between
input and output. It definitely helps
students not only acquire language but
also develop life skills, such as how to
work with others, present ideas and listen
to others. It also gives them the chance to
experience a small piece of the real world
in their classes by negotiating, turn-taking,
suggesting and getting to a final result. All
these skills will help them in their future
careers and are essential elements for
working effectively.

I freely confess that working in a group
has not always been an easy thing for
me. Nevertheless, it has been worthwhile
to experience it. I have learnt many
things from working with group members,
ENGLISH
Tprofessional
EACHING
ENGLISH TEACHING professional
Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd,
Rayford House, School Road,
Hove BN3 5HX, UK
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both academically and culturally, and I
have also learnt to know myself better.
Many people complain about working
in groups because of the struggles this
entails if it is alien to them or their
culture. I, too, complained a lot about
groupwork until I came to realise all the
benefits I could get from working with
others. Now I have fewer complaints and
have started to observe and evaluate my
own behaviour more actively. I am
confident that our students will gain the
same benefits if we, as teachers in non-
western cultures, diligently incorporate
groupwork in our classrooms. ETp
Doff, A Teach English: A Training Course
for Teachers CUP 1991
Kagan, S Cooperative Learning
Resources for Teachers Inc 1994
Qiangba Yangjin is a
Tibetan English teacher
in the School of Tourism
and Foreign Languages
of Tibet University. She
received her MA TESOL
in the USA in 2001. She
has been teaching at
TU since 1992 and is
currently also the vice
dean.
changba88@yahoo.com
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Teaching Professional Confessional
and tell our readers how and why
you became the professional English
teacher you are today? Do you have
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write to helena.gomm@pavpub.com.
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Would you like to review books or other
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 M E T H O D O L O G Y
CLIL-ing
me softly
Erwin Gierlinger is a major
singles out seven CLIL buzz-word in
Europe, and a
vast number of articles and books have
commandments for been published on the issue of what
constitutes ‘quality’ CLIL. See, for
content and language example, works by Do Coyle and Oliver
Meyer. While these attempts to establish
integrated learning. quality indicators for CLIL make a
great effort towards introducing some
theoretical guidelines and focused
thought into a hugely heterogeneous
field with greatly varying contexts, they
nevertheless run the risk of being
dismissed as merely offering far-fetched,
ivory-tower advice of relatively low
value for practising CLIL teachers.
This has led me to ask teachers what
they consider to be difficult or
challenging about their own CLIL
approach. Adding the results to my own
experience of CLIL teaching, I have
devised a list of provocative statements
intended to stimulate discussion on the
nature of CLIL in particular contexts. I
call this list ‘the seven commandments
for CLIL’. By approaching CLIL from
this angle, I hope to achieve two things:
● Firstly, by not being positively
prescriptive but still giving a focused
direction for discussion, I hope to enable
CLIL teachers to voice, discuss and
defend their own CLIL quality markers.
● Secondly, by using language which is
free of CLIL jargon and introduces
an element of light humour, I believe
teachers can relate the discussion
better to their own CLIL context and
interests.
So far, my pre-service and in-service
training sessions for CLIL seem to
12 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
support the success of this endeavour.
However, it needs to be made totally clear
that the point certainly is not a religious
or dogmatic one but, rather, by
crystallising the issues into ‘grand’
statements, participants in an in-service
teacher training CLIL course can sharpen
their minds towards some of the most
critical issues when implementing CLIL.
CLIL: the seven
commandments
1 Thou shalt not think that
language will take care of
itself
When observing CLIL classrooms and
talking to teachers, I often find that they
operate on an underlying principle which
assumes that giving enough subject input
will somehow automatically lead to
language comprehension and improved
competence. Meaning-related language
activities that direct the learners’
attention to grammatical or semantic
features of the language (focus on form;
awareness-raising of language form;
implicit or explicit noticing of language
form) are mostly seen as a distraction, a
waste of time, and not as part of the
content delivery. Furthermore, since the
lexical input is almost exclusively driven
by the conceptual understanding of the
subject or topic objectives, hardly any
preparation or classroom time is reserved
for lexical issues such as, for example, use
of the mother tongue, word frequency,
‘general’ versus ‘academic’ versus
‘subject-specific’ vocabulary, registers,
collocations and word morphology.
Closely related to this is the
question of feedback. Should CLIL
teachers also give language-related
feedback, or is meaning-related feedback
enough? Classroom observations and
studies show a wide variety of ways of
dealing with this issue. On one end of
the cline, you will meet teachers who say
something like ‘I’m not a language
teacher therefore I don’t feel qualified to
give any feedback on language issues. I
will only correct the students when I
notice that the content is not understood
or delivered properly’. On the other end,
there are teachers who emphasise the
importance of corrective feedback.
However, this is mostly restricted to
pronunciation errors or inappropriate
choice of words. Only very rarely can
one see grammatical corrections or
semantic feedback that goes beyond
isolated words – feedback on lexical
relationships, for example.
Evidence is gathering that input is a
necessary condition for language
learning but not, on its own, a sufficient
one. It is, therefore, of vital importance
in CLIL teacher training to discuss the
role of text enhancement measures,
scaffolding activities and noticing tasks.
2 Honour thy forebears’ and
contemporaries’ wisdom
One of the reasons for the popularity of
CLIL amongst teachers may be that,
from a historical point of view, it has
been very much driven by practitioners
who are enthusiastic about language.
CLIL started off in many countries as a
grassroots phenomenon, which is now
becoming more and more
institutionalised. Typically, schools
would try to enhance their profile by
introducing it, either because of
popular demand, typically from parents,
or in order to attract more academically
gifted learners. This often led to very
highly individualised forms of CLIL.
While it is of great importance to
acknowledge local constraints, knowledge
and experience, there is also a growing
concern that CLIL should be crystallised
CLIL started off in
many countries as a
grassroots phenomenon,
which is now becoming
more and more
institutionalised
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Teacher trainers
need to create a climate
of mutual respect in
which theory and
practice can feed
into each other
into a more theory-guided method.
However, work on this is still very much
in its infancy and some of the theoretical
work is considered by practitioners to be
too ‘airy fairy’, too hard to integrate into
their daily teaching practice or simply not
relevant within their local contexts. For
example, recommendations and results
from Canadian immersion programmes
cannot easily be implemented in Austrian
schools. Nevertheless, theoretical
deliberations such as the CLIL matrix,
the linguistic interdependence hypothesis,
BICS and CALPS, dual comprehension
(see the work of Wolfgang Butzkamm
and John Caldwell), the two solitudes
assumption, etc should be used to
question and sharpen teachers’ grounded
guiding principles for CLIL.
When doing awareness-raising
activities, however, teacher trainers need
to be very cautious not to open up the
practice–theory divide but, instead,
create a climate of mutual respect in
which theory and practice can feed into
each other.
3 Thou shalt not change thy
words
Probably the biggest challenge in CLIL,
especially when dealing with low-level
learners, is to bridge the gap between the
learners’ poor linguistic knowledge in
the foreign language and the much
higher linguistic demands of the subject.
How to do the ‘CLIL splits’ is the
number one recurring theme in CLIL
in-service training. One popular way of
dealing with this dilemma is to simplify
texts by rewriting them or by using
authentic texts written for much younger
learners. This practice, although
understandable and often heavily
defended, runs various risks. As Anne
O’Keefe, Michael McCarthy and Ron
Carter point out, the learners may
receive a conceptually watered-down
version of the content as both topic-
relevant language, such as certain
technical terms and, above all, typical
academic language will be missing.
Furthermore, typical word partnerships
(collocations) will have been replaced by
more general and vaguer words, which
will give the text a very different lexical
quality. Needless to say, this will have
the effect of slowing down rather than
accelerating academic and subject-
specific learning. Since lexical richness
and authenticity are vital for scholarly
learning, text enhancement or
scaffolding measures can be a way out
of this conundrum. The underlying
principle of an approach like this is that
the text should remain as linguistically
authentic as possible. However,
everything around the text should be
utilised to enable the learner to complete
subject-appropriate tasks successfully.
Experienced teachers provide, amongst
other resources, word glossaries,
keyword inventories, guiding questions,
text visualisations, graphic organisers,
academic word lists, morphology
training and mother-tongue scaffolding.
4 Thou shalt use all thy skills
A further important tool when doing the
splits and trying to reconcile linguistic
reality with linguistic necessity lies in
the field of skills training. The learners
need to be taught how to become
● efficient readers;
● efficient dictionary users (real and
web-based);
● efficient notetakers;
● efficient communicators (with
interaction and negotiation skills);
● efficient researchers and data
gatherers;
● efficient presenters
in the target language. Therefore,
providing them with strategies that will
improve these skills needs to be an
integral part of CLIL lessons or of
training for CLIL.
5 Honour the virtues of the
web
Traditionally, the written word has been
very much at the centre of school-based
learning. Books in all shades and forms
of lexical density have been the
backbone of scholarly socialisation.
Linear, incremental and lockstep
learning was at the heart of this
approach. However, the advent of
technology-based media has widened
the scope of information gathering and
13

CLIL-ing
me softly
processing. As a result, the learning
styles of the net generation may pose a
particular challenge and provide a
particular opportunity for CLIL
teaching. The following things should,
therefore, be considered carefully by
CLIL teachers:
● Visual information leads to faster and
deeper comprehension.
● The web provides an abundance of
multi-modal learning opportunities
and has become an increasingly
popular starting point for teacher-
produced material.
● Web-based learning dramatically
changes the relationship between
teacher and student in the learning
process.
● Customised, collaborative and
autonomous learning will become the
norm rather than the exception in
technology-mediated language
learning.
Obviously, this will force all educators
to acknowledge the need for multi-
modal literacy in which the practice of
conveying meaning involves the
purposeful integration of resources,
such as writing, images, speech,
gestures, drawing and sound. As
modern technology allows texts to
become increasingly multi-modal, it is
vital to move beyond overemphasis on
the written word and recognise that the
printed word is just one of the modes in
a set of modes that represent meaning.
CLIL teachers may be trail-blazers and
innovators in this respect as there is a
dearth of commercially available CLIL
materials and this often forces them to
design their own.
6 Thou shalt unite with thy
CLIL brothers and sisters
According to experienced CLIL
teachers, one of the characteristics and
desired outcomes of CLIL is its quality
of going beyond the individual,
atomistic classroom. CLIL is widely
regarded as favouring a whole-school
policy, where teachers, pupils, head
teachers, parents, language assistants
and often educational authorities
14 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
typically collaborate a lot more intensely
than in traditional classrooms. The
‘lonely cowboy’ approach of a teacher
working independently and alone in the
classroom is very much the exception in
CLIL teaching. In numerous CLIL
programmes, the subject teacher and the
English teacher or a language assistant
work very closely together in designing
the course and creating the teaching
materials. Furthermore, in countries
with non-institutionalised CLIL
programmes, such as CLIL modules in
Austria, teachers have to go public by
the need to ‘sell’ this bilingual teaching
to their pupils, their parents and,
possibly, their colleagues and the
In numerous CLIL
programmes, the
subject teacher and the
English teacher work
very closely together in
designing the course
educational authorities. It can be widely
seen that cross-curricular projects,
international projects, school exhibitions
and presentations, CLIL/bilingual areas,
school exchanges, invitations to outside
experts, knowledge demonstrations for
parents or other visitors and web-based
interactional activities are the rule
rather than the exception in CLIL
classrooms. This combination of
professional collaboration and ‘public’
teaching techniques creates a unique
CLIL dynamism.
7 Meyer, O ‘Towards quality CLIL:
Thou shalt not kill CLIL
Effective CLIL needs time, patience and
extra resources. It is unwise,
unprofessional and unethical to sell it as
a quick-fix, self-driving ‘let’s just speak
English in the history classroom’
approach. Time and time again, teachers
emphasise that careful planning and
intensive cooperation before the actual
implementation of CLIL is vital for its
success. Questions such as:
● What subject areas will be covered?
● What is the role of the mother tongue?
● How will we deal with testing,
evaluation and feedback?
● What materials will be used and what
support will be needed?
● What resource materials and
scaffolding structures need to be made
available?
and quite a few more need to be
considered and negotiated before the
actual start of any programme.
Furthermore, it is essential to remember
that any increase in language
competence takes time and is markedly
shaped by the input and the nature of
the communicative situation. In other
words, the specific discourse situation in
a geography or history CLIL classroom
will first and foremost encourage a
geographic or historical discourse and
may only slowly spill over to general
speech situations. As Christiane Dalton-
Puffer puts it: ‘It is necessary to
recognise that CLIL classrooms are one
specific variant of a more general
educational context which cannot be
expected to “prepare” learners for other
situational contexts in any direct way.’

Going for CLIL has biblical support, as
in the so-called ‘Matthew effect’: ‘For
unto every one that hath shall be given,
and he shall have abundance: but from
him that hath not shall be taken away
even that which he hath.’ Therefore, my
advice is: Get CLILed. ETp
Butzkamm, W and Caldwell, J A W The
Bilingual Reform: a Paradigm Shift in
Foreign Language Teaching Narr
Studienbucher 2009
Coyle, D, Hood, P and Marsh, D CLIL:
Content and Language Integrated
Learning CUP 2010
Dalton-Puffer, C Discourse in CLIL
Classrooms John Benjamins 2007
successful planning and teaching
strategies’ Puls 33 2010
O’Keefe, A, McCarthy, M and Carter, R
From Corpus to Classroom: Language
Use and Language Teaching CUP 2007
Erwin Gierlinger is a
senior lecturer in EFL,
working at the University
College of Education of
Upper-Austria. His
professional interests
include the socio-
cognitive aspects of
learning in the foreign
language classroom.
He has participated in
various European
teaching programmes
and has been in charge
of several in-service
courses on CLIL.
erwin.gierlinger@ph-ooe.at
 IN THE CLASSROOM
High
frequency
habits
Jackie Fung King Lee has some effective ways
to teach wh-questions.
-questions, used to request
Wh specific information, are
very important structures
for students of English as the need to
use them arises often. Nevertheless, and
despite the fact that they are taught
again and again at different levels, many
learners do not have an adequate
command of these structures.
I will outline here the way in which I
teach wh-questions, although the method
described can also be used for other
high-frequency grammar items. The key
is, I believe, to select appropriate contexts
and to develop a sequence of relevant
activities to improve the learners’
understanding of question forms and to
increase their ability to use them in
effective communication.
A question of questions
Consider the following grammatically
incorrect questions, which were produced
by students in the oral exam of the Hong
Kong Certificate of Education (most of
the students had had at least 11 years of
instruction in English):
Where are you usually buy it?
Where you sleep?
When you get your last illness?
Where penfriend come from?
Where did the party hold/held?
Reports on this exam regularly include
comments about the candidates’
16 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
inability to form questions correctly:
‘Many examiners reported that up to
75% of candidates found difficulty asking
correct grammatical questions based on
the headings given.’
‘One wonders why after learning
English for at least 11 years, candidates
are still unable to ask a proper question.’
Traditional grammar teaching in
Hong Kong adopts a disjointed
approach which is divorced from
reading, writing, speaking and listening.
A number of grammar books used in
the schools are over-reliant on
mechanical drills and the main teaching
method seems to be memorisation of
set patterns. Typically, after the teacher
presents a grammar rule illustrated by
several unrelated single sentences, the
learners are asked to undertake a
number of monotonous repetitive drills
with little relevance to their daily lives.
The following is typical of such a drill:
Change the statements below into
questions.
1 Mrs Lee praised Lily yesterday.
Did Mrs Lee praise Lily yesterday?
.........................................................
2 Simon had left home before his
mother woke up.
.........................................................
3 This film star is like a friend of mine.
.........................................................
The impact on the learners of
grammar manipulation drills of this
kind is usually fairly limited. Marianne
Celce-Murcia argues that sentence-level
drills cannot give learners sufficient
context to learn when and why to use
the target structure. The exclusive focus
on form by many teachers and textbook
writers may be one reason for
unsatisfactory learning outcomes, and
the learners’ failure to achieve
command of question structures is
certainly evidenced by the poor
questioning techniques they display in
the exam.
A question of context
It has often been argued (by David
Nunan and Marianne Celce-Murcia, for
example) that grammar items should
always be presented in context. Only
through learning activities that are
richly situated and fully meaningful and
contextualised will learners be able to
perceive the situational meaning and
use the structure for communication
purposes, which in turn can strengthen
their motivation for learning.
So, when it comes to question
forms, the first question that a teacher
should think about is where and when
wh-interrogatives are usually used. Some
possible answers include:
1 In the classroom, when a teacher
wants to find out about the students’
knowledge or to check their
understanding (When did the First
World War break out? Why do we say
‘an hour’, not ‘a hour’?), or when the
students want to ask the teacher for
clarification (What will be included in
the test?)
2 At home, when parents want to
request specific information from
children, or vice versa (When will you
come back for dinner tonight? Mum,
where is my ball?)
3 In social contexts (What do you
usually do in your spare time?)
4 In the street, for getting directions
(Where is the nearest supermarket?)
5 In newspapers and magazines, for
advice seeking (How can I get rid of the
oil stains on my dress?)
6 In a riddle (How do bees brush their
hair? With a honeycomb.)
In this article I will use an advice-seeking
letter as an example of suitable language
input for the teaching of wh-questions.
The letter shown here was written by a
group of teachers working on a project
on wh-question formation.
The teacher can begin the lesson by
reading the letter aloud with appropriate
intonation to help the students
understand the context: here, that a
young girl with a number of personal
problems is soliciting advice. The creation
of a relevant and life-like situation such
as this can arouse the students’ interest
and get them ready to engage in activities
based on this context.
Dear Miss Wong
I am unhappy because I have many
questions but don’t know the answers.
First, I don’t understand the
meaning of life. My grandmother died in
a traffic accident last summer. I was
very close to her and still feel sad
about her death. Why was she killed?
Why did she leave us so suddenly? If
there really is life after death, what is
she doing now? If we all die one day,
what are we waiting for now? Why do
people die?
I feel lonely in class. I have very few
friends. Most of my classmates don’t
like talking to me. Why am I such an
unpopular student? I really can’t figure
it out. What mistakes do I make? Why
do they treat me like this? How can I
make them accept me?
Finally, I think I’m in love. I’m really
interested in a boy in my class. Why
doesn’t he take notice of me? I’m not
sure if I’m too young to date a boy.
Actually, when is the best time for
students to start dating? What do boys
and girls talk about when they are
together? I really envy the girl sitting
behind me in my class. She gets along
with all the boys. Why is she so
sociable? Where does she get her
charm? Why am I so shy?
I’m afraid I’ve asked too many
questions. But I’m really desperate. I
think it is the end of the world. Please
help me!
Yours sincerely
Lonely Heart
Guided induction
Instead of beginning the lesson with the
teacher stating the rules for the
formation of wh-questions and
illustrating them with isolated sample
sentences, the guided induction
approach involves getting the students
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Table 1 Distinction between be and lexical verbs
Lexical verb Be
Copula be Auxiliary be
Where does she get all Why am I such an What is she doing now?
her charm? unpopular student?
to read the letter for themselves after it to raise the students’ awareness of the
has been read to them, to understand distinction between the verb be and
the context and then to engage in lexical verbs, and the following
grammatical analysis of the question predicator, in a wh-question (see Table 2).
forms found in it. The students can be By comparing sentences 1a and 1d,
asked to identify the questions in the the students can see that the dummy
letter and categorise them according to operator do rather than be should be
the kind of verb used – questions used before a lexical verb such as get. A
containing the verb be and those comparison of 1a and 1b reveals that
containing lexical verbs. They can also the third person singular subject she, in
be encouraged to subcategorise copula the simple present tense, should be used
be and auxiliary be, and to identify the with the variant does, while the plural
verb form of the predicator following subject they is preceded by the variant
auxiliary be, as shown in Table 1 above. do. Further, comparing 1a and 1c, the
According to Mun Ling Lo, learning students can discover that the
outcomes are related to how the content predicator following the operator do
is structured – what is kept invariant must be a base verb form (eg get).
and what is varied. Ference Marton and
Ulla Runesson (cited by Lo and Pong) Separation
identify four patterns of variation Teachers can also separate the different
commonly found in lessons: contrast, components of the wh-question to help
separation, generalisation and fusion. the students discern the structure. The
students can be asked to find examples
Contrast of each category of wh-question, as
Based on the questions categorised in shown in Table 3.
Table 1, a teacher can use contrast, by
changing only one element of the Generalisation
sentence and keeping the rest constant, Generalisation is another way to help
learners understand wh-question structure.
Table 2 Contrast The learners can be presented with a
1a Where does she get all her charm? number of wh-questions and encouraged
to generalise the different structures, as
1b Where do they get all their charm?
shown in Table 4 on page 18.
1c *Where does she gets all her charm? If the learners experience difficulty
1d *Where is she get all her charm? in identifying the structures, the teacher
can ask guiding questions to help them
Table 3 Separation
Wh-word + aux do + subject 1 Where does she get all her charm?
+ lexical verb (base verb 2 ...........................................................................
form) 3 ...........................................................................
Be Wh-word + copula be + 4 Why is she so sociable?
subject + adjective 5 ...........................................................................
phrase 6 ...........................................................................
Wh-word + copula be + 7 Why am I such an unpopular student?
subject + noun phrase 8 ...........................................................................
9 ...........................................................................
Wh-word + aux be + 10 What is she doing now?
subject + v-ing / past 11 ...........................................................................
participle 12 ...........................................................................
17
High Table 4 Generalisation

Wh-word + .............. +
subject + .............. ?
1 Why do they treat me like this?
2 Why did she leave us so suddenly?

frequency Wh-word + .............. +

3 Where does she get all her charm?

4 Why is she so sociable?

habits .............. + .............. ?

