Feeding time

I have just spent an hour making top hats. If you're British, you know exactly what I mean. Basically they are marshmallows dipped in chocolate and topped with a Smartie, and they're every child's favourite birthday party treat. If you're still confused, here's a picture of them:

But I don't have a kid and I'm not going to a birthday party. I have 13 teenagers who I see twice a week, and who I love to feed with all manner of sweet things.

So why do I spend my Sunday afternoons thinking up what to surprise them with? Well firstly, it's just that - it's a surprise. The wonderfully cute thing about my teens is that, no matter how often I bake for them, they are still really surprised every time. The best present is an unexpected one, and I get an unbelievable high from seeing their amazed faces. I guess Russian state school teachers don't bake too often...

Of course food can be a reward, for example, I think I first started baking for my kids when they got high results in a test. But I also like to use food as part of a game. For instance, I already wrote a post about using a chocolate advent calendar to give my kids CAE Use of English tasks. A mouthful of chocolate prevents students from asking their neighbour for help and forces them to deal with their task on their own.

Sweets are also a great way to divide up the class. One of my first days as a teacher I observed a colleague doing the following with a group. She wrote 6 topics from the coursebook on the board, and beside each a colour. Then she offered each student a coloured Skittle, and depending on the colour of sweet they had chosen, they had to speak on that topic for 30 seconds. Of course there are many other ways to decide which topic each student will receive, but using sweets just makes a nice alternative, and we are, after all, all about varying our activities. I prefer to have students work in pairs rather than speaking in front of the whole class. Sometimes I allow them to choose 2 or 3 sweets right from the start, and then they can choose in which order they want to address the topics. This is a good idea if I want to give them marks for their speaking, because they can speak first on the topic that they consider to be the easiest, and by the time they reach the 'harder' topic, they have satisfactorily rehearsed the structure and functional phrases necessary for their presentation, and are better able to deal with the themes that they feel less confident about.

Finally, I really believe food goes a long way towards helping with affectual issues. Working in a private school where student retention is important, I am always concerned about creating an atmosphere not only conducive to better learning, but also of enjoyment and friendship. I am sure that even the shyest student relaxes for a moment when he takes a big bite of chocolate cake and is therefore just that bit more open to his next speaking task. I like to hope that as he is savouring my sponge, he is forgetting just for a moment to panic about the upcoming listening task. And for the time that the group is partaking of my culinary experiments, there are no conflicts, no less-liked students. Everyone is equal and united in the same activity - eating.

PS. One word of warning: sugar highs lead to very deep slumps. Don't give too much food at the beginning of class or you can kiss productive activity goodbye. You will have a frenzy of chat for 15 minnutes and then the rest of class you will have to just stand by and watch as they slide slowly off their chairs into a sugary coma. Believe me. We've been there.

Can Christmas Activities be Useful?

It's the first of December. Where did the year go? The snow has hardly started to fall in Moscow, I'm still recovering from 'opening' the new academic year, and yet we already have to start thinking about parties and decorations and presents and... Christmas lesson plans.

Why celebrate Christmas in the classroom?

Well, the main reason in my school is that the kids will expect it. If I don't do something Christmassy, I risk being classified as the Boring One, the Humbug (yes, I'm sure some of my teens know what that means!).

Like Halloween, the value of which I had to explain to some parents in an official letter, Christmas in the classroom is not an opportunity for the teacher to evangelise - although I wish I could - but an essential part of life in an English-speaking country. Even if you do not celebrate it, you could not avoid it if you found yourself in London over the festive period. And there, I've just proved another point, that the vocabulary surrounding Christmas is so widely used that our students have to be aware of them or miss out on a lot of natural conversation coming up to December 25th.

So we can just watch a Christmas video, can't we?

I'm not against video in the classroom if it is restricted to short sections and accompanied by a task, but I personally struggle to find interesting videos, so I am going to take a different tack.

Inspired by the Supermarket.

I found the greatest Advent calendar in Tesco's last week. So great that even my mum approved of the 9 pounds I spent on it. But it's a very sturdy thing, and if I get 9 years out of it in the classroom, then it will have been more than good value.



It's a tree made of 24 boxes, each of which has a drawer filled with chocolates. Little do my darling teens know it, but the chocolates are soon to be accompanied by task sheets. The idea is that they will choose a number, but before they can eat the chocolate, they will have to complete whatever task I have added. As they're a CAE prep group, I'm thinking: creating word families (Use of English Part 3), comparing photos (Speaking Part 2), writing a five-line essay (focus on topic sentences and essay structure for Writing), sets of Trios (Use of English Part 5) etc.

Disadvantges: not personalised. For some the task may be very easy, for others, a nightmare. Also, do I bring out the tree only on Christmas Eve and have them all do their tasks at the same time (obviously more time-effective this way) or does a different student take their chances each day as we go through December (logical from the point of view of an Advent calendar, but somewhat unfair to make some wait)?