.............. + .............. +
5 Why am I so shy?

6 Why am I such an unpopular student?

complete the tables. Using a guided
induction approach, the learners and
the teacher collaborate and interact to
co-construct grammar rules together.
Fusion
Fusion takes place when the students’
attention is focused on several variables
simultaneously. In language
consolidation activities, it occurs when
the students have to manage several
variables at the same time and are,
therefore, encouraged to see the
relationships between them. Here, I will
illustrate how the use of songs can
enable students to experience fusion and
how it can promote the learning of
question forms.
The lyrics of the song The End of
the World include a number of wh-
questions containing lexical verbs (Why
does the sun go on shining? Why do the
stars glow above?). The teacher can
consolidate the students’ knowledge of
question forms by drawing attention to
the language patterns in the song. This
can be done by inviting the students to
complete blanks on the operator and
the predicator, as shown in Table 5.
Table 5 The End of the World
Why .......... the sun .......... on shining?
Why .......... the sea .......... to shore?
Don’t they know it’s the end of the
world?
’Cause you don’t love me any more.
Why .......... the birds ......... on singing?
Why .......... the stars .......... above?
Don’t they know it’s the end of the
world?
It ended when I lost your love.
As a follow-up activity, the learners
can be asked to rewrite the lyrics, using
wh-questions to express their own
personal problems, real or imagined.
Another song that can be used to
provide practice of wh-questions is Papa
.............. + .............. ? 7 When is the best time for students to start dating?
.............. + .............. + 8 Why was she killed?
.............. + .............. or 9 What is she doing now?
.............. ? 10 What are we waiting for now?
Don’t Preach. The teacher can set the
scene by telling the students that the song
is a letter to her father, written by the girl
who wrote the advice-seeking letter they
studied earlier. The students are then
asked to listen to the song to identify her
problem: pre-marital pregnancy. They
can be asked to imagine that they are the
worried and angry father who wants to
find out more about his young daughter’s
pregnancy by asking her questions.
Music and songs can help develop
the students’ imaginations and create a
relaxed learning atmosphere, in addition
to performing the crucial function of
providing opportunities for the learners
to experience fusion and to practise the
target language meaningfully.

Experience shows that mere presentation
of prescriptive grammar rules with
repetitive, unchallenging and
decontextualised grammar drills cannot
help learners develop accuracy or
fluency. Learners need to learn how to
put grammatical knowledge to use in
authentic contexts. While teachers can
help their learners discover the
appropriate forms through patterns of
variation, they need also to provide real-
life situations to exemplify the target
language and choose authentic materials
such as songs to create a relevant, relaxed
learning atmosphere so that the students
can then put the form to practical use in
a meaningful context. ETp
I would like to express my thanks to the
teachers on the learning study project
‘Developing students’ ability to distinguish
between ‘verb-to-be’ and ‘verb-to-do’ in
wh-question formation’. Some ideas in
this article come from them.
Celce-Murcia, M ‘Towards more context
and discourse in grammar instruction’
TESL-EJ: Teaching English as a Second
or Foreign Language 11 (2) 2007
Lo, M L ‘Learning study – the Hong Kong
version of lesson study: development,
impact and challenges’ In Matoba, M,
Crawford, K A and Sarkar Arani, M R
(Eds), Lesson Study: International
Perspective on Policy and Practice
Educational Science Publishing House
2006
Lo, M L and Pong, W Y ‘Catering for
individual differences – building on
variation’ In Lo, M L, Pong, W Y and
Chik, P (Eds) For Each and Every One:
Catering for Individual Differences
Through Learning Studies Hong Kong
University Press 2005
Nunan, D ‘Teaching grammar in context’
ELT Journal 52 (2) 1998
Jackie F K Lee is an
associate professor in
the Department of
Linguistics and Modern
Language Studies at the
Hong Kong Institute of
Education, where she
specialises in grammar
teaching. Her research
interests include lesson
study and gender in
English language
teaching.
jfklee@ied.edu.hk
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18 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 Over
the
wall ... Alan Maley is
certainly not lost in
translation.
‘Translation is that which openeth
a window, to let in the light; that
breaketh the shell, that we may
eat the kernel …’
(Preface to the King James’
authorised version of the Bible, 1604)
ince the biblical myth of the
S Tower of Babel, humankind has
needed to find ways for people
using different languages to
communicate. One way was to learn the
other language. Another was to learn a
‘global’ language, like Latin or English.
But there is an even more time-honoured
solution to the problem: translation.
Of course, the whole question of the
value or otherwise of translation in
language learning continues to fuel
controversy and debate. However, the
books I am reviewing here are not closely
concerned with teaching or learning
languages, nor teaching translation as a
skill; they are about translation in its own
right, as a specific form of human activity.
I have, however, added a few classroom
books at the end of this article.
After Babel
This must surely be one of the most
influential books on translation ever
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
written. George Steiner was a remarkable
scholar – both polyglot and polymath –
and interested in the big questions about
language and culture, which intersect at
many points with translation issues. It is
impossible to do justice to this 500-page
book in a few paragraphs, but these are
some of the key issues Steiner explores:
Why are there so many different
languages when they offer no adaptive
evolutionary advantage? Can linguistics
solve the riddle of a universal underlying
language versus linguistic relativity? Is
translation possible? How is
communication – and translation – possible
when everyone has a private language with
uniquely personal meanings, even though
social pressures force meanings into fixed
moulds? Can translation be confined to
inter-lingual texts, when every act of
communication, even in the first language,
involves interpretation, and is therefore a
form of translation? Do polyglot bilinguals
have different kinds of brains from
monolinguals? Does translation in its
widest sense involve ‘transmutation’ – texts
in multitudinous versions, representations
of written texts in other modes – in art,
music, dance, drama, film, etc? If this is the
case, is what we call ‘culture’ a gigantic
network of intertextuality? (Or, as Steiner
asks, ‘Is culture the translation and re-
wording of previous meaning?’)
He deals with these and other
questions in highly complex arguments,
drawing on a mind-stretching range of
reference, from neuroscience to
psychology, from classical to modern
literature in at least four languages, from
linguistics to literary criticism. He takes a
rather dim view of the kind of
mathematical linguistics which seeks to
establish linguistic universals, quoting
Dell Hymes: ‘Most of language begins
where abstract universals leave off.’ His
exploration of the Universalist/Relativist
issue is detailed and finely nuanced –
and he returns to it repeatedly throughout
the book. If there is an underlying
common semantic framework, then
translation is possible. But if all
languages see the world in uniquely
different ways, then translation is
impossible. In fact, he finds little firm
evidence for either position. He
concludes that translation is a paradox: it
is theoretically impossible, yet practically
– and miraculously – feasible. The
greatest translators manage to balance
the ‘resistant difficulty’ of texts with their
own ‘elective affinity’ for those texts, and
manage to produce new texts which
deepen our understanding of both
languages: ‘to produce a text which the
foreign poet would have written had he
been composing in one’s own tongue.’
19

Over
the
wall ...
Is That a Fish
in Your Ear?
The most exciting recent book on
translation is David Bellos’s Is That a Fish
in Your Ear? It covers virtually every issue
raised by translation and is written in a
highly entertaining and accessible style. He
writes of ‘the irresistible desire of words to
mean something else’. Yet for him, this is
normal: ‘Using one word for another isn’t
special, it’s what we do all the time.
Translators just do it in another language.’
In one chapter he dismisses the myth of
‘literal translation’, pointing out that ‘a
translation that makes no sense without
recourse to the original is not a translation’.
He also puts forward a spirited case for the
use of translation in language learning. In
Chapter 6, he offers a brilliant example of
12 stages in the translation of a four-line,
seven-character-per-line Chinese
shunkouliu, which gradually assumes the
shape of English verse forms. As he
comments: ‘When you have to pay
attention to more than one dimension of an
utterance – when your mind is engaged in
multi-level pattern-matching pursuits – you
find resources in your language you never
knew were there.’ He draws attention to
translation up (from a small to a dominant
language) and down (from a dominant
language to a smaller one). This helps
explain the dominance of writers translated
from English on the shelves of bookstores
throughout Europe. He continues with this
theme in Chapters 19 to 21, where he
discusses the relatively few languages ever
translated and the regrettable dominance
of English – in publishing, in international
law, in the EU. Ironically, the regulations
put in place to give linguistic parity actually
led to a reinforcement of English
predominance because of the need to use
it as a pivot language. In the later chapters
iStockphoto.com / © Steven Robertson
– 26 to 31 – he discusses the translation of
literature and issues of style and ‘match’.
He prefers ‘match’ to ‘equivalence’, and
illustrates what he means by neatly
translating the pun from French: Adolf
Hitler – Fourreur into an English ‘match’ –
Adolf Hitler – German Lieder.
I have only been able to touch on
20 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
some of the most interesting chapters but
the whole book is fascinating – and can be
dipped in and out of, unlike Steiner!
The Third Language
Alan Duff’s The Third Language takes us
into the mind of the translator at work.
Duff argues that often the translation reads
not like English but like a third language –
‘translationese’. In this book he explores
why this is. Each chapter examines in
detail different aspects of the problem:
words themselves, words in grammatical
structures, and idioms and cultural
context. The book is a treasure-house of
carefully-chosen examples, drawn mainly
from French, German, Serbo-Croat and
Hungarian. There is detailed and insightful
analysis of each example. In Chapter 5,
The Translator and the Text, Duff tries to
show ‘what goes on in the writer’s mind
while he is working’, for, as he states at
the outset, ‘whatever goes on in the
writer’s head must go on in the translator’s
head as well’. For anyone interested in the
nuts and bolts of how meaning is carried
over from one language to another, this is
essential reading.
Other titles
Susan Bassnett’s book, Reflections on
Translation, I found very disappointing. It is
cobbled together from articles previously
published in The Linguist Magazine and the
ITI Bulletin. Although some of the articles
are interesting, the book lacks cohesion.
Not so with Edith Grossman’s Why
Translation Matters, which is an eloquent
and passionate plea for greater respect
to be given to translators as creative
writers, not mere anonymous hacks. And
as the translator of Don Quijote, she
knows what she is talking about.
For literary titles dealing with issues
related to translation, I would recommend
Brian Friel’s play Translations, about the
clash of cultures and languages in 19th-
century Ireland. Also Diego Marani’s
novel (brilliantly translated from Italian by
Judith Landry) New Finnish Grammar.
This is about a man who has lost his
language after a severe head wound. It is
an anguishing account of his failed
attempt to recover Finnish, presumed to
have been his lost language, and his
pathetically tragic fate.
There are relatively few practical books
on using translation to teach language.
Three of the best are Alan Duff’s
Translation, Françoise Grellet’s Apprendre
à Traduire and Maria Gonzales-Davies’s
Multiple Voices in the Translation
Classroom. All contain stimulating and
productive activities for classroom use. I
should also mention Peter Newmark’s A
Textbook of Translation, though this is more
related to training translators than teaching
language. For more theoretical discussions,
Guy Cook and Wolfgang Butzkamm and
John Caldwell are in the vanguard of a
movement to restore translation to its
proper place in language teaching after a
century of monolinguistic domination.

All too often, the judgement is made that
something has been ‘lost in translation’.
These books show the contrary, namely
that much is to be ‘found in translation’. ETp
Bassnett, S Reflections on Translation
Multilingual Matters 2011
Bellos, D Is That a Fish in Your Ear?
Translation and the Meaning of Everything
Particular Books 2011
Butzkamm, W and Caldwell, J A W The
Bilingual Reform: a Paradigm Shift in
Foreign Language Teaching Narr
Studienbucher 2009
Cook, G Translation in Language
Teaching: An Argument for Reassessment
OUP 2010
Duff, A The Third Language: Recurrent
Problems of Translation into English
Pergamon 1981
Duff, A Translation OUP 1989
Friel, B Translations Faber and Faber
1981
Maria Gonzales-Davies Multiple Voices in
the Translation Classroom: Activities,
Tasks and Projects John Benjamins 2004
Grellet, F Apprendre à Traduire Presses
Universitaires de Nancy 1990
Grossman, E Why Translation Matters
Yale University Press 2010
Marani, D (translated by Judith Landry)
New Finnish Grammar Dedalus 2011
Newmark, P A Textbook of Translation
Prentice Hall 1988
Steiner, G (3rd edition) After Babel OUP
1998
Alan Maley has worked in
the area of ELT for over
40 years in Yugoslavia,
Ghana, Italy, France,
China, India, the UK,
Singapore and Thailand.
Since 2003 he has been
a freelance writer and
consultant. He has
published over 30 books
and numerous articles,
and was, until recently,
Series Editor of the
Oxford Resource Books
for Teachers.
yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
 TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS 

Managing
your classes
T
Jane-Maria Harding here is far more to teaching
English to young learners
da Rosa explains what (YLs) than teaching the
language itself. Classroom
classroom management is management and motivation play such
an important role that if these are not
and why it is important. in place, there is little chance of
teaching or learning happening.
Naturally, a syllabus or curriculum states
what is to be taught, but the how is
where genuine communication takes
place and, therefore, where language
acquisition is more likely to occur: how
you get the children into the classroom,
how they get their materials out and
how activities are set up and managed.
Before reading the following
! article, take a moment to
consider what classroom management
means to you. Do you plan the
management parts of your lessons?
How do you give instructions? In which
language do you give them? What
routines do you have in place? How
important are routines for young
learners? What has worked for you
recently? What hasn’t worked, and why
do you think it wasn’t successful? Are
there any areas that you feel less
confident about?
What is classroom
management?
Classroom management can mean
different things to different people. It
can cover a broad spectrum of events
and considerations that go on in the
classroom, from giving instructions to
organising the furniture. In the YL
classroom, classroom management
should not necessarily focus on
implementing reward and consequence
systems (and certainly should not
include rewards and punishments).
Classroom
management should
be about ensuring that
every child is cognitively
challenged and
cognitively engaged
Classroom management should be
about creating an effective learning
environment where the learners are
actively engaged. It should be about
providing plenty of opportunities to
maximise the learners’ exposure to
contextualised language as well as to
the relevant target language. It should
be about ensuring that every child is
cognitively challenged and cognitively
engaged so that the chances of their
getting distracted (or being a
distraction) are reduced considerably.
Being pro-active rather than re-active
means that behaviour and discipline
issues are reduced to a minimum.

22 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS
Classroom management
is about communication
Communication doesn’t come from
listening to and understanding words; it
comes from using every sense possible.
It comes from monitoring body
language; listening to the intonation,
stress, strength and energy of the voice;
and looking at facial expressions and
gestures. These are all skills which
children possess naturally and which
they have expertly honed at a very
young age in their first language. These
skills develop so naturally that no one
needs to teach them to us; but, for
some reason, as soon as we are faced
with a different language we focus so
much on the words being spoken that
we forget about interpreting the rest.
There is much more to communication
than words. If children are instantly
provided with a translation or
explanation of a new word or
expression in their own language, they
are being denied the opportunity to
acquire language at a more accelerated,
natural pace. Children who are given a
direct translation become lazy and no
longer try to understand the English
instructions as they know an easier
option is about to follow. They come to
rely on the translations more, not less.
Classroom management
is about leading the pack
Cesar Millan, the Mexican-born dog
trainer known as ‘The Dog Whisperer’,
is able to take control of a pack of 20
or more dogs, including some which
have been known to be vicious. How
does he do it? He is unable to reason
with them and he doesn’t believe in
issuing physical injuries to dominate
them. He emits calm assertive energy,
which nurtures stability and creates
balanced, centred dogs with placid
submissive behaviour. In other words,
he becomes the pack leader.
Although perhaps not everyone
would like to admit it, it could be argued
that there are similarities between a
pack of dogs and a class of children
who don’t speak the same language as
you (or are pretending not to). As the
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •

teacher, you need to use calm, assertive
behaviour in order to become the
leader of the pack. But how is this
done?
Classroom management
is about your voice
A noisy classroom is to be expected
when working with large numbers of
children. However, raising your own
voice above and beyond the natural
register not only results in the noise
level rising, it can be very damaging, and
vocal problems are not uncommon
amongst teachers. Another reason why
teachers need to be aware of how high
their voice is in terms of pitch, tone
and volume is that, once the high, nasal
‘head’ voice is engaged (as opposed to
the more natural ‘chest’ voice), it may
reach an annoying pitch/tone which
many children deal with by switching off
and simply not hearing.
As the teacher,
you need to use
calm, assertive
behaviour in order to
become the leader
of the pack
As Rowena Whitehead, quoted by
Tessa Woodward, asserts: ‘The voice, “the
muscle of the soul”, is our most personal
musical instrument. As teachers, the voice
is one of our most important tools. A well-
moderated voice enhances communication
and can make a great contribution to the
students’ experience of the classroom as a
relaxed, calming learning environment.’
Classroom management
is about your body
language
Children read body language quickly
and easily. They can tell your mood and
emotions by the way you hold your
hands, stand and move around the
classroom. They are also very visual
learners. What better ‘visual’ is there
than your own body language when you
Children can
tell your mood and
emotions by the way
you hold your hands,
stand and move around
the classroom
are trying to communicate with them?
One of the first things I do with a new
class, regardless of age, is to teach the
gestures I use which accompany
classroom verbs and instructions. It is
totally satisfying when the children
leave the lesson, smiling, having acquired
new learning skills and useful
vocabulary which will help them
understand classroom instructions in
future lessons.
It is not really that important which
gestures you decide to use. What is
important is that you are consistent
and use the same gesture every time.
Different ages and different levels will
require different sets of classroom
verbs. To get an idea of the instruction
verbs you will need, take a look at the
coursebook you are using. A book that
is used for eight-to-nine year olds
might need verbs such as match, draw a
line and complete; for younger children
you may need touch, colour or draw.
There is no need to spell out to the
children what they are going to do by
saying ‘First we’re going to learn the
gestures then we’re going to repeat the
words and do the gestures ....’; just motion
for the children to stand up, do one of
the gestures and say the word. When
one of them copies you, react
encouragingly until they are all copying
the gestures. Soon, they will start to
repeat the words as well.
Try putting words that collocate
into a short chant with the actions to
make it more interesting:
Listen, repeat, listen, repeat
Listen, listen, listen, repeat
Draw, colour, cut (clap)
Draw, colour, cut (clap)
Draw, colour, draw, colour
Draw, colour, cut (clap)



23
 TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS
Managing




your classes
Once you have presented the
classroom verbs, remember to recycle
at the beginning of each lesson the
ones you are going to use. For
example, if you are going to do some
craft work, you will need to remind the
children of cut, colour and stick (or glue
if that’s what you have chosen to use).
Having gestures also lends itself
nicely to miming games such as
‘charades’, which can be used to help
reinforce the vocabulary. Another
positive point about presenting the
instructions to the learners as gestures
is that they can easily relay back to you
what they have to do without resorting
to their first language.
Classroom management
is about you
Essentially, the only behaviour you can
control in the classroom is your own.
You will be unable to make any
changes, though, unless you first
acknowledge what you are doing. It is
much easier to make yourself aware of
what is going on in your classroom
than it used to be. As a teacher trainer,
I had the opportunity to work with
primary English teachers in Portugal.
During the teaching practice lessons
where I observed the teachers in
action, I would video the lessons for
the individual teachers to watch and
listen to and then ask them to reflect
on what actually took place in the
classroom (as opposed to what they
thought had taken place).
Having gestures
also lends itself nicely
to miming games such
as ‘charades’, which can
be used to help reinforce
the vocabulary
24 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

One teacher was hardly able to
recognise herself in the recording as
she thought her high, shrill voice
sounded ‘hysterical’. Needless to say,
there was a vast improvement in her
next lesson. Another teacher realised
that not only had she drilled the
language for the students, she was so
focused on completing an activity that
she was unaware that the children had
not actually produced any language.
As mentioned earlier, children’s
lessons tend to be quite noisy, but it
was the difference in the type of noise
that another teacher noticed. In her
first lesson, the children repeated and
chanted and produced lots of language
as they moved around the classroom.
You will be
unable to make
any changes to your
own behaviour unless
you first acknowledge
what you are doing
The noise was extremely productive.
The second lesson was more sedate,
but the noise production was just as
high. However, this time it was the
noticeably unproductive noise of
fidgeting and chair scraping. Recording
the lessons also helped the teachers
see how long (and sometimes how
boring) some of the activities were,
which resulted in an improvement in
their planning and their overall
expectations of what is achievable.
Most importantly, all of the teachers
noticed their own classroom language
and instructions. Some were trying too
hard to speak only in English, which
resulted in their using structures that
were too difficult for the children to
understand, while others kept changing
the instructions and confusing the
children. As a result, they all started
planning in more detail their classroom
management and the language they
wanted to use. Given that many
classroom routines and teaching
strategies are applied almost
automatically, it seems to make sense
to take the time to ensure that these
habits are well formulated and
considered good practice.
Self-reflection task
Make yourself aware of what you
are saying and what your voice
sounds like from the learners’ point
of view. It is very easy to record
yourself nowadays using a
smartphone or MP3 player.
How do you think you sound to
your learners? Are your instructions
clear enough? Do you react
efficiently to different situations?
What phrases do you say or noises
do you make repeatedly? What
could you do differently?

I will leave you with a quote from Haim
Ginott:
‘I’ve come to the frightening conclusion
that I am the decisive element in the
classroom. It’s my personal approach that
creates the climate, it’s my daily mood that
makes the weather. As a teacher, I possess
a tremendous power to make a child’s life
miserable or joyous. I can humiliate or
humour, hurt or heal. In all situations it’s
my response that decides whether a crisis
will be escalated or de-escalated and a
child humanised or de-humanised.’ ETp
Ginott, H Teacher and Child Avon Books 1975
Millan, C Cesar’s Way Hodder Paperbacks
2008
Woodward, T Models and Metaphors in
Language Teacher Training: Loop Input and Other
Strategies CUP 1991
Jane-Maria Harding da
Rosa has been involved in
teaching young learners
both as a teacher and
teacher trainer for over
15 years. She was involved
in the rewriting and
standardising of the
International House
Certificate in Teaching
Young Learners (for
more information see
www.ihworld.com).
For more ideas and
materials for teaching
YLs, see her blog
http://jmhdr.wordpress.com.
jmhdrosa@gmail.com
 W R I T I N G
The speaking
chain
Jane Neill makes sure Writing activities can be the bane of a
teacher’s life:
her students have plenty to ● Do you plan short, sentence-level
activities?
write about.
● Do you only teach with the end
product, such as a letter of complaint,
in mind?
● Do you tackle the question of style?
● Do you choose a language point and
centre the writing around that?
● Do you try to do everything, all in one
fell swoop?
Also, why is it that so many books will
take you step-by-step through some
extremely useful stages in working
towards a final product, and then
present the students with a task on a
completely different topic to do for
homework? Having done all the
preparation for a letter complaining
about a hotel – contextualised
vocabulary, looked at paragraphing,
sequencing, and so on – the follow-up
task is a letter complaining about a car!
What are the students supposed to do
about all that unknown vocabulary?
For many learners the problem is two-
fold: they struggle to think of ideas, and
they have difficulties with grammar and
lexis. I realise this may be a simplification,
but it is what I set about solving.
The process
I trialled the following process with an
intermediate group, but I have since
used the same approach with different
levels of learners and the results are
very encouraging.
First of all, it is important to get the
students to work in small groups in
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
order to generate ideas on your given
topic. Then you need to ensure there is
plenty of time for them to speak about
these ideas and support them with
examples, details or reasons why. There
are two ways to encourage a ‘speaking
chain’: set up a pairwork activity and
then combine the pairs into small
groups to exchange information, or ask
the students to move around the class
individually, telling each person they
meet their thoughts. Both ways mean
that the students will be working with
different partners, exchanging ideas and
justifying them to each other, but the
one primarily described here is the
second of the two.
For many learners the
problem is two-fold:
they struggle to think
of ideas, and they
have difficulties with
grammar and lexis
This amount of repetition brings a
whole host of benefits: it will promote
accuracy, give the students some fluency
practice, make room in the lesson for
peer- and self-correction and provide an
opportunity for everyone to consolidate
their thoughts and refine their
statements. You may decide that some
time needs to be allocated for the
correction of common errors, but each
successive time the students change
partners, their language will improve. It
is for these reasons that I have been a
champion of repetition for a long time,



25
 The speaking
chain



and there are many activities that give the
students an opportunity to revisit and
improve their production, which can be
integrated into a lesson on writing skills.
The speaking chain should be
supported by notes and note-taking.
This is the part of the lesson which
promotes process, rather than product.
The students jot down their initial ideas
at the start, and they are then
responsible for altering and adding to
them, during the chain, without any
direct teacher correction. This should
encourage them to take risks, use their
own forms of shorthand and just ‘get
down and get dirty’ with the whole act
of writing.
It may even be the case that some
students are working with a new
alphabet, while others may not be used
to doing more than sentence-level
writing. It is, therefore, up to us, as
teachers, to make the physical activity
enjoyable and stress-free, not forgetting
to design our lessons in such a way that
we are constantly promoting the
improvement of the students’ skills.
The class
One example I can give you is of a
mixed-nationality class at B1 level on
the CEF scale. The students in this class
had various problems: they ranged from
Arabic speakers, who spoke confidently
but were struggling with written script
and spelling, to European students who
were impatient with themselves and
wanted to write at a much higher level
than their structural knowledge
allowed. Creating lessons which satisfied
students at both ends of the ability
spectrum was quite a challenge.
The day before the writing activity,
the class were asked to choose different
categories for famous people in their
country. The final list was sport,
exploration, literature, art, music and
science. Asking the students to create
their own list underpins the activity
with a sense of ownership, making it
less something which is imposed upon
them and more of a personal choice,
thereby generating more enthusiasm for
participating in the task.
Their homework was to make some
notes about a famous person from their
26 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
country who fitted into one of their
categories. This gave the students space
to collect information and write without
any fear of judgement. Equipped with
this, the next day they had to tell a
partner about this person. One very
important detail was that the partner
was allowed to ask questions. This
meant that the descriptions became
fuller, and the students were encouraged
to ask each other questions to clarify
details. At the end of the first
discussion, the learners were asked to
make any changes or additions to their
notes that they wanted.
It is up to us to make
the physical activity
enjoyable and stress-
free, not forgetting to
design our lessons in
such a way that we are
constantly promoting
the improvement of
the students’ skills
This cycle was repeated, until each
student had spoken to every other
person in the room and their notes were
becoming more and more detailed.
During all the speaking, I was
monitoring, ready to lend a hand with
any language problems which the
students could not solve for themselves.
By the end of the activity, they each had
enough written information to start
creating a profile of their chosen
famous person.
When the students were asking each
other questions, a natural opportunity
for spelling practice arose as they
wanted to know how to write any
unfamiliar names of people and places
which came up. Furthermore, they were
constantly looking at each other’s notes
and helping with structures. This
quantity of independent learning and
skills development was much greater
than I had anticipated – and what a joy
it was not to have a teacher-led lesson!
Returning to their desks, the
students then worked on their notes for
the remainder of the class time. I did a
short round-up of correction on such
things as prepositions of time and place,
which was all that was needed. I singled
out errors for correction without saying
who had made them so that the
correction was done anonymously, with
no one made to feel embarrassed about
their mistakes.
The product
The students’ written biographies were
some of the best pieces of writing I had
received from that class. Those who
struggled with English script did not
feel stressed during the lesson, and had
enough accurate information from their
notes to create a good piece of writing.
As a result, their confidence soared.
Those students who wanted to create
more complex sentences also had the
opportunity to develop their writing
because there was time to play with
their notes, making changes and
improvements. This meant that they had
a greater sense of achievement as well.

Later in that term, we returned to the
topic of their famous people and, this
time, the writing activity was to make a
biography of someone else’s hero. This
meant that they had to ask a lot more
questions and take notes about what they
were hearing. It automatically created
the maximum possible amount of peer-
correction, and it was a huge success.
Whether you are a devotee of product
or process, give this a whirl and take the
pain out of getting inky fingers. ETp
Jane Neill is a teacher,
teacher trainer and EAP
lecturer at the University
of Gloucestershire, UK.
She has been teaching
for 20 years, both in
Europe and the UK.
jneill@glos.ac.uk
TALKBACK!
Do you have something to say about
an article in the current issue of ETp?
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 IN THE CLASSROOM
Outcomes-based
language coaching
Peter Zoeftig looks s I stated in my first article
at how coaches can work
with language learners.
A (ETp Issue 81), coaching is
different from traditional
teaching methods which use
pre-prepared coursebook or syllabus-
based material. It is, instead, a
collaborative approach, which develops
self-observation, makes use of the
students’ own resources and focuses on
emerging patterns and opportunities for
insights.
A skilled coach has an awareness of
the internal processes of surfacing
language, and uses rapport, pacing and
leading techniques to move the coachees
towards their own desired outcomes.
Employing a combination of appropriate
questioning methods, essential feedback
on emerging skills, consolidation time
and repeated focus on areas that need
attention, the coach begins from the
starting point of the coachees’ own
values and encourages them to come to
an enhanced awareness of changes in
their own performance. Since the focus
is on creating better outcomes, we
cannot separate these from the
processes involved in creating them.
The coaching of
language
Using a coaching approach in language
teaching enables us to make use of
powerful techniques, valuable insights
and deeply challenging methods in
order to bring out the best in our
learners – but how do these fit in with
students who are still learning the
language being coached, and which
techniques are strictly language and
communication-oriented?
Language coaching accelerates the
processing of language, especially
memorisation, auditory digital
processing 1 and performance. These
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
features are brought to the fore through
questioning techniques focusing on any
‘mistakes’ that express themselves in
deletions, distortions and generalisations
(often borrowed from another language).
We emphasise action and performing
real tasks rather than theory or textbook
exercises, which have little place here.
The coaching of
learners
A coach helps to draw out the coachees’
own way of thinking and talking, at the
same time as developing their language
ability in order to produce better
outcomes. This is not the same as
therapy or the use of coaching
Since the focus in
coaching is on creating
better outcomes,
we cannot separate
these from the
processes involved
in creating them
techniques in order to solve problems in
other areas often covered by coaches
and counsellors (such as stress, phobia,
addictions or time management issues).
For language coaches, the goal is to
‘shift’ 2 the coachees’ language awareness
(and self-image within the language
framework), but not to deal with other
aspects of their lives by using therapy or
employing theoretical models (though
these other, more personal aspects may
be influenced in the process).
A coach does not need to be liked,
to make a difference in every session, to



29
 Outcomes-based
language coaching



psychoanalyse or to be responsible for
the results. A coach doesn’t have to share
the coachees’ problems, doesn’t need to
know very much about the specifics of
their business and doesn’t need to have
control or to direct. If anything, it is the
coachee who has control of the
outcomes. There is no control (although
there can be confrontation at times) but
there will be very important outcomes
and shifts of awareness.
Modelling
A teacher can at times serve as a model,
but there may be other or better models
for the learner to follow. Generally,
teachers should talk less – especially
about their own language models – and,
by creating rapport and drawing back in
order to learn more about the learners’
world, allow the learners to develop
their own models. Rather than setting
up a ‘parent–child’ scenario, coaches
use a non-directive, non-judgemental
approach. The aim is to lead, using
‘L+1’ formulations (using a variety of
contexts) that encourage greater self-
awareness in the learners.
The coach draws out conversation
from the coachee by creating rapport
through matching in a sympathetic way
and mirroring both body language and
verbalisation. The coachee can then
begin modelling language utterances by
the use of reflective listening and guided
reformulation, A key idea from NLP –
the realisation that the student’s own
mental map is in a process of formation
and change – helps to understand why
this is likely to be effective.
Drilling and questioning
Drilling and other reinforcement
methods will be familiar to many
teachers. In outcomes-based learning, I
am advocating a change in the teachers’
usual framework towards enhancing the
learner’s (coachee’s) own view of what is
possible. Here, organisations may use
activities which are part of the
marketed product on offer and which
their customers have willingly bought
into, but the coachees first need to be
engaged in real communication and
brought to an enhanced state of
30 • Issue 82 Sptember 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
awareness and openness with regard to
their own language. Once this has been
achieved, repetition, preparation and
question-and-answer methods may be
used to deepen and anchor the
coachees’ desired outcomes.
These methods can be more or less
sophisticated, and some, such as
initiation–response–feedback (IRF), are
helpful, so long as they start with the
coachees’ intended statements and work
with them towards the outcome they
were aiming at, rather than merely
imposing a ‘correct’ outcome. When
coachees attempt to describe their
thoughts about something, begin to use
Through a
question-and-answer
process the coach
can help the coachees
to retrieve, process,
compose and rephrase
their thoughts more
correctly
different tenses and consult a dictionary
or some other resource to find the
words that express what they want to
say, the coach needs to listen actively
and may then start to intervene to
correct mistakes in tenses, sentence
structure, pronunciation or choice of
words. Through a question-and-answer
process the coach can help the coachees
to locate, retrieve, process, compose and
rephrase their thoughts more correctly.
This process is designed to open doors
in the coachees’ memories and to
encourage visualisation and internal
echoing of the language so that the
aspects being led out suddenly ‘click’ in
their understanding. This can be done
by progressively shifting between visual,
auditory and physical response
techniques.
Possible methods
Teachers are supposed to be experts in
understanding and aiding
communication, so it is ironic that so
many just tell their students what they
‘should’ say – or talk over them rather
than building deeper rapport and getting
the students to where they know they
would like to be but can’t quite manage
yet. Beginning with the coachee’s own
words is important, followed by a
supportive and reflective leading
approach. Repeating, regenerating,
reformulating and regularly revisiting
the same language, over and over, once
the goal has been identified will draw
out deeper insights. This same principle
applies to coaching someone to produce
the perfect golf swing, dance step or
management technique – endless
repetition, with slight variations along
the way until perfection is reached.
Clearly, this is very different from the
techniques applied in much language
teaching where, each lesson, the teacher
moves on to yet another discrete
learning point different from the one
before (often as a requirement of the
syllabus), or where a student brings up a
point only to be told that it is ‘not
relevant at this stage’ or ‘will be
considered later at a higher level’, etc.
In a more conventional teaching
approach, using input, elicitation,
production, controlled practice, freer
practice and feedback, one element that
is often overlooked is generative or
‘cybernetic’ system modelling. A teacher
who instantly feeds back the ‘correct’
forms overlooks the aspects of student-
driven quality that come from matching
the language practice to the values and
current vision of the students
themselves. Thus, whatever approach is
used must be in full congruence with the
coachees’ developing inner dialogues
and move them gradually into new
zones, if necessary challenging them to
leave their comfort zones by confronting
lazy use of language or lack of
attention to embedded bad habits.
The importance of shifts
The key to outcomes-based learning is
shifts, by which I mean shifts in
behaviour, understanding, the
experience of learning, the speed of
change and in the coachees’ internal
dialogue. Shifts and sudden ‘clicks’ of
realisation are commonly experienced
by those who acquire a language by
living in and embedding themselves in
the culture of a country. These sudden
realisations occur when they consult
their own inner map of the language
emerging and compare it with that of
the experts they meet and know.
This immersion experience can, to a
certain extent, be achieved in the
language classroom, but this requires
that the communication that takes place
there must be authentic at all times, and
not reliant on pre-prepared materials –
unless these have been chosen in unison
with the learners and reflect very closely
their own map of the world. Most
importantly, at all times the learners’
vision of their own language learning
experience must be paramount.
The coach must learn how to
identify from what the learners are
saying the processes that are taking
place in their minds. In a large class this
may be difficult, so it will be necessary
to explain to the learners that they need
to challenge and develop their own
insights. All the participants can be
encouraged to reflect on what another
person was trying to say. This is akin to
placing members of a football team into
positions for which they are currently
only partly suited but which they wish to
aspire to. Thus, a natural centre-forward
might be put in midfield for a spell (if
this is also their understanding of how
they can better understand the game) in
order to help them to be a better
attacker in future. Everyone learns from
one another in the coaching context.
Giving feedback
Very specific feedback is important, too.
Not just saying ‘well done’ or ‘better use
of tenses today’, but listening deeply to
what each learner is saying and, from
that, developing a clear image of that
learner’s own mental map of the
language, in all its meandering ways,
and then discussing with the learner
how this map seems to them, in what
ways it is useful at the current time and
how they themselves feel it needs to be
developed. This can perhaps be done
with beginners and with very
elementary students in their mother
tongue or by using a pictorial approach.
In a group, this kind of listening to each
other – as well as commenting on the
emergence of language in other learners
– is very valuable as it helps speed the
process of discovery about the language.
Calibrating
improvements
It goes without saying that the
outcomes from the learning experience
must be measurable, tangible and as
clear to the coachees as they are to the
coach. The coachees need to have the
sense that they have made a significant
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
step by themselves – not because they
have been handed a list, a worksheet, an
exercise, etc, but because they have
actually used the language intelligently
and seen a difference in how they have
done it compared with previous
occasions. This is where skilful
language-oriented question-and-answer
methods come in.
I would argue very strongly for a
written outcome that is produced
voluntarily by the learners and done in a
relaxed way. I personally favour written
‘model’ sentences or phrases that will be
used for memorisation practice and
generative work during the following
The outcomes
from the learning
experience must be
measurable, tangible
and as clear to the
coachees as they are
to the coach
lesson, and involve the coachee doing,
organising, practising or preparing
something – though other kinds of
didactic ‘learning to learn’ workshops or
talks about business skills, etc may have
validity in another context). Above all,
each session should aim to generate a
clear outcome for the inner dialogue of
the coachee. This means that everything
in the coaching session must be very
sensitively worked with to lead the
coachees towards a better experience of
using the language, including objective
and subjective experiences.