Advantges: I can increase exam task practice is a fun way that will not create resistance. The activity is guaranteed to interest the class and I am sure they will never forget the word Advent calendar again! Bringing something other than the textbook is always exciting, but the tasks are academic enough to satisfy the students who 'just want to practice the exam!)

Other Christmas-inspired activities

There are any number of worksheets, handouts, wordsearches etc out there devoted to Christmas, but doesn't it become a bit repetitive to offer a crossword of target vocabulary every time we have a national holiday with somewhat unusual words? Here are some other activities I'd like to try:

Christmas food. I have high retention because I feed my kids. Seriously. This year they requested Cadbury's Dairy Milk, and I am also planning to introduce them to Christmas Pudding. We can investigate the history of Christmas pudding and other festive dishes (they all love cooking as well as eating) and write a report on them or a review of the Pudding (Writing Paper). They can choose which dish best symbolises Christmas for the cover of a cookery book (Speaking Part 3).They can practice their advanced adjectives that we have recently been working on to describe their feelings when they smell the cooked pudding, recall their favourite festive food or talk about their associations with the New Year holidays.

Two of my students have confessed to making their own Jamie Oliver-style videos. I think this would make a great research project, perhaps over the holidays, and the listening practice and vocabulary gained when they watch each other's clips will be a nice addition to the regular course vocabulary.

Christmas Tree competition: The language involved in planning and executing a project to construct their own Christmas tree will cover a range of functions: suggesting, agreeing and disagreeing (politely!), giving clear instructions etc, not to mention the lexis of building materials (transparent plastic, rotating light bulb) and actions (sawing, trimming, cut a jagged line). And above all the opportunity for spontaneous language practice is huge. As they started planning last week I was thrilled to see how engaged my class was, how they spoke to everyone, not just their usual partner, and how much they interrupted each other to build on each other's ideas, whereas in a usual class they typically wait politely for one student to finish their long-winded idea before adding their own. They were truly listening to each other and collaborating, not simply adding another suggestion to a list.

More Christmas activities to follow.... :-)

Post-it feedback

A common complaint among our students is that they don't receive enough feedback from their teacher on their progress. If I ask the teacher, however, they invariably say that they do give regular feedback, so perhaps the problem is not whether it is given or not, but whether the students recognise it as such.

So how can we make feedback more obvious, and therefore beneficial, to our students?

We don't really go in for report cards like a regular school would. For many teachers our feedback is limited to verbal comments and short notes at the end of essays. In the first case, we may fail to be specific: You did that role-play really well! while in the second case we may be too specific, making comments related only to the fulfilment of that particular task.

One colleague mentioned that in the high school where he worked before joining us some teachers used post-it notes to give children specific feedback on the current lesson. It was a no-fuss method: the teacher silently made notes throughout the lesson and then stuck the notes to the desks as he passed through the class. Apparently it was so popular that childern were clamouring for their page every day, and were genuinely interested in reading the teacher's remarks.

I decided to try this with my teenagers.

What worked:
Individualised comments, specific to each student and to the current lesson.
The students were amused when they read my notes.
Negative comments were not made in front of the whole class.

What didn't work:
In our small class, the students could see very well what I was doing, and as it was the first time, they were interested and distracted by what I was doing. They wanted to see the pages immediately.
I found it hard to put notes on a specific page, rather than all on one page, because I had to search for the appropriate student's name.
I kept forgetting to write my thoughts down, so I didn't have comments for everyone.
I now do not have a list of comments on the lesson, because I've given them away!
I wonder where those notes went to? To the bin?

Follow-up:
I need to think this process through to the end. How are these notes helpful if the student simply reads it at the end of class and then throws it away? How can I systematise this process? How can I be sure that the advice will be followed?

Hot or Cold Correction?

Carol Numrich made an excellent presentation last week on giving oral feedback, which really challenged the way I look at hot and cold correction.

Typically we choose not to give hot correction during speaking activities because we believe it interrupts the students' flow of thought and may embarass them in front of their classmates. Also, as Carol points out, 75% of communication in English is done by non-native speakers, and students should be able to deal with mistakes in what they hear.

Anyone preparing students for exams will know that the criteria for marking speaking usually allows any errors which do not impede communication. Actually, only certain errors have been proven to impede communcation. Those are, for example, the distinction between /p/ and /b/ at the beginning of words, and the difference between long and short vowels (a mistake I hear in almost all of our students in Russia). Interestingly, most consonant sounds cause problems if they are not pronounced properly, but not /th/, something we try to drill into our students in countries where this sound does not exist.

Those errors all deal with pronunciation. Well, what about grammatical errors? According to Numrich, Seidlhofer (2004) states that errors which do not impede are forgetting the 3rd person -s, confusing who and which, and misusing articles. There are others, but I have named these as they are errors which I feel usually have my colleagues and I tearing our hair out over. 'He's advanced, how can he still say "he do"!!' As if we didn't know that this particular mistake is one of the very last to be corrected in any learner, native or otherwise.