A coach is a leader and, therefore, has
to develop a very strong sense of
alliance with the coachees. Coaches thus
have great responsibility and should be
professional. The subject matter of the
coaching sessions must be agreed and
shared: this is not an opportunity for an
intrusive discussion or chat about the
coachees’ lives. The focus should be on
language. The pace of the lesson should
be relaxed, focused on the experience
and the emerging outcome (not input
from the coach) and it should always be
leading to more performance-oriented
outcomes.
The coach should match the
coachees’ language by repeating and
rephrasing words and sentences that
they have started, and will then lead the
coachees to a deeper language
awareness and improved performance.
The coach should sensitively guide
the coachees away from any incorrect
structuring or expression of the chosen
sentences, by querying the way in which
they have been formed. It is essential
that plenty of time be given for
reflection. In this kind of coaching, a
reframing technique can be used or a
further analysis of the students’ own
language can be carried out.
It is important to understand that
quality is the key element, not quantity
(this is the essence of good pacing).
Giving feedback to the coachees on
what they have said or written, is very
beneficial, enabling them to make
corrections themselves, but –
importantly – allowing them to access
their own value model or vision in order
to do this, not simply acting as a
commentary! Correction need not be
given immediately or until, first, the
coachees have assessed for themselves
what the problems are, since an
overload of spot-corrections can easily
be forgotten.
To sum up, then, the model to
follow is of pacing and leading through
a logical reconstruction of the desired
outcome in the mind of the coachee,
followed by a search for the required or
possible tools that will contribute to
such an outcome, followed by creative
exploration of the ways of expressing
this outcome. ETp
1 ‘Auditory digital processing’ is an NLP
term which refers to the turning of
information from the senses into
language.
2 By ‘shift’, I mean the creation of a new
awareness or understanding by taking a
new perspective, experiencing a
powerfully changed feeling or removing
a blockage.
Peter Zoeftig has over
25 years’ experience of
teaching and coaching,
having worked in France,
Belgium, Saudi Arabia
and the United Kingdom.
He has qualifications in
NLP and coaching and is
involved in both personal
and business executive
coaching, recently
providing training for
CERAN and Sherbourne
Priors OISE, Warwick, UK.
info@tostig.co.uk
31
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 IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
More tested lessons, suggestions, tips and techniques which have all worked for ETp
readers. Try them out for yourself – and then send us your own contribution. Don’t
forget to include your postal address.
All the contributors to It Works in Practice in this issue of ETp will receive a copy
of the Apple Premium version of The IELTS Skills App, produced by Macmillan. This app
provides exam practice exercises and interactive tasks for developing IELTS skills.
Macmillan have kindly agreed to be sponsors of It Works in Practice for this year.

Vocabulary practice How well do you

Here are two activities which I use for improving group dynamics in my classes:
Musical words
This activity is good for reviewing
and/or reinforcing vocabulary which
has been studied previously.
● Play a song or a piece of music and
ask the students to walk freely around
the classroom. Pause the music and
ask them to work in pairs with the
person nearest them.
● Tell them they have around 30 seconds
(you decide the time according to the
level of the students) to say as many
words in English as possible in a given
category, for example adjectives.
Black magic
This is another nice activity for
practising vocabulary, which is good
for both beginners and higher-level
students.
● Tell the class that you are going to try
a little magic. One student will stand
outside the classroom while the
others choose an object. That student
will then come back in and try to
guess the object.
● Ask for a volunteer to stand outside
the classroom. Make sure it is clear to
everyone that the student can’t see
or hear the rest of the class, but
while you are arranging this, secretly
tell this student that the object will
be the one you ask about after you
have asked about a black object.
● After the 30 seconds, start the
music again and ask them to
continue walking around the
room. Then pause it again and tell
them to work with the person who
is now nearest to them. This time
they have to say as many words as
possible in a different category,
for example vegetables.
● You can repeat the procedure with
any number of further categories,
such as English-speaking countries
or action verbs.
● Ask the other students to choose
an object in the classroom.
● Bring the volunteer back into the
classroom and start asking
questions, such as Is it the window?
Is it my desk? to see if they can
guess the object. The rest of the
class will be amazed when the
volunteer is able to identify the
object straight away.
● Higher-level students can then
discuss in English how they think
the ‘magic’ was done. Lower-level
students can have the discussion in
their own language.
Ronaldo Adenilton de Lima
Recife, Brazil
know me?
By the time we have learnt and
practised tag questions, I find that I
know something (sometimes quite a
lot!) about each of my students and,
naturally, they have learnt something
about me, too. When it comes to
revising tag questions, I say to the
students, ‘You know me very well,
don’t you?’ and then get them to
write down a couple of tag questions
to ask me, using things they think
they know about me but are not 100
percent sure about, or things they
want to find out about me. I do the
same for them (it’s a good idea to
prepare your own questions before
the lesson, especially if you have a
large class, to ensure that everyone is
asked a relevant question).
We then take turns to ask and answer
questions. When they are asking their
questions, I remind them to use
proper intonation, depending on
whether they are certain or not about
my answer to the question. At the
end I say ‘Now you can be sure that
you know me well’.
Personalising what you’re teaching in
such a way is not just an effective
teaching/learning tool, it also helps
to develop a good rapport with your
students, which is essential to any
successful learning process.
Nataliya Potapova
Uzhhorod, Ukraine

34 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 Friday fun
When you teach students every day, the last lesson of
the week can often be rather tiring for everyone. You
may also have completed all of your week’s objectives
and may be in the mood for revision, or just something
different. Here is a selection of tried and tested ideas
you can use or adapt:
1 Activity tables
Ask the students what they would like to revise or work on
and put them into groups, sitting around tables. Give
each group a task, monitor them and at the end have
them make presentations to the rest of the class on what
they have done. The students can also swap tables when
they have finished, and this can even be a timed game.
2 Student-generated quizzes
Get pairs or groups of students to make a quiz about the
week’s work or a related theme. It’s also fun if they
incorporate what their classmates did or said into the
questions. They can also write some questions to test you.
3 Student news discussion
Ask one pair of students to bring in either a news article
or a video clip (or, for the more creative, to write and/or
record their own). They present this to the rest of the
class and it is used as the basis for a class discussion.
4 Review of learning objectives
Put the students into groups and ask them to discuss
what their learning objectives are, how they are improving
and what they can all do to get better. You can then give
further ideas and practice strategies.
5 Class project
To keep up motivation throughout a course and to develop
class rapport, it is nice to have an ongoing project which
the students can work on once a week in or after class. It
could be anything from a class/school blog to a formal
entry for a competition.
6 ‘Dress down’ Friday
Use Fridays as a time to break down routines. You might
try showing part of a film, not using your coursebook or
having the students bring in something to eat or drink
from their country, city or area. Even just making them a
cup of English tea changes the atmosphere into one more
conducive to conversation.
Phil Wade
La Réunion, France
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Conjugation command
This is a kinaesthetic and audio-lingual activity for the
revision of conjugation, which is suitable for elementary and
pre-intermediate students. It can be used at the beginning
of a lesson – and is particularly useful for waking the
students up when the lesson takes place first thing in the
morning!
Prepare a list of verbs that you want your students to revise.
Ask the students to stand in a horizontal line at one end of
the classroom; you stand at the other end. Tell the students
that you are going to say some verb forms which may or may
not be correct. What they have to do is to move a step
forward and repeat the conjugation if they think it is correct.
Any student who makes a mistake must step aside, and the
last three or five students (the number is up to you) who
stay in the line are the winners. Demonstrate the activity
beforehand to make sure the students know what they are
supposed to do.
I have used this activity with students and also with trainee
teachers. I use a military training style and tone when
calling out the verbs and ask the students to move forward
smartly with a firm step, as soldiers do, which really adds an
element of fun.
This activity requires quite good coordination between the
mind and the body, so expect some fairly slow kinaesthetic
responses from some students – and be tolerant of these.
Mohammed Arroub
Homs, Syria
IT WORKS
IN PRACTICE
Do you have an idea which you would like to contribute to
our It Works in Practice section? It might be anything from
an activity which you use in class to a teaching technique
that has worked for you. Send us your contribution, by post
or by email, to helena.gomm@pavpub.com.
All the contributors to It Works in Practice get a prize! We
especially welcome joint entries from teachers working at
the same institution. Why not get together with your
colleagues to provide a whole It Works in Practice section of
your ideas? We will publish a photo of you all.
35
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Art in
action
María Palmira Massi, Bettiana Andrea
Blázquez, Zoraida Risso Patrón,
María Angélica Verdú and Paola Scilipoti
give their students an aesthetic experience.
rtistic expression is generally
A judged by experts, employing
an array of perspectives
which sometimes may
wrongly lead us to the belief that art is
beyond our reach. But what if we could
get our students to form opinions on
and judge aspects of art in our lessons?
This article explores the pedagogical
potential of different forms of visual art
and their use in the ELT classroom. Art-
based materials are recommended as the
starting point for the development of
creativity and imagination in the
students. A worksheet with tasks that
draw on the students’ senses and
emotions will be given as a practical
example of what can be achieved.
Art as input
The word art embraces the creation of
aesthetic objects in a wide variety of
fields, from painting, sculpture and
photography to music, theatre, dance,
film, literature, architecture and the like.
The place of art in education is well-
established because art appeals to all
our senses. Lawrence Baines favours
multisensory learning techniques
because they ‘provide an effective, highly
adaptable method for addressing both
student engagement and achievement.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
When students invoke more than one
sense, simultaneously or over a period of
time, they tend to interact with the
material more intensely and thereby
retain what they have learned for longer
periods’. If Baines is correct, then art
has a natural place in the ELT
classroom; it can be exploited in many
different ways in order to engage
students in sensory experiences and
facilitate their learning of language.
Activities incorporating art help to
develop creative and critical thinking
skills, and they are also motivating for
students as they provide a change of
pace in lessons. In addition, meaningful
learning through the arts stimulates the
students’ imaginations and opens their
eyes to possibilities beyond their own
immediate experience.
Art as impact
Creativity
Contemporary ELT authors such as
Ben Goldstein and Jamie Keddie
acknowledge the powerful impact of
imagery on language learning. In
particular, they stress the importance of
the development of creativity as
essential to any learning environment.
Although fostering this skill takes time,
the end product will not only be worthy
of praise but, above all, memorable for
the students. Creativity arouses interest,
and whatever students do out of a sense
of curiosity will naturally yield
meaningful and long-lasting results.
Agency
The more involved the students are in
the learning process, the easier it will be
for them to learn. Agency – the
opportunity for the students to have a
say in their own learning – is another
important factor. If students are given
choices, there is a good chance that
their imagination will spark off
innovative ideas, making their learning
experience more valuable to them.
Imagination, understood as the capacity
to construct alternative realities, has an
inexhaustible potential which, if
exploited in a systematic way, will bring
out the best in our students. Visual arts
in the classroom can stimulate their
imaginations and engage their feelings,
Art can be exploited
in many different
ways in order to engage
students in sensory
experiences and
facilitate their learning
of language
resulting in affective education (that
which involves the emotions). Emotions
inevitably shape and mould our
students’ performance. So, by
developing their creative and
imaginative skills through the use of
visual artistic expression, opportunities
will be provided to involve not only
their cognitive capacities but also their
affective dimensions.
Art as teaching resource
Visual arts can serve as the starting
point of an ELT lesson. They can be
used with various pedagogical and
methodological objectives. Taking a
particular topic as the starting point, a
whole lesson can be designed on the
basis of images – with or without verbal
support – to generate discussion and
debate, which may then lead to the
students’ production of their own forms
of artistic expression.



37
 Art in




action
For reasons of space, just a small
selection of genres of visual art –
photographs, paintings and posters –
will be explored in this article.
Photographs
We will begin with photographs, which
have been an important part of our
daily lives for many years, serving a
variety of different purposes – from
simply capturing the essence of a scene,
landscape, person or city to provoking an
emotional reaction in the viewer. Society
and its many facets have long been
depicted through the camera lense,
modulated by the artistic perspective of
the photographer. A photograph, then,
is a powerful visual tool which teachers
can make use of to introduce thought-
provoking image-inspired activities into
the language learning environment. In
particular, when dealing with people’s
feelings and emotions, photographs can
speak louder than words. There is often a
discrepancy between what a photograph
shows and what each individual sees,
and this offers an array of possibilities
for the teacher to exploit in class.
Paintings
Paintings – of the sort that are found in
art galleries and museums – have
traditionally been divided into different
categories: landscape, portrait, still life,
abstract, etc. They are modes of
expression that serve to channel, and
give a concrete representation of, the
artist’s thoughts, emotions and
opinions. As such, they provide a fertile
environment for narrative
reconstruction, interpretation of
symbolism and exploration of political
meaning that can be put to good use in
the ELT classroom.
In a content-oriented lesson, the
exploration of a particular historical
period can be carried out through an
analysis of the most outstanding
paintings of the time, or the most
relevant artists, the techniques they
used, and so on.
A virtual tour through online
collections of paintings in museums all
over the world can be quite stimulating
38 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
and can be used to guide the students
towards an awareness of how history is
reflected in art, and vice versa.
An alternative is to choose one
particular artist as the focal point and
then analyse that artist’s work in
tandem with the socio-historical context
of the time.
Yet another possible course of
action is to focus on a particular genre –
for example portraits, which lend
themselves to descriptions of people
and their personalities, or landscapes,
which are particularly useful for
descriptions of places.
Likewise, a comparison of artists
and their techniques can turn out to be
quite enriching and motivating – as can
discussing the criteria by which we
judge art.
Consciousness-
raising posters are
of particular interest
in the ELT context
since they are designed
to be inspirational and
thought-provoking
Posters
Posters have become a vital art form in
many societies. Produced for a variety
of reasons – both commercial and
political – they exhibit a wide variety of
artistic styles, representative of prevailing
artistic trends at the time of production:
art nouveau, symbolism, cubism, etc.
Typically, posters include both textual
and visually striking graphic elements,
together with contrasts and bright colours
in order to make their message clear.
María Palmira Massi, Bettiana A Blázquez, Zoraida Risso
Patrón, María Angélica Verdú and Paola Scilipoti teach
English at Facultad de Lenguas, Universidad Nacional
del Comahue, Argentina.
Posters have real potential as
materials for classroom use.
Consciousness-raising posters are of
particular interest in the ELT context
since they are designed to be
inspirational and thought-provoking.
For example, organisations such as
PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals) or WWF (World Wide
Fund for Nature) regularly launch
public awareness campaigns and issue
posters which are available to download
and use in the classroom. Such posters
are generally concerned with drawing
attention to the importance of
protecting the rights of animals, saving
endangered species, fighting
deforestation, global warming and
pollution, etc. Thus, they have
tremendous potential for the discussion
and analysis of controversial issues.

There are several implications of a
multisensory approach to learning. By
being systematically exposed to visual
art, the students’ creativity and
imagination can be stimulated whilst a
safe environment is provided for
emotions to be overtly expressed. This
can be achieved by means of diverse
tasks with not only a cognitive but also
an affective focus. Since emotions are
intrinsically linked to those parts of the
brain which words fail to reach, the
students will be sensitised to other
forms of artistic expression, both inside
and outside the classroom. ETp
Baines, L A Teacher’s Guide to
Multisensory Learning: Improving Literacy
by Engaging the Senses ASCD 2008
Goldstein, B Working with Images CUP
2008
Keddie, J Images OUP 2009
paolascilipoti@yahoo.com.ar
 Art in action • Photographs
Level: Intermediate Topics: Feelings and emotions; life stories
Objectives: Functions: Describing situations; hypothesising; asking and
● To describe people in photographs as a springboard for answering questions
discussion Skills: Speaking; writing
● To arouse the students’ interest and involvement by appealing
Senses: Sight, smell and hearing
to their senses and emotions

Lead-in
Working in pairs, look at the photograph opposite and discuss the questions below.
1 Who do you think these hands belong to? Are they a woman’s or a man’s hands?
How can you tell?
2 How old is this person?
3 Think about his or her personality. What is this person like?
4 What have these hands achieved?
5 What smell can this image be associated with?
6 Would you like to have hands like this when you grow old? If so, why?
7 Do the hands remind you of someone you know? Who? What is/was this person like?
8 Why has this photograph been taken in black and white? What effect does this produce?

Hands-on Extension
Working in pairs, look at the pictures below and think of four questions which 1 Working on your own,
can be used to generate a class discussion. choose one of the photographs
on the left and write a
paragraph about one person in
it, explaining why you have
chosen them. Think about what
the photograph tells you about
the person’s life story. Use any
of the issues raised during the
previous stages. Give your
piece of writing a title.
2 Every photograph has a
story behind it. What about
one of your own photographs?
Choose one and be ready to
1 ................................................................................... 2 ...................................................................................
share it with the class. Think
.................................................................................. .................................................................................. of suitable answers to the
following questions, and select
a piece of music to accompany
your photograph:
1 Why have you chosen this
particular photograph?
2 Are there any people in it?
If so, who are they?
3 When and where was it
taken?
4 Who took it?
5 How do you feel about it
now? How did you feel
about it then?
3 ................................................................................... 4 ................................................................................... 6 Do you associate any
particular smell with it?
.................................................................................. .................................................................................. If so, what?

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 • 39

 LANGUAGE LOG
Indirectness
John Potts charts the intricacies and idiosyncrasies,
the contradictions and complications that make the English language
so fascinating for teachers and teaching. In this issue, he was wondering whether
you might possibly appreciate an explanation of indirectness in English.
J
ust the other day, as I was mulling over this article, I
received an email from a colleague that began
‘Jenny and I were hoping you might be available to
join us in Zurich for one of the following meetings ...’.
It’s a perfect and timely example of something that puzzles
many of my students, namely the way that some English
speakers don’t always state things directly. Here, we’ll look
at how and why.
I know that googled results can sometimes be misleading,
but I thought I’d try googling this phrase and a few similar
ones to see what happened. I was hoping you might ...
received 4 million hits, while I was hoping you ... had 18
million. When I googled the phrase I was wondering whether
you wanted ..., I received 12.5 million. Googling I was
wondering whether you knew ... added another 4.7 million –
and I was wondering whether you could ... a whopping 238
million. Clearly, we do a lot of hoping and wondering!
So what is the effect of using past forms, whether past
simple, past progressive, past perfect or second-form modals
like could or might? First of all, although these are past forms,
they obviously refer to the present (at the time of speaking or
writing). My correspondent could easily have written ‘Jenny
and I hope you are available to join us ...’. That would be very
clear, and also very direct. But would it perhaps seem too
presumptuous, too pushy, even a little peremptory?
Let’s reduce those potential elements a little by adding a
modal form:
‘Jenny and I hope you will be available to join us ...’
And a little more, by switching to the progressive, which
makes the verb feel less categorical:
‘Jenny and I are hoping you will be available to join us ...’
Still a little more, by switching the modal to a more
tentative form:
‘Jenny and I are hoping you might be available to join us ...’
40 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
And finally, by moving from the immediacy of the present
into the distance of the past:
‘Jenny and I were hoping you might be available to join us ...’
As the speaker moves away from ‘real time’ present forms
into past forms, any potential pushiness diminishes. The
increase in distance-in-time of the forms is reflected in an
increased distance-from-immediacy of the request, which
means more ‘space’ for me as the reader. As modern idiom
puts it, the writer isn’t ‘in my face’ – there’s little risk that I’ll
feel imposed upon, and therefore there’s a greater chance
that the request will be successful and not declined. This use
of the past forms in creating distance-from-immediacy results
in politeness, indirectness, tactfulness, discretion, deference,
and so on, depending on the context and the speakers.
Using indirect forms such as these is clearly a pragmatic
strategy – we could almost say a rhetorical strategy. This is
not to say that using such forms is always the appropriate
strategy. Sometimes, directness is needed because the
context is urgent, for example. Perhaps the most extreme
expression of indirectness I have ever encountered
personally was on a very crowded rush-hour Northern Line
tube train approaching Leicester Square, when one
commuter said to another ‘Excuse me, but my foot seems
to have become accidentally trapped beneath yours’.
Other people would have reacted very differently, using far
more direct language, so this raises the issue of the
speaker’s personal language choices and consequently of
his idiolect. I feel fairly confident that he would also say (or
have said) things like the following:
‘Did you need anything else?’
‘I had been hoping that I could leave at ...’
‘Should we perhaps start rather earlier?’
‘I could do it for you if you wished.’
‘Might I ask you whether you knew where ...?’
In contrast, other speakers would say none of the above
 LANGUAGE LOG Indirectness

things – these utterances would not be part of their repertoire. Interpreting such utterances correctly can be very difficult, as
They might perhaps say: it’s partly a matter of context and circumstances, but also one
of language variety, age, culture, upbringing and personality.
‘Do you need anything else?’
What is perfectly clear to a certain British English speaker
‘Can I leave at ...?’
may be maddeningly vague to an American English speaker,
‘Let’s start earlier.’
while the directness of a bluff, down-to-earth Northerner may
‘I can do it for you if you want.’
seem abrupt to others. (Listening to the test match cricket
‘Where is ...?’
commentary on the BBC can be very instructive in this
respect, with its mix of speakers from different backgrounds.
The use of questions rather than affirmative statements can I regard tuning in regularly over the five days of the game
also contribute to indirectness. For example, look at the as essential field research, of course.)
difference between these three sentences:

‘Should we start earlier?’

‘Shall we start earlier?’
‘Let’s start earlier.’
The first question is quite tentative, offering most of the
decision-making to the respondent, while the second offers
at least 50 percent of that decision-making process. The
third is quite different: it takes command, and gives a
clear lead.
And we can go further in each direction: super-tentative forms
like ‘Might I suggest that we start earlier?’ towards one
extreme, and ‘We’re going to start earlier’ towards the other.
However, suppose the speaker who says things like ‘Should
we start ...?’ or ‘Shall we start ...?’ actually really means
something much closer to ‘Let’s start ...’. Is this person
asking us or telling us? How are we to know?
As society changes, then some of the above influences will
change, too, and there will be corresponding shifts in
people’s repertoires and idiolects. Moreover, the spread of
English as a global language, and especially as the lingua
franca between non-native speakers of English, may well
result in some of these more indirect uses diminishing: they
could be too opaque, too open to being misunderstood or
even risk being missed altogether.
‘I was wondering whether you were aware you were standing
on my foot’ may not always be the ideal way to express your
needs on a crowded train.
John Potts is a teacher and teacher trainer
based in Zürich, Switzerland. He has written
and co-written several adult coursebooks, and
is a CELTA assessor. He is also a presenter for
Cambridge ESOL Examinations.
johnpotts@swissonline.ch

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COMPETITION RESULTS
5 8 26 19 8 22 15 17 5
R O N S O C K P R Congratulations to all Shona Hagger, Vergiate, Italy
2 3 6 9 8 3 19 16 9 16 16 18
D U B I O U S L I L L A those readers who Kate Howcroft, Shipton, UK
14 8 26 9 23 18 26 8 17
E O N I V A N O P successfully completed Louis Jacobs, Tel Aviv, Israel
5 14 2 19 21 18 13 14 26 1 18 21 14 our Prize Crossword 52. Abdenour Khemiri, Beja, Tunisia
R E D S T A M E N F A T E
20 8 3 13 26 8 2 8
The winners, who will Nawel Khemiri, Beja, Tunisia
Y O U M N O D O each receive a copy of Magdalena Muszynska, Sosnowiec, Poland
14 25 2 18 21 18 11 9 13 14
E G D A T A X I M E the Macmillan English Patricia Rincón, Miranda de Ebro, Spain
26 7 2 8 24 14 22 14 8 8 Dictionary for Advanced Helen Simpson, Glasgow, UK
N J D O Z E C E O O
25 5 18 24 14 14 23 14 26 2 8 5 Learners, are: Emily Tinsdale, Paris, France
G R A Z E E V E N D O R Seda Can Yildiz, Kars, Turkey
9 2 26 9 9 5
I D N I I R 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
26 14 14 2 16 14 19 17 16 14 26 2 8 5 F D U W R B J O I Q X H M
N E E D L E S P L E N D I D 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
14 26 2 20 18 15 14 14 4 14 E K L P A S Y T C V Z G N
E N D Y A K E E W E
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T T C A R E A G E I N S P I T E O F T H E C O
14 14 12 9 17 16 18 9 16 19 21 8 1 16 9 23 9 26 25 9 21 19 19
E E H I P L A I L S T O F L I V I N G I T S S
2 5 14 18 13 26 14 14 2 16 14 19 19 21 9 16 16 17 8 17 3 16 18 5
D R E A M N E E D L E S S T I L L P O P U L A R Kathy Norris

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 • 41

SCRAPBOOK
n the year of the 60th anniversary of
I
the accession of Queen Elizabeth II,
this issue of ETp takes us back a
mere hundred years or so to the time
of Queen Victoria, the only other British
queen to celebrate a Diamond Jubilee,
and looks at education in the UK in the
Victorian era. As you will see, some
things are very different today – although
some haven’t changed much at all.
History
When Queen Victoria came to the throne at
the age of 18 in 1837, education was still
mainly for the privileged few. Children from
wealthy families might be taught at home
by a governess until they were old enough
– if they were boys – to go to Public
Schools such as Eton or Rugby. (A word of
explanation here: in most countries, the
term public school means just what it says,
42 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
schools for the general public. In Britain,
though, a Public School, note the capitals,
has always been a private fee-paying
school and, therefore, very much not for
general consumption!) Most poor children
didn’t go to school at all on weekdays: they
had to work in order to contribute to their
family’s income. However, there was a
system of education based in churches, the
Sunday School, which had been started by
Robert Raikes some years earlier. By the
early 1830s, 1,250,000 children (about a
quarter of the school-age population at the
time) received some education in this way.
In 1833, the government awarded
grants of money to schools for the first
time, and in 1844, a law was passed which
required children who worked in factories to
be given six half-days of schooling every
week. Schools were set up to provide free
basic education for orphans and very poor
children. These were called ‘Ragged
Schools’ because the children generally
wore tattered clothes.
Some of the people who ran the
schools were themselves unable to read, so
the standard of education was somewhat
erratic!
In 1870, Parliament passed the
Forster’s Education Act, requiring all areas
of Britain to provide schools for children
aged five to 12. However, not all these
schools were free so many parents could
not afford to send their children to them. As
attendance at school was not compulsory,
many children didn’t go – not least because
their earning power was valued by parents
and employers.
Teachers
Many Victorian teachers had no formal
training; few had even been in higher
education; they just learnt ‘on the job’ as a
kind of apprenticeship. When they reached
school leaving age, abler children could
stay on as ‘pupil teachers’ who would help
the teacher in exchange for lessons.
Some larger schools used a monitor
system. The teacher would choose some
of the brightest pupils to be taught by the
headmaster in separate lessons after
school. The following day, each of these
monitors would be assigned a group of
fellow pupils and would teach them what
they themselves had just learnt.
In Victorian schools, the teachers were
often strict and by modern standards very
scary. Children soon learnt to do what
they were told, otherwise they would get a
rap across the knuckles with a ruler, or a
clip around the ears. Victorian teachers
would often use a cane to punish naughty
children, hitting them on the hand or the
behind, or sometimes across the back of
the legs. In Public Schools, even prefects
would carry canes and use them on
younger pupils. Other favourite
punishments were the writing out of ‘lines’
– either long poems or hundreds of
repetitions of sentences such as ‘I must
not be late for school’ (or whatever the
offence had been). The tolerance level
was pretty low and all sorts of things
might attract punishment: being rude,
answering back, speaking out of turn,
poor work ... in fact, anything that
displeased the teacher. Children who had
been punished at school usually kept
quiet about it because, if their parents
found out, there was a good chance that
they would be punished again at home!
Classes
Many schools were rather grim buildings,
often with classroom windows set high up
to prevent the children looking out and
being distracted. Drab by today’s
standards, they might perhaps have a stern
text as the only wall decoration. Boys and
girls were usually separated; they used
different entrances and had separate
playgrounds. In smaller schools, both sexes
might be taught in the same classroom, but
they would still sit separately.
Gems, titbits, puzzles, foibles, quirks, bits & pieces,
quotations, snippets, odds & ends,
what you will
Many schools had very large classes.
One school in Hitchin, for instance, had a
classroom which seated 300 children! Large
classes meant that everything tended to be
done in a rather regimented way. The teacher
would write information on the blackboard
and the pupils would copy this into their
books and learn it off by heart. A large part
of education consisted of rote learning:
memorising names and dates from history or
reciting the ‘times tables’ (multiplication
tables). Children were also expected to
commit many other things to memory, such
as poems – and Victorian poems tended to
be many-paged epic ballads!
For handwriting practice, a specially-
ruled book was used: the copybook. The
first line was printed, or copied carefully
from the blackboard, then the children
would have to fill the entire page with
identical lines. They used dip pens, which
they loaded with ink by frequently dipping
the metal nibs into ink wells on the desk
top. (Fountain pens had been invented, but
were not very reliable and were not mass-
produced until the 1880s.) An overloaded
nib would make a blot in the book, and this
is the origin of an expression still used
today: to ‘blot your copybook’ means to
make a serious mistake.
To do arithmetic, the children had to
use the Victorian equivalent of a calculator:
the abacus, a frame with sliding wooden
beads. This tool has been in use for many
centuries all over the world; seeing a
proficient user at work is impressive – in
many cases they can still out-perform
today’s electronic counterparts!
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Stories were used a great deal in
schools to instil morals and to caution
children about the consequences of unwise
behaviour. These were known as
‘Cautionary Tales’. Some of the more
extreme, such as the popular translation of
the German Der Struwwelpeter, warned of
very dire consequences indeed: such as
not looking at where you are going resulting
in drowning, and sucking your thumbs
leading to impromptu amputation!
The school day
The school day began at 9.00 am and
finished at 5.00 pm. In the middle of the
day, there was a two-hour break, which
allowed enough time for the children to go
home for lunch, although in rural areas
where their houses were likely to be
further away they might eat at the school.
(Also in the country, many children took
time off school to help with the harvest,
dig potatoes and do other farmwork.)
Although most of the Victorian child’s
school day was rather boring, some
playtime was allowed. Children had
various toys to play with, including hoops,
tops, skipping ropes and marbles. They
also played team games such as tag,
hopscotch and football.
Sickness
Medical care was expensive in the Victorian
age and few poor families could afford to
see a doctor. Although children were often
frightened of getting sick, some of the
‘cures’ were even scarier. For whooping
cough, a common childhood disease, one
recommended cure was to swallow a
spider in butter! If a child felt ill at school,
the teacher might administer a cheap
‘medicine’ such as James Morrison’s
Universal Pill – said to cure every single
ailment, but actually just a mixture of aloes
and cream of tartar! As you may gather,
medical understanding in the Victorian era
was rather limited.
Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus
Darwin, was a physician, philosopher and
scientist, but not much good in any of these
fields. One of his beliefs was that sleep
could cure disease and that spinning around
really fast was a very good way of inducing
sleep. Later, the American physician
Benjamin Rush adapted the treatment: he
believed that spinning would reduce brain
congestion and, in turn, cure mental illness.
He was wrong – he just ended up with dizzy
patients who were still disturbed!
Literature
The view of schools as portrayed in
Victorian literature ranges from the rosy to
the tormented. Written towards the middle
of the 19th century, the novels Jane Eyre,
Dombey and Son and David Copperfield
all include terrifying accounts of the abuse
and neglect of schoolchildren, while in
1857 the famous Tom Brown’s Schooldays
triggered an avalanche of popular fiction
© Chris Pole / Sutterstock © iStockphoto.com / Ian Huball
set in schools, usually boarding schools
(Public Schools).
This trend for school-themed literature
began to die down in the mid 20th century,
but still appears now and again in various
forms – perhaps the latest of these are the
Harry Potter books (and films)!
Scrapbook compiled by Ian Waring Green
43
Reviews
words from the Academic Word
Read This! Fascinating Stories
List. An exercise (usually a gap-fill
from the Content Areas
or matching words to definitions)
by Daphne Mackey and Alice Savage
completes the pre-reading
Cambridge University Press 2011
section. The reading texts
Level 1: 978-0521747868
themselves, all of which are
Level 2: 978-0521747899
600–700 words long, are
Level 3: 978-0521747936
accompanied by two exercises,
Teaching reading in an academic context the first dealing with the main
presents particular challenges when the idea, the second with reading
students’ language proficiency is at a low for detail, taking the form of
level. Furthermore, if they have never multiple-choice or true/false
developed the habit of reading, it questions. Two more exercises
requires considerable effort to then check and recycle the
persuade them to actively engage vocabulary introduced in the
with reading material. Texts to be pre-reading stage. The heart
used in such circumstances of each chapter lies in the
obviously need to appeal by following section, ‘Applying
presenting their content in such a Reading Skills’, which
way that the students can develops reading sub-skills, such
recognise the relevance to their as making inferences, finding cause and
own lives. The students also need effect, detecting main ideas and
to be motivated to read by the use supporting detail, or reading critically by
of a variety of activities. Read distinguishing facts from conjecture. This
This! is a three-level reading section is particularly important since
course (high-beginner, low- high-order thinking skills, whose role in
intermediate and intermediate) reading for academic purposes cannot
which tries to meet these be underestimated, are addressed. After
concerns. The books include having done these activities, the students
content areas such as are given the chance to practise the
communication, mathematics, newly-learnt vocabulary and also to put
psychology, sports and fitness, the content into a personal perspective in
and the texts (also recorded on a closing discussion. A ‘Wrap-up’ at the
CDs) are non-fiction readings end of each unit, with a vocabulary
presenting true and interesting review, discussion sections, roleplays,
stories with an academic writing assignments and a link to the
flavour. excellent WebQuest, in which
Each book contains five units, students have to find information
each one divided into three chapters. from authentic websites, provides
There is an overall unit topic, eg more practice.
criminal justice, and each chapter deals The CDs in the teacher’s
with an aspect of it which is likely to manuals have recordings of all the
arouse the students’ interest, eg the reading texts. These teacher’s
biography of a con man; the history and manuals, which don’t overload the
contested reliability of fingerprints; and teacher with more information than
how linguistics helped to prove the is necessary, also have separate
innocence of someone executed many reading tests for each unit.
years before. Each chapter, which takes The identical structure of
three to five hours to cover, has the same each chapter is both a strength
structure. It begins with a preview, which and a weakness of the series.
provides the students with the Whilst it provides the students
opportunity to find connections to the with confidence as they know
unit topic and to discuss and predict what will come up, it does not
what the text might be about. Next, offer much variety or any
vocabulary is introduced in three element of surprise – as some
categories, two of which are related to of my colleagues who have
the content area, while one contains used the books have pointed out.