It is also difficult to know whether these mistakes are actually just slips, and correcting them might just frustrate our learners.

So perhaps we don't need to correct all these errors then at all?

Well, certainly many Russian students would have a very low opinion of their teacher if he or she just passed over all these errors. So which method should we use?

According to Carol's study, most teachers prefer to recast the student's mistake. It's fast and it's teacher-controlled, so the teacher can mentally pat himself on the back. 'I corrected this mistake!'

(For more info on types of error correction, Olenka Bilash's site has a very detailed summary. http://www2.education.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.Bilash/best%20of%20bilash/error%20correction.html )

But apparently our students don't hear this as correction! When we recast the student's sentence, he understands it as clarification of meaning, not grammar. (The brain works in strange and wonderous ways.) So the student thinks the teacher didn't understand where he went, not the fact that he got his past simple wrong.

Two of the many problems that Carol mentioned connected to recasting are i) the teacher may not take into consideration the stage in the student's own development, ie. is he ready to perfect the 3rd person -s or is he still learning what a verb is at all? and ii) just because a mistake has been corrected, does it mean the student has actually learnt not to make this error?

If the teacher chooses to recast, we are recommended to keep it short and focussed on only one error at a time. We are advised not to raise our voice as we question their sentence, or the learner will think we are seeking clarification of meaning, rather than language. Instead, if we use a firm, flat intonation pattern, the unusualness of the teacher's voice will draw the student's attention to the fact that a mistake has been made.

But there are other options available to us. We could ask the student to clarify what he has just said. We could use metalanguage, if the student is able to understand the terminology: 'Is that 2nd Conditional?' We could elicit the correct version from the leaner or from the rest of the class. But most importantly, the correction should be explicit and immediate.

Bang goes cold correction. Haven't I just spent ten years teaching myself to collect mistakes for the end of the lesson instead of jumping in every time I hear a mistake?

Perhaps this week I'll try to get out of my groove and give hot correction every time. I wonder will my students notice? I wonder will they be offended? And I wonder will their accuracy be a lot better because of it? Let's see...

(Many thanks to Carol Numrich and Pearson Longman - this is not intended to be plagiarism, just my musings on the topic.)

Understanding emotions (CAE Listening)

Part four of CAE Listening involves matching two lists of words or phrases to five short extracts that students hear twice. I've noticed that the second list more often than not is a list of emotions, but since lists of emotions and feelings reach the hundreds (if you google them), how can ensure that my students can cope with this task?

I've noticed that certain emotion feature more often than others. 'Resignation', for example, seems to pop up regularly, and this is not something I can assume my students know, so I decided that their attention needs to be drawn to some words explicitly. I am not against telling exam classes: Learn this word because I've seen it ten times on an exam paper! Not a meaningful way of dealing with the word, but at least it's effective.

Just asking students to learn a list of emotions may help them to expand their productive vocabulary, but it may not help them complete the task any better. Why not, if they understand all the words?

The greatest problem with defining emotions is that many are very similar, and the strength of an emotion may vary from person to person. To understand intensity, we brainstormed synonyms for common, general emotions, eg. sad, happy, hurt, confused, and then tried to agree on a ranking from most extreme to least.

But how can I be sure that my students understand the fine distinctions between words, eg. the difference between despair and helplessness?

If I had more time and better resources, I would use a corpus to show a variety of situations in which an emotion is used. As I don't, I decided to ask the students to try to get inside the feeling themself

The task:

• We studied the exam task: Decide in which sport the speaker had an accident, and how he felt at the time.
• We predicted: If I had an accident parachuting, I wouldn't feel hope, I would feel terror... etc.
• We carried out the task and checked it.
• We wrote emotions on slips of paper, put them in a hat and drew one out in secret.
• Students created a personal story of about 30 seconds to describe this emotion without using the word or its synonyms.
• The class guessed which emotion was illustrated.

On the surface, this looks like just a repetition of the exam task, but the key here was that students had to fully understand the nuances of 'their' emotion in order for the others to guess correctly. If they misunderstood their word, they chose expressions which were not quite accurate enough, and the class failed to come to the right conclusion. From the teacher's point of view, it was very clear which students didn't quite understand the word and which words caused more problems than others.

We will spend more time on the contexts for these emotions, and then repeat this task at a later date. Hopefully their stories will be more exact.

Successes: I was impressed by my youngest student illustrating petrified by: 'I couldn't move, I was turned to stone!' None of the class were aware that the origin of this word lies in the Greek for stone!

'Overwhelmed' seems to be used at lot in my class, but never quite right, until today, when I muttered at a student who was going on and on about Czech beer, 'Alcoholic!', at which her jaw dropped in amazement and her eyes almost popped out, and the rest of the class pointed