44 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Reviews
The same objection to the uniformity has
been raised against the length of the
reading texts as well as their level of
difficulty. Indeed, the teacher’s manuals
state that the units can be used in any
order; thus, the language in Unit 4, for
instance, is no more difficult than that in
Unit 1. However, my students and I have
generally found the texts so interesting
that boredom is unlikely to set in.
Read This! is a reading skills series
ideal for university preparation classes
where the students are not accustomed
to the requirements of reading for
academic purposes. Through its
controlled sequencing of activities and
presentation of language that is
challenging but not above the level
indicated, it is likely to develop the
students’ reading skills, expand their
vocabulary and – no less importantly –
make reading a non-frustrating
experience in the English classroom.
Stefan Rathert
Kahramanmaras, Turkey
Teaching Languages to
Students with Specific
Learning Differences
by Judit Kormos and Anne Margaret Smith
Multilingual Matters 2012
978-1-84769-619-9
This is a useful book for those unfamiliar
with the subject outlined in its title, but
also for those who have some experience
in the field and are looking for inspiration.
It provides a practical overview, tackling
the thorny subject of labelling students
with a learning difference unfairly,
explaining the complexities of how
language is acquired and providing much
needed insight into how to teach
language to those who have a specific
learning difference (SpLD).
It is a fact that one in ten learners
‘exhibits’ some form of learning
difference (such as dyslexia), so teachers
in the EFL/ESOL classroom, the authors
argue, need to be able to provide the
right kinds of support for these learners.
To this end, the multisensory approach to
learning is highlighted as key.
The book is divided into nine
chapters and is well laid out, with the
contents for each chapter distinctively
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
presented on a white-on-black
background. The chapters are
then further divided into headings
with flow-charts, diagrams and
graphs to help assimilate
complex ideas to do with how
memory, procedure and
automisation take place in the
brain – how we learn – and to
show how the performance of
learners with different abilities
contrasts with that of their
more traditional peers. Each
chapter then ends with the
key points summarised and
with suggested tasks and
further reading.
The authors go into some
detail about how students
with a specific learning
difference find second
language acquisition an
almost Herculean task; so
much so, that you begin to wonder if
teaching them a second language is different types of learners; we were
actually doable. It is, but you have to wait presented with ‘grasshoppers’, who take
until chapters six and seven, which in everything holistically, benefiting most
thankfully deal with the Holy Grail: from ‘mind maps’, and their cousins, the
techniques for teaching, in which many more analytical ‘inch worms’, who prefer
practical solutions and strategies are put their learning presented in more
forward to help improve L2 production sequential, tabular form.
among students with SpLDs. There are useful strategies and
These include providing the right methods on offer here, which is as it
environment for learning; a breakdown of ought to be because being an effective
the four skills; suggested resources, second language teacher of students
including IT; differentiation, which I with a learning difference, as anyone who
thought was particularly helpful, whereby has had direct experience in the
text interpretation is delegated, based on classroom knows, is all about thinking on
ability groups clubbing together to find one’s feet and finding the right
meaning; types of learning style; and methodology: one that helps the students
getting students to think about their own to work things out for themselves.
learning processes out loud, which may Ashley Chapman
sound unusual, but helps learners London, UK
become cognisant of how they arrive at
solutions.
I think Teaching Languages to Reviewing for ETp
Students with Specific Learning
Would you like to review books
Differences would have worked better,
or other teaching materials for ETp?
however, if the practical side to teaching
We are always looking for people
– the tips and suggestions – had been
who are interested in writing reviews
presented in a more digestible format, for us. Please email
rather than tightly packed into linear helena.gomm@pavpub.com
blocks of text, as I found I had to for advice and a copy of our guidelines
untangle the reed bed to get at the for reviewers. You will need to give your
treasure in the depths. But that’s postal address and say what areas of
quibbling; it was worth the effort. I teaching you are most interested in.
particularly liked the descriptions of
45
 IN THE CLASSROOM
A second
self 5
Jill Hadfield presents n the previous articles in this series,
I
a motivational programme.
I have explored the three pillars of
Zoltan Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational
Self System theory and suggested
some practical activities for each
component. In this final article, I will
make some suggestions for structuring
activities into a ‘motivational programme’.
A motivational
programme
A motivational programme would need
to consist of three modules: a short
‘Induction Module’ in the first week of
a new course to raise the students’
awareness and create their vision of
their L2 selves, followed by two ongoing
parallel processes, ‘Operationalising the
Vision’ and ‘Keeping the Vision Alive’,
that involve a) weekly goal-setting and
strategy-mapping activities and b)
weekly activities designed to keep the
Ideal L2 Self vision fresh and vivid in
the learners’ minds. These specific
motivational tasks would take place
within the timetable of the course as a
whole, alongside and integrated with
other more traditional language
learning activities. The third pillar of
the L2 Motivational Self System,
Enjoyment of the Learning Experience,
would be provided by these language
learning activities through a variety of
means such as engaging tasks, teacher
enthusiasm and rapport, productive
group dynamics and work on learner
experience of success and self-esteem.
46 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Induction Module:
Imaging Identity
This module is aimed at creating a rich
yet realistic vision of the Ideal Future
L2 Self, through activities such as
visualisation of the L2 Self and
discussion of what is feasible within the
constraints of the course, together with
discussion of what might help achieve
that vision and what might hinder it.
This module is best done in the first
week of the course to create an
inspiring vision and set goals for the
course ahead.
Operationalising the
Vision
For the vision to be actualised and
become a reality rather than remaining
in the realm of daydream, students and
teachers need to outline a route map
together.
They need to begin by identifying
the long-term goals of both the class
and the individuals within it, based on
the learners’ vision of what they want to
achieve but taking into account
constraints such as the time available,
the demands of the syllabus, etc. These
goals can be divided up into those the
class will pursue as a whole and those
that individuals might set for themselves
through self-study.
Thereafter, weekly route-mapping
sessions can focus on establishing short-
term goals for the week, breaking these
down into specific tasks and then
organising these tasks into a study plan
for work both in and out of class for
the week ahead. Some time can be
devoted at the start of each week (or
possibly at the end of the week for the
week ahead) to establishing the general
goals for the week, and the students can
be encouraged to make study plans for
homework.
Another useful ongoing thread is a
strategies component: learning about a
range of achievement strategies that can
be used to improve study techniques,
such as ways of memorising vocabulary,
for example, and about a range of
avoidance strategies that can be used to
overcome obstacles to learning, for
example learning time management or
distraction avoidance skills. These could
be introduced at the beginning of the
course in a ‘Strategies fair’, or
integrated into the programme on a
regular ‘Strategy of the week’ basis.
● Activities in the first category, aimed
A final component should be some
sort of record of progress and
rewarding of success. When the students
have drawn up their study plans, they
could be encouraged to make a contract
with a ‘study buddy’ to keep them on
track and ‘sign off’ their contract at the
end of the week as a record of success.
More general records of success could
be kept in the form of wall posters,
recording class progress towards the
goal.
● Activities in the second category,
Keeping the Vision Alive
While the activities in ‘Operationalising
the Vision’ are cognitive, based on
analytic goal setting, strategy selection
and recording of progress, the activities
in ‘Keeping the Vision Alive’ are
affective: designed to deepen and enrich
the original vision, and to keep it firmly
present in the students’ consciousness as
a source of inspiration. The two strands
thus complement each other.
‘Keeping the Vision Alive’ activities
fall into two categories: those whose
aim is to keep in touch with the vision,
to develop it in more detail and make
sure that it is not lost in the day-to-day
business of doing grammar exercises
and writing essays, and those whose aim
is to use the L2 in real-life, virtual or
simulated situations, sending the
students into the L2 community or
bringing the L2 world into the
classroom to make the language and
culture come alive.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Short introductory Activities aimed at creating a vision of an Ideal L2
module at start of course Self, substantiating that vision and grounding it in
reality, identifying what could help or hinder the
vision from becoming realised and enhancing the
original vision
Activities needing a short Activities aimed at goal-setting, task identification,
regular slot each week study planning, learning contracts, strategy
identification and charting of progress
Activities as part of Simulations, roleplays
normal language work
Activities forming project Videos and interviews with the L2 community
work
Out-of-class recreational Penpals and chat rooms
activities
Routine breakers Cultural evenings, guest speakers, film screenings,
etc
These multiple pathways share the goal
at developing and elaborating the L2 of establishing a sense of the future L2
Identity, could include detailed and Self that is elaborate and detailed – and
precisely targeted visualisations of the which is reinforced by experience and
students coping successfully in understanding of the L2 community.
various L2 situations, contact – in The activities will fit into the syllabus
real life, through the web or through in different ways. Many, for example
reading texts – with successful simulations and roleplays, can easily be
language learners to increase the integrated into language work within
students’ awareness of what learning the normal syllabus. Some, for example
a language entails, and activities sending the students into the community
aimed at increasing the students’ self- to make a short video or audio
esteem and belief in their L2 selves. interviews, could form an ongoing
project to develop speaking and listening
aimed at making the language and
skills. Some, for example the penpal
scheme, could form an out-of-class
culture come alive for the students,
recreational or homework activity, while
could include those aimed at getting
others, like film evenings, guest speakers,
them to interact with members of the
festival celebrations, etc, can act as one-
L2 community, by, for example,
off routine-breaker lessons.
sending the students out into the
community with projects and 
interview tasks, inviting speakers into
the classroom or setting up The table on this page summarises the
opportunities for online interaction different ways motivational activities
through penpal schemes, networking can be integrated into the language
sites and chat rooms. This could also syllabus. ETp
use drama techniques: activities which
simulate interactions with the L2 Jill Hadfield has worked
as a teacher and teacher
community, for example in a trainer in Britain, France,
restaurant or at an airport, or China, Tibet, Madagascar
and New Zealand. She
roleplays where the students have to edits ELTmag
think themselves into an L2 identity. (www.eltmag.com), and
her books include the
Finally, aspects of the L2 culture Communication Games
could be brought to life through series (Pearson), Oxford
Basics, Classroom
classroom or extra-curricular Dynamics and An
activities, such as celebration of Introduction to Teaching
English (all OUP).
festivals, cookery classes or film
screenings. jillhadfield@mac.com
47
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Talk amongst
yourselves
Aaron Deupree researches the role of the mother tongue in international schooling.
ith so many demands on
W teachers, classroom action
research often falls by the
wayside. Yet not only can
such research be an impetus for
improving instruction and learning, it
can be a fulfilling exercise in itself,
exploring an issue that one is curious
about. With that in mind, I set up a
small experiment whereby I sought to
evaluate the value of mother-tongue
languages in my own ESL classroom,
and what implications this would have
on my teaching.
The question
My research question was: What is the
role of the students’ mother-tongue
languages in English-medium
international school classrooms?
English is today’s lingua franca, and
in international schools – just as in
society at large – it is the language of
knowledge and power; and there are
many implicit (if not explicit) structures
in place in schools that underscore this
paradigm. This has major implications
for international schools, in many of
which the majority of students are
English language learners (ELLs) who
need as much linguistic support as
possible in order to be able to achieve
academically.
Research from Jim Cummins and
many others has shown that second
language (L2) acquisition, especially in
an academic setting where L2 is the
language of instruction, is most
successful in environments where the
students’ first languages (L1) are valued
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
both as a learning tool for accessing
prior knowledge and as a way of
validating student identity. Moreover,
L1 is seen to be the basis of one’s
cognition and the more it is developed,
the more success the learner has in
acquiring other languages, especially
when it comes to achieving academic
proficiency. Cummins refers to this as
‘cognitive academic language
proficiency’ (CALP), and it is often the
language of the classroom, textbooks
and academic writing.
English is the language
of knowledge and
power; and there are
many implicit structures
in place in schools
that underscore
this paradigm
Many international schools have
become aware of the research of
Cummins and others, and have
developed after-school mother-tongue
programmes, using teachers based in the
local community. However, our boarding
school is located in a small isolated
village in the Alps with little access to
the linguistic resources necessary for
such a programme. This was the catalyst
for me to explore my research question
and design my experiment on mother-
tongue language use.
The research
Some educators may view L1 as either
an impediment to classroom learning or,
at best, a nuisance. This recently
manifested itself in a conversation with
a colleague who observed me for our in-
house professional development
programme. He noted that I ‘allowed’
my students to use their L1 to discuss
and understand the texts they were
reading. This is true, but the reality is
more that students at our school often
opt to negotiate meaning in the
classroom by utilising their L1, rather
than that teachers actively promote such
a language policy. On the other hand, in
some cases students have been penalised
for using their L1 by losing
participation points or being isolated
from their same-language peers. In this
particular case, my colleague felt that I
was offering students an avenue to avoid
using and developing their English
language skills.
It was with a view towards these
types of discussions that I aimed to
understand through action research
whether L1 was valuable in my
classroom as a tool for learning and
could, therefore, be useful in other
classes as well.
My experiment involved two
advanced ESL skills-based classes of 15
secondary students each, including
speakers of Arabic, Russian, Mandarin,
Japanese, German, Farsi, Korean,
Hindi, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
In my control group, the students
were seated so that they were each next
to someone who spoke a different



49
 Talk amongst
yourselves



language, and they were instructed to
communicate solely in English for
interactive activities in the class.
The students in the experimental
group were seated at tables in groups of
two to four by same language, and they
were encouraged to use their mother
tongue for interaction in the classroom
in order to help each other understand
and learn. Heavy emphasis was placed
on activities that facilitated pairwork or
work in small groups.
Over the course of several weeks of
the autumn semester, both sets of
students maintained these interaction
patterns and were given a post-test to
see how much their English usage and
reading skills had improved from their
original ESL placement test, which they
had taken in August.
The results
So who improved most: the students not
allowed to use their mother tongue, or
those encouraged to do so and grouped
with that in mind? Well, both groups
improved almost equally. In fact, the
latter (the experimental group)
improved by 2.5 points and the former
(the control group) by 2.4 points –
about a 7–8% overall improvement in
their raw scores.
Despite the obvious limitations of a
small study like this one, I believe that if
nothing else, the experiment suggests
that using L1 in English medium
instruction classrooms is not detrimental
to improving English proficiency,
counter to the belief sometimes held by
many stakeholders in schools, not least
teachers and sometimes parents. Indeed,
it could be that, as the research suggests,
it is an additional learning tool for
students in international schools.
The strategies
My classroom experiment has motivated
me to explore the mother-tongue issue
further. So, in what specific ways can
English teachers employ L1 in their
classrooms to optimise learning? Since
carrying out the experiment, I’ve
continued to read about and collaborate
with my colleagues in the ESL
department on ways we can use L1 as a
50 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
learning tool. We are currently
undertaking an initiative to implement a
self-taught mother-tongue programme,
similar to the provision in the
International Baccalaureate Diploma
Programme, for all students who are
interested in continued cognitive
engagement in their mother-tongue
languages. In addition to looking at
programme changes, these are a few
basic strategies for teachers that we are
striving to employ in our classrooms
and throughout the school:
1 Encourage the students to compare
discrete language features and
structures from their L1 to English,
including identifying cognates
between their languages and English.
2 Have the students log key
terminology and vocabulary (either
self-selected or prescribed) in a
personal bilingual dictionary they
create for each unit in each class,
that includes English definitions and
mother-tongue words, plus any other
associations (images, etc).
3 Encourage the students to find
sources and read about the content
that is being taught, in their mother
tongues. The internet has endless
online resources such as
encyclopaedias where students can
first understand the information in
their L1, then transfer that
understanding. At our school, one
of our ESL teachers has created an
international collection of books in
dozens of languages that students
can access at any time in the library.
These were purchased from or
donated by students. These mother-
tongue sources can be used for any
inquiry-based research projects, too.
4 Allow the students to do pair- and
groupwork in their L1 and construct
dual-language projects and tasks
where both the students’ languages
and English are represented. Display
these and share them with the
community at large.
5 Display and present the students’
mother-tongue languages
throughout the school. This could be
as simple as putting up welcome
signs or labelling the school library
with signs that the students create in
their own languages.
Not only do these strategies seem to
help students in developing their
English language skills and content
knowledge, they also encourage them to
be cognitively engaged in their L1s.
These strategies also reinforce the
notion that students’ mother tongues
are important for learning, and that we,
as a learning institution, recognise and
value their backgrounds and languages.
One might even say that it is this
recognition of ‘additive bilingualism’
that is an essential part of fulfilling the
aims of being international educators.

A second theme that has come out of
this for me, as a classroom teacher, is
that action research can be engaging
and fun, and it can better inform our
teaching practices (and hunches) so we
can provide our students with the most
effective learning environment possible.
Indeed, if we, as educators, want to
inculcate in our students a desire to
become life-long learners, then, as
teachers, we can and should continue to
learn ourselves; and action research is a
meaningful way to achieve this aim. ETp
Cummins, J ‘Rethinking monolingual
instructional strategies in multilingual
classrooms’ Canadian Journal of Applied
Linguistics, Special 10 (2) 2007
Aaron Deupree
completed his CELTA
in Durban, South
Africa and his MEd
in International
Education in Leysin,
Switzerland. Since
finishing university in
2000, he has taught in
Japan, France and,
most recently,
Switzerland, where he
balances teaching,
outdoor pursuits and
family time.
adeupree@las.ch
IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
Do you have ideas you’d like to share
with colleagues around the world?
Tips, techniques and activities;
simple or sophisticated; well-tried
or innovative; something that has
worked well for you? All published
contributions receive a prize!
Write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Chat show game show
Richard Hillman’s students get points for revising vocabulary and recycling grammar.
ere’s a quiz question: What’s an
H
exciting new way to revise new
vocabulary and recycle grammar
points? Actually, the technique I’m
going to recommend is itself a re-
treading of a well-trodden path, but this
does not diminish its excitement.
Furthermore, there is minimal gap-
filling involved! I call it ‘Chat show
game show’ and here’s what is involved:
Playing the game
The class is divided into two or three
groups, and each is given a set of
questions or sentence stems which
practise the target language. The
language the groups are expected to use
is given to them, and their job is to
come up with an interesting answer to
each question or an interesting sentence
ending. Then comes the competition
stage, where they share their answers
and the teacher awards points according
to how interesting the answers are.
The technique can be used for
General English, CPE level, pre-
intermediate level, EAP, ESP, business
English, and for practising grammar,
vocabulary, collocations, colligations
and many other things.
For example, when practising ‘future
in the past’, the students would be given
a set of sentence stems, such as: ‘The
girl saw that the man was going to throw
himself off the bridge and ...’. The group
with the most interesting sentence
completion would get most points. Or a
question from a vocabulary worksheet
might be: ‘Name two things that
deteriorate in us as we get older’. This
could lead to a lot of different
interesting answers.
Awarding the points
How about the awarding of points?
Take a question like ‘Who’s the most
inspirational person you’ve ever met?’
Obviously, this is a personalised
question, so each group would
nominate the student from their group
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
with the most interesting answer.
One group might say that one of
them has met a famous celebrity. That’s
definitely worth points. Or their answer
could be their religious leader. That’s a
serious answer meriting an award of a
serious number of points. Then again,
another group might say they’ve never
met anyone particularly interesting.
They can be given points for having
high standards and waiting until
someone really good comes along. Or a
student from another group might say
that their father is the most interesting
person they’ve met. For personalising
their answer, and for having an inspiring
father, they should definitely get a lot of
points. Yet another answer might be
that their English teacher is the most
interesting person they’ve met. Of
course, if this group are already leading
in the competition, you might want to
deduct points for deliberately flattering
the teacher, to put it politely.
Alternatively, they might win the
jackpot and get massive bonus points!
Furthermore, lots of extra points
should be available for students who
justify their answer particularly well, or
make cogent objections about the
teacher’s awarding of points. Equally,
points can be awarded for correcting
another group’s answer, or for
answering any follow-up questions that
occur to the teacher.
What’s the point?
This activity has many benefits:
● It’s fun!
● The students do a lot of speaking.
● The students are combining speaking
with learning and consolidating
vocabulary or grammar points, thus
making the speaking all the more
meaningful and useful.
● The students are engaging
intellectually and emotionally with
the target language items, thus
making learning very effective.
● The students often become very
creative; they get to play with the
language and have their affective
barriers lowered.
● It extends the students’ facility with
how these language items can be used,
as they get the chance to test out what
works and what doesn’t work.
● Most of the questions are not of a
strictly right or wrong nature, so
alternative answers can be accepted,
and it’s more of a collaborative
comparing of answers. However, the
team can’t get their point for that
answer until they use the language
item correctly, which aids accuracy (in
this they can be helped by the teacher,
or by other groups, for points, as
much as is necessary). It takes away
some of the pressure of coursebook-
style exercises where the weaker
students will only get 60 percent of
the answers correct – if they’re lucky!
Here, they can get points for every
answer!
Beside the point
An alternative to this procedure is to
dispense with the points and the game
show, and just have a sharing of the
groups’ answers. This makes the activity
quicker, acts as a variation if you’ve
recently had a game show, and also
lends itself better to other types of
topics and questions. Either way, it’s
fun, involves lots of speaking and
provides very useful practice of the
target language. ETp
Richard Hillman has
taught English all
around the world, in
countries such as Brazil,
Finland, Sudan, Saudi
Arabia, Turkey and
Japan. Now the world
comes to him at Bell
London, UK. His abiding
interest is in group
dynamics and how to
foster a positive and fun
atmosphere in the class
to maximise learning.
Richard.Hillman@bell-worldwide.com
51
B USINESS E NGLISH professional
Tell me
a story
Louis Rogers considers the importance of narrative
in business English.
t the ELT Connections
A conference in Leeds in 2011,
I watched a very engaging
and inspiring symposium
from Alan Maley, Brian Tomlinson,
Hitomi Masuhara, Jayakaran
Mukundan and Ivor Timmis about the
importance of integrating narrative into
ELT materials. They put forward a
number of arguments for doing this,
and gave a variety of techniques for
people to try. Since then, I have been
trying to incorporate more narrative
texts into both my own lessons and the
materials I write for publishers.
Commonly, the only unit of a
coursebook that has a strong narrative
angle is found in a general English
course at an intermediate or upper-
intermediate level, where it serves as a
vehicle for teaching narrative tenses. It
is not surprising that narrative texts are
used to teach these tenses as the
frequency with which they occur in this
genre is much higher than in many
other methods of communication (as
research by Douglas Biber and his
colleagues reveals). However, it is
perhaps surprising that narrative texts
don’t play a more integral role across a
number of units as they can be
engaging and motivating for students,
can play a key role in vocabulary
development and can be used as a
vehicle for a multi-skilled integrated
approach to teaching.
Unfortunately, the perception of
narrative texts means that we don’t see
them used very often in contexts outside
52 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
of general English. However, they can
play an important role in a much wider
range of ELT contexts and can be
particularly useful in business English
courses. In this article, I will look at
some of the common roles of narrative
in a business context and the impact of
extensive reading on incidental
vocabulary learning. Finally, I will
suggest some methods for incorporating
narrative within a business English
context. The article is then followed by
a set of cards that models one of the
techniques discussed.
Storytelling in a
business context
Stephen Denning defines and describes
a number of key areas within the field
of business in which narrative plays an
important role. Firstly, it can be used to
inspire people to follow a course of
action which will encourage them to
‘buy into’ a future direction for a
company, department or project.
Secondly, it is important in
communicating who we are – describing
our paths, our successes and failures –
as a way to raise interest in a
presentation, meeting or informal
discussion. Companies are also
increasingly using narrative to describe
both their past and their vision for the
future – essentially as part of a large
brand identity that they are trying to
create. Finally, it is also a way for
individuals or organisations to impart
knowledge and values to others.
Being a successful storyteller can be
a powerful tool for any business person,
as narrative can be used to engage with
others, motivate people or simply to
socialise and interact more effectively.
We constantly write and rewrite our
own personal and professional
narratives in order to make sense of the
decisions we make and to create our
own life story. This real-life tool for
business communication is exploited
very little in business English materials.
Yet not only is it an authentic approach,
but it also has a number of key
pedagogical outcomes.
Extensive reading
Rod Ellis distinguishes between incidental
and intentional learning as between focal
and peripheral attention. In other words,
intentional learning is where the learner is
explicitly trying to commit something,
such as new vocabulary, to memory,
whereas with incidental learning, the
learner is not actively trying to commit
new words to memory. That is not to
say that new lexis is not being noticed
or attention is not being paid to it, but
that the learner is not explicitly aiming
to acquire new vocabulary.
Unfortunately,
the perception of
narrative texts means
that we don’t see them
used very often in
contexts outside of
general English
According to Thomas Huckin and
James Coady, most vocabulary learning
occurs incidentally as a by-product of
reading and listening activities where
there is not an explicit focus on learning
vocabulary. Consequently, extensive
reading plays a key role in second
language vocabulary acquisition. Huckin
and Coady also argue that texts that have
a high interest value for learners help
aid incidental vocabulary acquisition.
Therefore, creating absorbing narrative
texts, or ones based on a real person’s
life story, is potentially a method to
both engage the learners and also
enhance their linguistic knowledge.
B USINESS E NGLISH professional

Methods for integrating
narrative texts
In the following section I will suggest
three ways in which narrative texts can
be incorporated into business English
materials.
1 Skills and stories
Many business English coursebooks
have reading or listening texts that
centre around people, well-known or
fictional, particularly in sections that
are designed to focus on teaching
grammar and vocabulary. However, one
area where this is often lacking is in the
functional language section of a book.
This can often give the feeling of being
little more than a phrase book; it can be
quite uninspiring and fail to interest the
learners. The better materials integrate
these functional exponents into a
narrative by establishing a context in
which the exchanges happen and by
creating a sense of putting the students
‘in the moment’ of the situation.
2 Case studies
One area where we do see some
narrative entering business English
materials is in the form of case studies.
Case studies generally take a task-based
approach to reviewing the skills and
language taught in a unit, and the better
ones tend to integrate a strong narrative
into the situation. Unfortunately, many
are quite formulaic and don’t exploit the
potential for using narrative as a vehicle
for teaching and recycling skills and
language. The Harvard Business Review
case studies, which are suitable for more
advanced learners – from upper-
intermediate upwards – are engaging
texts, looking at a wide range of
scenarios in a variety of business
contexts. The longer nature of these
makes them particularly good for
incidentally developing the learners’ lexis
when they are used as reading texts.
3 Business mazes
Business mazes, more commonly known
as action mazes, are essentially stories
broken up into sections, often on
separate cards, each of which is followed
by two or three options. Each option
sends the reader down a different path
of the story. Once the reader has chosen
their option, they are then presented
with an additional part of the narrative
and three or four further options. Each
of these routes results in a different
outcome to the story. Such mazes are
commonly found in science fiction and
fantasy writing. However, they can also
be used in the business English
classroom. When done collectively in a
class or group, these narrative texts can
enable practice of a number of key
functions that are taught to business
English students, such as suggesting,
agreeing, disagreeing, explaining,
justifying, etc. They can also be created
to link thematically to a unit or to a
particular learner’s needs and context.
There are some examples of
businesses mazes at www.uefap.com and
many more for both professional and
general purposes. Using business mazes
for a reading task also works well via a
digital platform. There is a free piece of
software available online called
Quandary that allows you to write your
own mazes. Mazes can be as long or as
short as you like: many of the examples
available online have more than 50
cards. The example that accompanies
this article (on this page and page 54) is
a shorter one and is intended just to
give you an idea of what a maze is and
as a small example to try out. ETp
Biber, D, Conrad, S and Leech, G
Longman Student Grammar of Spoken
and Written English Pearson 2002
Denning, S A Leader’s Guide to
Storytelling: Mastering the Art and
Discipline of Business Narrative Jossey-
Bass 2005
Ellis, R Learning a Second Language
through Interaction John Benjamins
Publishing Company 1999
Huckin, T and Coady, J ‘Incidental
vocabulary acquisition in a second
language’ Studies in Second Language
Acquisition 21 (2) 1999
Louis Rogers is a Course
Tutor at the University of
Reading, UK. He is the
author of Reading Skills
and Writing Skills, in the
DELTA Academic
Objectives series, and
the Intermediate and
Upper-intermediate
levels of the Business
Result Skills for Business
Studies workbooks,
published by OUP.
l.j.rogers@reading.ac.uk

Business maze: Quattro

Lesson plan
This business maze can be used as a fluency task following
on from a number of skills-based lessons. If you have been
teaching language related to meetings, or functional phrases
for areas such as giving an opinion or making suggestions,
then this will provide ideal fluency practice. You will need
one set of cards per student or pair of students.
1 Copy and cut out the cards on page 54 and distribute
sets (arranged in numerical order) among the students.
Ask them to read the first card and to choose one of
the options. Once they have made their choice, ask the
students to tell a partner which one they have chosen
and why. If they disagree on the best option, that’s fine,
but try to encourage them to agree on one path.
2 The students should now read the section on the next
card that the option they chose tells them to read.
● If pairs have agreed on the same one, they should
repeat the process from 1 together again.
● If they have chosen different options, they should
explain their part of the story to their partner.
They can then discuss again which option they will
take and why.
3 The students repeat each of the steps above until they
reach the conclusion of their story.

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 • 53





Business
maze:
Quattro
3 5
You decide to hold a staff meeting to
find out how people feel about working
in Quattro. The meeting quickly turns
into a big argument as the staff think
you are the problem.
Fire the staff. How dare they speak to
you like that? You pay their salaries and
they should respect you. Go to 8.
Take on board their comments. Perhaps
they are right? You decide to provide
some training for your staff. Go to 9.
4 6
Your chef adds 20 new dishes to the
menu, but people still complain. One
review says: ‘How can they add even
more rubbish to this menu?’
Bad luck – Your business cannot
recover and closes.
8 10
You fire all the staff and hire new people.
It starts really well and they are very
enthusiastic, but three leave after a few
weeks and one night two don’t come to
work. One tells you he is embarrassed
to serve such rubbish food.
Bad luck – It seems the staff were not
the problem.
54 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
1 2
Your restaurant, Quattro, has been open
for five years. For the first three years the
restaurant was very successful, but for the
last two it has been losing money. If things
do not change in the next six months, you
will have to close your business.
You like the food, but your spouse
thinks the food is the problem and
refuses to eat there! Perhaps the food
is the problem. Go to 2.
You often see your staff standing around
doing nothing and when they do serve
customers they are quite rude. You
decide you need to do something about
the staff. Go to 3.
You interview people for the head chef
position and have to choose between two
candidates. Juan has been a chef for over
25 years and has worked in some top
restaurants. Leo has excellent references
from his last job, and his current
restaurant is one of the best in town.
Experience is best, surely? You can’t
take chances, so you appoint Juan.
Go to 6.
It’s your last chance. You decide to take
a risk and appoint Leo, even though he
is young. Go to 7.
Juan did work for some good
restaurants – a long time ago. When he
starts, he is lazy and arrogant. You try to
fire him and get another chef, but it’s
too late.
Bad luck – Your restaurant has closed.
Bad luck – The training session
becomes one big argument as the staff
think you don’t know what you’re doing.
Everyone quits and the restaurant
closes.
When you look online, you see lots of
bad reviews about the restaurant’s food.
You decide something needs to be
done.
Lots of complaints are about the
choices on your menu. You decide to
ask your chef to create a new menu.
Go to 4.
You don’t like the chef and think he has
become a bit lazy. Changing the chef,
not the menu, might be the best option.
Go to 5.
9
You decide that staff training is needed.
You want to provide good training but
have limited money.
You decide to train the staff yourself.
You have worked in the industry for ten
years and used to train staff in a college.
Go to 10.
You haven’t got much time and decide
to pay a consultant to come in. Go to 11.
7
Leo turns out to be an excellent chef
and really turns your restaurant around.
The next year you win a ‘restaurant of
the year’ award.
Well done – You’re still in business.
11
Well done – The consultant gets your
restaurant onto a TV programme that
helps improve restaurants. The food and
service get better and your restaurant
has become popular again.
B USINESS E NGLISH professional
May I leave a message?
Phil Wade finds opportunities for practice when no one is available.
hanks to mobile phones, it is now
T common practice in the business
world to expect that managers and
even junior staff will be contactable 24/7.
The only problem is that it’s nearly
impossible for them to answer every call:
they might be in a meeting, on another
line or even on a plane. Thus, they find
themselves constantly leaving voice
messages, picking up their own messages
and calling people back.
Telephone skills have long been
taught in general and business English
classes, but how many coursebook
activities actually involve leaving or
responding to messages? Activities
involving answer machine messages
were one of my favourite tasks in the
old days of language labs. I used to get
my business students running round to
each other’s booths leaving messages.
Luckily for those of us who were
language lab fans – and thanks to the
internet – we can now apply the same
ideas to the modern classroom.
The activities below can be used to
improve the students’ ability to listen to
short messages, to develop dictation
skills, to get them used to the repetitions
and redundancies of natural English, to
revise grammar or vocabulary and to
leave short but effective messages
themselves. They can be used as warmers,
lead-ins or set-up stages for roleplays or
simulated meetings and negotiations.
Basic procedure
Each student signs up for an account at
www.voxopop.com (see Russell Stannard’s
Webwatcher in ETp Issue 81) and opens a
new thread (a chain of voice recordings)
called something like ‘Bob’s message
service’ or ‘Sony sales department’.
The students (in the role of
‘receivers’) each record a short answer
machine message and upload the link to
their message/thread onto a class
webpage, blog or wiki.
Then, in the role of ‘callers’, the
students visit each of their classmates’
links, listen to the original message and
leave messages of their own.
Returning to the role of receiver, each
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
student listens back to the messages they
have received in response to their own
message and then responds appropriately.
Variations
The basic procedure lends itself to a
number of different variations, which you
can employ by giving the students specific
instructions about how they should
record or respond to the messages:
1 Unfinished messages
Instruct the callers to miss out key bits
of information which the receivers have
to enquire about in the next class.
2 Wrong number
Tell the callers to pretend to phone the
wrong department. The receivers then
have to find the right person to pass the
message on to.
3 Fast speaker
Ask the receivers to speak quickly when
they leave their messages so the callers
have to replay the message several times.
4 Error correction
Get the receivers to make deliberate
mistakes with the target language. The
callers have to re-record all the messages
correctly on a new thread.
5 Paraphrasing
Tell the receivers to pretend to forget
the target vocabulary and to paraphrase
it in their messages. The callers then
have to work out which lexis it is.
6 Agenda
Ask the callers to leave messages to
arrange a departmental meeting but with
different requirements. The receiver then
has to negotiate and finalise a set time.
7 No name
Tell the callers that they are various
employees of the same company who
leave messages but forget to say their
names. The receiver has to use the content
of the message and the sound of the voice
to figure out who left each message.
8 Timed dictations
Give the students a time limit to note
down all their messages and then check
them with each other to see how correct
they are.
9 You’re hired; you’re fired
Ask the callers to pretend to be bosses
who call and sack their employee as
politely as possible for poor performance.
The receivers (the employees) then have to
try to win back their jobs. Alternatively,
the callers are potential employers who
offer jobs to an interviewee (the receiver).
The receiver chooses which offer to accept.
10 The demanding boss and the PA
Pair up the students and ask them to
pretend to be each other’s demanding
boss and personal assistant (they each
play both roles). In their boss role, they
have to leave lots of messages before the
next lesson as a normal boss would do to
a PA. These could be instructing the PA
to book plane tickets, checking if work
has been done, enquiring about progress
on a project – even asking the PA to pick
up some dry cleaning. In the next lesson,
in the role of the PA, they have to report
back for one or two minutes to the boss
in front of the class and say what they
have done regarding the messages.

As essential skills in business and life in
general, leaving, picking up and acting on
messages certainly warrant a place on
any English course. One of the real
benefits is that the students get used to
listening to non-native-speaker English.
Anyone going into the business world
will, at some point, be working with
international colleagues who increasingly
use English as a lingua franca.
Incorporating activities like those above
can provide valuable practice in this area.
If you prefer video messages, the same
recordings can be done at
www.voicethread.com
or sent as e-messages using
www.eyejot.com.
Phil Wade has a Business
degree, a PGCE, the
CELTA, MA TESOL and
DELTA Module 3. He has
managed an MA business
English course and has
taught corporate,
foundation, undergraduate
and pre-MBA courses. He
is a Cambridge examiner,
materials writer,
contributor to BESIG and
member of the TESOL
France editorial team.
philawade@gmail.com
55
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
CLIL: from
policy to reality
Christa Mundin and Charlotte Giller try to fill the gaps
for Spanish teachers facing a new challenge.
his article looks at the
T challenges facing teachers and
teacher trainers in Valencia,
Spain, in preparing for the
implementation of a trilingual education
policy (Valencian, Castillian and
English) in primary and secondary state
schools in that region. As teacher
trainers and EFL teachers, we have been
contracted for the last five years to
deliver general English courses in
modular format to improve standards of
English amongst teachers in our area.
The teachers
Motivation
For the most part, the teachers we are
working with are subject teachers rather
than language teachers, and within any
one group of, say, 20 adults, there will
be a mix of infant, primary and
secondary teachers. The modules we
deliver equate to a 60-hour course, or
half an average textbook, and they are
delivered after school in two sessions of
three hours per week.
Take a moment to imagine how
motivated you need to be to sign up for
six hours of unpaid overtime a week
after a hard day at the chalkface!
Spanish schools generally follow a nine
to five timetable – and in some cases
eight to five. Teachers on these courses
finish at 8.30 at night. So, what exactly
is their motivation for signing up?
By and large, the driving force is job
security. The Spanish Government’s
infamous austerity programme has
resulted in drastic cuts in the education
budget across the regions. Significant
56 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
increases in class size and working
hours have been imposed at the same
time as pay cuts, a recruitment freeze
and staff transfers. In addition, teachers
of various subjects are now required to
have a B1 or B2 level of English.
Despite opposition within the teaching
profession to these measures, the
Valencian government remains
committed to rolling out a trilingual
education model from 2012, following
the example of other regions in Spain.
The aim is for a third of lessons to be
taught in English, a third in Valencian
and a third in Castillian – and we are
aware of at least one pilot programme
delivering (at least in theory) 80 percent
of lessons to pre-primary children in
English. This is no mean task for
teachers and students alike!
Rationale
We would wager that most parents and
educators would agree that this is the way
forward: that using language as a medium
for learning content is using language in
the most practical of contexts and,
consequently, a powerful motivating
factor. Almost unanimously, the
plurilinguistic approach to learning is seen
as the tool which will empower future
generations of young people to widen
their employment prospects, not just on
the Iberian stage but on the world stage.
Feedback
So, how are those educators who are
not from an ELT background expected
to transform their hitherto monolingual
classrooms into trilingual ones? Our
particular remit is to provide general
English courses for them. These courses
don’t lead to any certification other
than attendance, and the entry-level
tests and end-of-module exams are
prepared by us. We always request
feedback from our ‘teacher-students’
and the following four comments
represent those most frequently made:
1 This is the first time I have been
taught English this way (using the
communicative method) and the first
time I have enjoyed learning English.
2 I studied English at school and at
university, but this is the first time I have
been taught by a native speaker and had
lessons which include pronunciation,
speaking and listening practice.
3 I have learnt a lot on this course and
want to continue.
4 I don’t feel either sufficiently
prepared or confident enough to teach
part or any of my classes in English.
As can be seen, the story so far has many
positives. Almost unwittingly, a by-
product of these courses has been the
opportunity for teachers to experience a
methodology previously unknown to
them and which they instantly perceive
to be good language teaching practice.
What’s more, our focus on the
importance of pronunciation in terms
of intelligibility rather than accent, has
proved hugely effective and popular with
groups at all levels. Finally, the teachers’
personal perception (and ours, too) is
that considerable learning has taken
place, but their common sense tells them
that they are still not ready to teach
their subject in English. And this is our
concern as well. Are we really giving
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
these teachers what they need to teach
their subjects in English? What is more
worrying is whether the policy makers
actually believe these ‘successful’ general
English courses to be equivalent to CLIL
training and preparation. There are now
several successful CLIL roll-outs in
countries such as Austria, Germany,
Finland, Norway and parts of Spain,
and as the model spreads, so do the
networking possibilities. The CLIL
Cascade Network (www.ccn-clil.eu)
comprises a Networking Zone, a
Teaching and Learning Zone and a
Professional Development Zone. The
way forward for regions and countries
which are embarking on this journey is
surely to consult with those who have
more experience and have had the
opportunity to iron out the problems
encountered along the way?
The strategy
In the meantime, back at the chalkface,
we looked at what we could do to add
value within the given constraints. We
decided on a practical, phased
approach, very similar to the three
phases outlined in John and Liz
McMahon’s presentation ‘Training the
CLIL Teacher’ given at the 2011
IATEFL conference in Brighton, UK.
Phase 1: General language
improvement via a mainstream
coursebook
We are currently doing courses aimed at
improving general language ability.
However, following consultation with
our teacher-students, we have decided to
take more of a lexical approach than a
grammatical approach, the language
being dictated by the subject to be
taught. Realistically, we have found this
needs to be restricted to two subjects
during any one course. A good starting
point is to choose two subjects which
most teachers are called upon to teach
at some stage in their career in addition
to their specialist subject, eg
environmental studies and citizenship.
For intermediate levels and above, we
now ask our teacher-students to present
information to the class (based on the
national curriculum textbook) using
simple charts or diagrams containing
the key language. The rest of the class
are then given prompts to frame
questions for the teacher to answer.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Phase 2: Classroom language
Classroom language makes a brief
appearance in the beginner and
elementary levels of the coursebook we
are using and, understandably, is not
seen again. We therefore decided to
dedicate one hour of each three-hour
class to communicative activities using
the social communication lexis and
structures required to manage and run
classes with confidence. This, after all, is
language that they are used to receiving
from us but not used to producing
themselves. This skill can be developed in
the safety of roleplay scenarios covering:
● English for giving instructions
● English for presenting information
● English for asking questions
● English for monitoring and feedback
● English for solving problems
Teachers particularly appreciate the
inclusion of useful collocations and set
phrases for the classroom – they not
only provide scaffolding but also boost
confidence. However, this has flagged
up the complexity of having so many
variables in the target audience: the
classroom language needed for infant
teachers has little to do with that needed
by a secondary teacher. To give a graphic
example, an infant teacher needs to
know how to ask the question: ‘Do you
need to do a wee?’; the secondary teacher
hopes they never will. There are also
differences in the equipment used with
different age groups and the instructions
this requires. Therefore, where resources
permit, we would certainly recommend
that classroom language input for infant
and primary teachers and secondary
teachers is given separately.
Phase 3: CLIL
This final phase is the bringing together
of Phases 1 and 2 to allow the teachers
to learn the CLIL craft. Although we
are currently unable, as individuals, to
influence this final phase, we believe that
teaching practice sessions (including
those with the presence of a native
speaker), CLIL lesson observation and
a mentoring scheme would provide a
sound working brief. We have had to
recognise our own limitations in these
courses and focus on those areas where
our input can make a difference to the
outcome, namely Phases 1 and 2.

The stakeholders in the CLIL process are
many, starting with the policy makers
and impacting the teaching workforce,
the teacher trainer and the student. We
believe that a suitable mission statement
title would be: ‘Failure is not an option’.
If this were to be the mantra for the
CLIL approach, perhaps the how it is
achieved would become as (if not more)
important than the when. Language
learning is a slow process and, therefore,
not the kind of soundbite that makes a
great headline. However – given the social,
cultural and, in these troubled times here
in Spain, the economic importance of the
job teachers do – if it were to translate
into a realistic, phased training timetable
for teachers, delivered within a framework
which promotes independent learning and
critical thinking skills, we believe it would
guarantee their commitment and
cooperation as strategic partners. In fact,
our teacher-students who have signed up,
turned up and participated with good
humour and great enthusiasm on these
evening courses, and their own current
and future students, deserve no less. ETp
Further reading
British Council and Ministerio de
Educación Evaluation Report on the
Bilingual Education Project, Spain 2010
Foord, D The Developing Teacher Delta
Publishing 2009
Mehisto, P, Frígols, M J and Marsh, D
Uncovering CLIL Macmillan 2008
Edge, J The Reflexive Teacher Educator
in TESOL Routledge 2011
Christa Mundin is Head of
Training at Asociación de
Profesores Profesionales
(www.appformacion.com)
in Gandia, Valencia,
Spain, and holds the
Trinity DipTESOL. She has
a particular interest in the
teaching of pronunciation.
She is currently designing
a Trinity CertTESOL
course specifically for
non-native speakers.
christamundin@hotmail.com
Charlotte Giller is an
English teacher at
Asociación de
Profesores Profesionales
and a part-time lecturer
at the Universidad
Europea de Madrid
(Valencia campus). She
is interested in critical
discourse analysis.
charliegiller@hotmail.com
57
 T E C H N O L O G Y
Prevent videos
from vanishing
Gary Collins insists you can step into the same stream as many times as you like – if you are careful.
xperienced teachers will know
E that there is nothing worse than
giving a web link to students
with the intention of engaging them in
an attractive task, only to find that the
website has moved, the URL is faulty
or your favourite video stream has been
taken away for good.
This is why it is sensible to
download material from the web onto
your computer, and maybe even to
convert it to a different codec or format,
such as WMV or MP4, to suit the
preferences of your institution’s
computer system. You can then carry
your streams around on a flash drive,
nicely organised in subject folders,
together with any relevant
accompanying material such as
worksheets, answer keys and teaching
hints, so that you can use them
whenever and wherever you like.
There are several examples on my
website (www.garycollins.ch) of short
video clips downloaded from the internet
which make excellent, reusable teaching
material, together with worksheets that
I have developed to go with them. Click
on ‘Teaching Ideas’ at the top to take a
look. The first example is a YouTube
stop-motion clip showing a man’s life
story illustrated by animated family
photos. The accompanying worksheet
requires the students to remember
details of the clip and, as they become
engrossed in this challenge, they will
hardly notice the amount of target
language they are practising.
Downloading
To download video material from the
internet, first you need to get yourself a
video downloader. I recommend the
58 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
RealPlayer Downloader. I use a Mac so
I got mine from http://uk.real.com/
realplayer/mac, but it is also available
for Windows and Linux. Whenever you
watch a video stream on YouTube, Bing
or any other platform, the downloader
will catch the URL of your stream. You
then click on ‘Download’ and collect
your stream from the download folder.
Once it has been downloaded, you can
rename the file or even convert it.
Searching for suitable
material
What you really want for use in class are
short, high-definition clips. At YouTube
you can filter your search. I usually tick
HD in order to limit my search to
streams that have a resolution of either
1080p or 720p: the streams are going to
be projected using a beamer and laptop,
and standard definition (SD) with
resolutions of between 240p and 480p
will not be of sufficient quality. Choose
at least 720p from the drop-up window
and then tick to download the largest
file in RealPlayer.
Capturing captions
You will get an even better teaching clip
if you are able to capture any target-
language captions or subtitles that
appear on screen. According to a study
done by Holger Mitterer and James
McQueen, using target-language
captions enhances the learning process,
while using L1 captions to support L2
audio is not to be recommended at all.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to
capture captions with the RealPlayer
Downloader. You can choose English
subtitles from a separate drop-up
window and see them on screen, but the
Downloader will not receive this
information.
In order to get around this problem,
you can capture the entire stream,
including the subtitles, while watching it
in full-screen mode. To do this, I use
Screenflow on my Mac; this is available
from http://en.softonic.com for about 70
Euros.
Once you have downloaded a RAW
version of your screen, you can export
the data, converting it to WMV, MP4 or
MPG4 format – but make sure you use
HD settings before rendering your
stream. ETp
Mitterer, H and McQueen, J M ‘Foreign
subtitles help but native-language
subtitles harm foreign speech perception’
PLoS ONE 4 (11) 2009
Gary Collins teaches
English at a vocational
training centre and runs
teacher training courses
for the Swiss Federal
Institute for Vocational
Education and Training
(SFIVET) and English
staff all over Europe.
collins.com@me.com
It really worked
for me!
Did you get inspired by something
you read in ETp? Did you do
something similiar with your students?
Did it really work in practice?
Do share it with us ...
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
 T E C H N O L O G Y
Please leave a message
Lindsay Warwick evaluates voice recording.
oice recording is not a new
V concept in ELT; it has been used
for language practice for
decades. What makes it relevant today is
the increased use of voice recording to
communicate in our everyday lives, from
leaving a voice message to a loved one
to recording a webinar for colleagues.
With voice recording, English
language learners:
● can communicate in English with
people all over the world;
● get valuable rehearsal time (we often
practise difficult conversations in our
minds in L1);
● are encouraged to take more care about
what they say and how they say it;
● have nowhere to hide and can’t let
others speak for them;
● can work on specific weak areas at their
own pace, gaining confidence as they go.
Tools and equipment
There are recording devices on computers
and smartphones, with the option to email
recordings. Free programs such as
Audacity can be downloaded and used
with a headset and microphone.
Online recording tools, such as
Vocaroo and Mailvu, allow voice or video
messages respectively to be emailed
privately. Audioboo uploads messages to
the web and will sync them to a blog or
social network.
Screencasting allows you to record
your voice and whatever is on your
computer screen at the same time. Jing is
a popular downloadable program; the
website Screencast-o-matic offers the
same free facilities online, and the
Voxopop website allows you to create
private talk groups where students can
talk asynchronously.
Inside the classroom
The following activities are great for
language development in class.
1 Activities for fluency
Story chain: Give the students the first line
of a story and ask them first to record it
and then to record a continuation (eg by
describing the place). The students then
swap recording devices and add more to
the story (eg by describing the main
character). They swap again, continuing
until the stories are complete.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Photo call: Give the students a photo
and ask them to talk about it using a
screencasting tool. What’s in the photo?
Does it remind them of anything? How
does it make them feel?
Present it: Get the students to practise
giving a presentation with slides or a
website. A screencast tool can record
the presentations.
2 Activities for range
These activities can all be done using
Audacity, which allows you to record
several tracks at one time, making it a
basic but free language laboratory.
Half a dialogue: Record one speaker’s role
in a dialogue, leaving gaps for the other
speaker. The students listen and record in
the gaps. This is a great way to practise
using appropriate discourse, eg showing
surprise, agreeing, disagreeing, etc.
Guess the words: The students work in
pairs and have a conversation for two
minutes while secretly trying to use five
new words/phrases chosen from their word
lists. They listen back and try to guess
what each other’s words/phrases were.
Paraphrase it: The students record
themselves talking about a topic.
Another student listens and records a
paraphrase of what they heard. This
continues three or four times. The first
recording is compared to the last.
3 Activities for accuracy
Describe and draw: The students describe
something, eg directions, their living room
or a photo. They listen to each other’s
recordings and draw what they hear.
Describe and guess: The students
describe something, eg a word, person
or object. They listen to each other’s
recordings and guess what it is.
Class survey: The students record
themselves giving personal information
or ideas using a particular language
point, eg ‘what you’d do if you could
travel the world’. They listen to each
other and report back to the class.
4 Activities for pronunciation
Shadow speaking: Record a text
yourself and give the students a written
copy. They listen and record themselves
speaking at exactly the same time,
copying your intonation. With
Audacity, they can listen back to both
tracks at the same time and compare.
Guess the sound: The students record
words or sentences with a particular
sound or minimal pair. Another student
has to listen and identify the sound.
Alliteration: The students write and
record a poem with a particular sound
for a class competition.
Outside the classroom
These activities encourage meaningful
communication in English outside class.
Language exchange: Your students work
with English speakers or learners in other
countries. They interview each other
about a different topic each week by
emailing recorded messages and report
back to the class. Use www.etwinning.net
to help you find a school to work with.
Project: Pair students from different
classes and ask them to prepare a
presentation to give at the end of term,
using voice messages to communicate.
Ask them to copy you in on some of
the emailed messages, and include these
in your final assessment.
Summary: Pair the students according
to their interests. Encourage them to
read or listen to English texts regularly
outside of class and email recorded
summaries to their partner. The partners
listen and email a recorded response.
Anecdote: The students record
themselves telling an anecdote. They
email it to a partner, then share in class
what they heard, choosing the funniest,
most embarrassing, etc.

Most of the above activities can be
done face to face. But voice recording
offers students the opportunity to hear
themselves, recognise their strengths
and weaknesses and think about how to
improve. Used appropriately, it can
create fun and engaging lessons, or
motivate students to extend their use of
English beyond the classroom.
For more information on voice
recording tools, and video tutorials on
how to use Audacity, go to
http://voicerecordinginefl.weebly.com. ETp
Lindsay Warwick is a
teacher and teacher
trainer, working with
students and teachers
from around the world
at Bell International
College, Cambridge, UK.
She is also a materials
writer and is currently
writing a coursebook
for Pearson.
lindsay.warwick@bell-worldwide.com
59
 T E C H N O L O G Y
Five things you always wanted to know about
webinars
(but were afraid to ask)
1 Webinar? Can you explain what
you mean?
Web + seminar = webinar. Essentially,
webinars are online seminars, presentations
or workshops, usually open to the general
public, and often free. They take place in
real time and last around an hour. Recorded
webinars can be accessed asynchronously
(at any time). Webinars frequently focus
on one specific topic, although they can
form part of a series over time.
2 Where do you attend a
webinar?
Webinars can take place in different
‘platforms’. You can have a webinar in a
text-based platform, where the participants
and the presenter interact via text. For
example, the British Council Learn English
Facebook page holds weekly webinars
(or ‘chats’) about grammar for students
of English. You can have a webinar in an
audio-only platform, where you hear but
don’t see the presenter and participants,
although you can view the presenter’s
slides. Education Week holds regular free
audio webinars: go to www.edweek.org/
ew/marketplace/webinars/webinars.html.
You can have a webinar in a video-
conferencing platform, where you both see
and hear the presenter – and possibly the
other participants as well.
With the spread of reliable broadband
internet access, video-conferencing
platforms tend to be the tool of choice for
webinars, as it is usually more engaging to
have video, audio and visual support (such
as slides). See below for some examples.
3 What webinars do you
recommend for teachers?
In the last year or two, there has been a
steady increase in the number of video-
conferencing webinars on offer for English
language teachers. Many publishers (eg
Macmillan, Pearson, OUP and CUP) offer
regular webinars, as do several English
language teaching associations. These are
all free and are an excellent source of
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
professional development for teachers.
There are even online conferences which
consist of a series of online presentations
over several days.
Here are some organisations that offer
free webinars for English language teachers:
IATEFL
Several of the IATEFL Special Interest
Groups (SIGs) offer monthly webinars on
topics of interest. These webinars are
free and open to the general public, while
access to webinar recordings is usually
limited to SIG members:
● BESIG (Business English SIG):
www.besig.org
● LT SIG (Learning Technologies SIG):
http://ltsig.org.uk
● YL SIG (Young Learners SIG):
www.yltsig.org
American TESOL Institute
This organisation offers free webinars every
Friday on a range of classroom-related
topics of interest to English language
teachers. Webinars are recorded and can
be freely accessed on the website after the
event. Go to http://americantesol.com/
tesol-lectures.htm.
Virtual Round Table Conference
This annual online conference provides a
rich resource of webinars aimed at English
language teachers. Have a look through
the webinar archives from conferences
over the past few years (www.virtual-
round-table.com) – and make sure you
attend the 2013 conference!
4 What do I need to attend a
webinar?
To take part in a video-conferencing
webinar, you need a reliable internet
connection and speakers (or preferably a
headset) to be able to hear the webinar
presenter. Most webinar participants
contribute to the session via text chat in
video-conferencing webinars, adding their
opinions on the topic, interacting with each
other or asking questions. Some webinars
will offer you the chance to use audio (and
possibly even video) to ask the presenter
In this series, Nicky Hockly
explains aspects of technology
which some people may be
embarrassed to confess that they
don’t really understand. In this
article, she explores a popular new
way of exchanging information.
questions, but given that public webinar
audiences tend to be large (40+), most
participant interaction is limited to the text
chat room for logistical reasons. If your
internet connection is unreliable or slow,
you may be able to freeze or close the
presenter’s video window, and just receive
audio – this will take up less bandwidth
and make for a more stable experience.
5 What are the dos and dont’s for
webinar presenters?
As a presenter, there are two main areas to
consider when preparing for and running
your webinar: technical issues, and how
to involve or engage your participants.
Technical know-how includes using a
headset rather than a stand-alone
microphone and speakers (which can cause
echo for listeners), and using a cable
broadband connection rather than Wi-Fi for
video-conferencing if possible – the former
is more reliable. Techniques to engage your
webinar participants include creating short
tasks that involve your audience, and
looking at your webcam when speaking
rather than at your computer screen. Take a
look at these two short videos that include
excellent advice from experienced
webinar presenters around the world:
● Webinar tech tips –
http://youtu.be/hebbpe6MVLw
● ‘Involving your audience’ tips –
http://youtu.be/UcqoZRZOlDw
And perhaps most importantly for webinar
presenters, be interested in and engaged
with your subject matter – that way, your
audience is more likely to be interested in
and engaged with what you have to say!
Nicky Hockly has been involved in EFL
teaching and teacher training since
1987. She is Director of Pedagogy of
The Consultants-E, an online teacher
training and development consultancy.
She is co-author of How to Teach
English with Technology, Learning
English as a Foreign Language for
Dummies, Teaching Online and Digital
Literacies. She has published an e-
book, Webinars: A Cookbook for
Educators (the-round.com), and she
maintains a blog at
www.emoderationskills.com.
61
Webwatcher
Web
have often been disappointed with the so-called collaboration
I tools I find on the internet. I have from time to time picked up
recommendations from tweets and blogs, but when I have
tried the tools out, I have often found them quite clunky.
However, there are some tools which have emerged recently
which I think have real potential.
What do collaboration tools do?
Collaboration tools are great for getting students to brainstorm,
share ideas, plan projects and do groupwork. Sometimes I even
use them in class. For example, if I have the students working in
groups of four or five, I can have just one member of the group
logged onto the internet, and that person can write up all the
thoughts and ideas of the whole group into whatever collaboration
tool we are using. If I then project it onto a screen, the whole class
can see their own ideas going up and can also see what the other
groups are saying. It’s a great way of pooling ideas and making
the most of all the good points that come up in groupwork.
Once I have all their ideas on the screen, I can then begin to
focus on particular ones. As a class, we can look at all the things
that the different groups have shared and I can ask the students
to make further comments, elaborate on certain points, etc. I can
then print out all their comments and add them to a blog.
Which collaboration tools work?
TodaysMeet
The most successful tool I have found so far is TodaysMeet. To
use this, you go onto the site (todaysmeet.com) and you will be
asked to create a ‘room’. You type in the name you want to call
your room (which is really just to create a unique internet
address for the page) and then you share the link that is
displayed with your groups of students. One member of each
group can then go to the link, click on the ‘Join’ button by
adding in their name (or the name of their group – I usually name
them Group 1, Group 2, etc) and then anything they write
appears on the screen once they click on the ‘Say’ button.
PiratePad
PiratePad is another simple tool (piratepad.net). You simply click
on the screen and it will create a page for you. You can then
share the address of the page with your groups and, as before,
just one member of the group needs to log on. They can write in
the name of their group or their own name, choose a colour to
write in and then start writing on the screen. Again, anything that
any of the group members write will appear on the screen.
I used this recently for brainstorming vocabulary. I asked
each group to think of all the words they knew which were
connected with the topic of technology and we quickly built up
an enormous list. There was obviously lots of repetition and I
had to go over the odd spelling mistake, but it worked well.
Tricider
Tricider (https://tricider.com) offers something a little more
sophisticated. I came across this tool recently and I must say it
looks really promising. In its simplest form, it is great for
brainstorming and getting students to share thoughts and ideas.
You simply type a question in the box on the homepage and it
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 82 September 2012 •
Russell Stannard
offers some simple tools to get
your students collaborating.
creates a web link to the question. Students can then click on
the link and add their answers. This is the simplest way to use
the tool, but I have noticed other teachers are using it in a very
interesting way. When the students write up their answers, other
students can log on and comment on each other’s answers in
the ‘Pros and cons’ column. So, some teachers write up a
question and add five or six answers or ideas connected with
that question. They then ask their students to come onto the
page and not provide an answer, since the teacher has already
done this, but to make comments on the answers that the
teacher has supplied. Let me demonstrate an example:
Question What are the benefits of living in the city?
Answers Comments
(provided by (added by students in the ‘Pros and cons’
the teacher) column)
Access to Tom – Yes, but it depends on the city. Some
amenities. cities don’t have enough amenities for the size
of the population.
Better Tom – I agree. In London I don’t need my car.
transport Fred – True, but public transport is very
system. expensive.
More job Yasmin – So why have I been looking for a job
opportunities. for over a year?
I really like this idea as I think it encourages use of some of
the higher-order thinking skills that we are always trying to
develop in our students.
Any questions you set on Tricider stay open for 14 days
unless you change the deadline. After that, all the comments are
summarised and organised for you to view. However, you can
end a questionnaire at any time.

I am writing this out of term time and I haven’t yet had a chance
to try out Tricider myself (I am not even sure of the pronunciation)
but I have been looking at many of the examples set up by other
teachers and it looks to be an excellent tool. I think it would be
especially helpful for students preparing to write an essay or
presentation, as they could collect ideas and comments around a
certain topic and then use these as the basis for an essay plan.
I have provided free help videos which will show you how to use all
three of these tools:
TodaysMeet www.teachertrainingvideos.com/todaysMeet/index.html
PiratePad www.screencast.com/users/Russell1955/folders/
Public%20Content/media/ba599651-fca6-42e9-93dd-4ead48d57d9f
Tricider www.teachertrainingvideos.com/tricider/index.html
Russell Stannard is a Principal Lecturer in ICT at the
University of Warwick, UK, where he teaches on the
MA in ELT. He won the Times Higher Education
Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and
Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site of
the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council ELTon
award, all for his popular website
www.teachertrainingvideos.com.
Keep sending your favourite sites to Russell:
russellstannard@btinternet.com
63
 Prize crossword 55
ETp presents the fifty-fifth in our series VERY FREQUENT WORDS ** A period of time with a particular quality
of prize crosswords. Send your entry *** Do Not ___ Gentle into That Good Night or character
(completed crossword grid and (poem by Dylan Thomas) ** A powerful emotion such as love or
quotation), not forgetting to include *** To come out of or out from behind anger
your full name, postal address and telephone number, something ** Unusual or unexpected
to Prize crossword 55, ENGLISH TEACHING professional, *** A word used for emphasis FAIRLY FREQUENT WORDS
Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd, Rayford House, *** ___ Mice and Men (novella by John * A door that leads out of a public building
School Road, Hove, BN3 5JR, UK. Ten correct entries Steinbeck) * A long line of coral just below the surface
will be drawn from a hat on 10 December 2012 and the *** Something that happens, especially of the sea
senders will each receive a copy of the second edition something involving several people * A small round purple fruit with a large
*** Plural object pronoun hard seed inside
of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced
*** Fewer than two * A dark-coloured beer without bubbles
Learners, applauded for its unique red star system
*** ‘A stitch ___ time saves nine’ (English * Unhappy because someone else has
showing the frequency of the 7,500 most common
proverb) something you want
words in English (www.macmillandictionary.com).
*** A fact, situation or intention that * To remove a part from something
explains why something happened * A place where wild animals are kept in
18 6 22 9 1 15 26 12 1 22 22 7 *** ___ The Lighthouse (novel by Virginia cages
6 6 17 12 10 13 3 19 11 12 24
Woolf) LESS FREQUENT WORDS
N *** A word used to say that if something – A very small hard piece of something
5 21 1 1 16 13 17 1 8 12 doesn’t happen, something else will be – A sound people make when they are
3 22 3 3 6 1 1 11 12 10 true as a result thinking about what to say next
*** ___ The Road (novel by Jack Kerouac) – A small child or a small amount of
12 22 9 22 9 18 6 3
*** On one occasion only alcohol
24 22 17 1 1 9 1 6 3 13 9 25 *** A medium-sized place where people – An object that is perfectly round
live and work – A structure used to house honey-
1 1 21 15 22 1 17 13 11
*** ___ Surrender (song by Bruce producing insects
12 3 24 1 15 15 5 24 22 3 1 Springsteen) – To make someone annoyed, confused or
*** To think that something is true worried
3 24 1 12 15 24 24
*** ___ I Ruled the World (song from the – Very strict and severe
7 5 15 15 13 22 3 22 22 19 19 musical Pickwick) – Careful about or conscious of something
*** To be strongly attracted to someone – Behaving in a silly way in serious
21 1 9 22 2 3 12 13
or something situations
5 24 1 17 13 3 15 13 3 4 *** Lacking the ability to do something – Perfect as an example of a type of
*** ___ Time Goes By (song made famous person or thing
17 1 20 1 6 5 23 22 22 18
in the film Casablanca) – The whole of time with no beginning or
13 13 24 22 3 18 5 *** Without anyone or anything else end
FREQUENT WORDS – Very enthusiastic about something which
19 1 9 5 8 16 14 1 5 24 22 12 15
** A piece of kitchen equipment used for you do regularly
baking – Extremely ugly and strange
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
N ** To disappear below the surface of the – An old word used to draw attention to
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 water something

6 1 18 6 1 9 15 5 6 1 9 16 1 3 5
To solve the puzzle, find which letter each number represents.
You can keep a record in the boxes above. The definitions of the 9 12 6 5 24 7 6 22 7 1 6 9 25 22 11

words in the puzzle are given, but not in the right order. When 18 6 1 25 16 5 13 6 15
Charles Dickens
you have finished, you will be able to read the quotation.

64 • Issue 82 September 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •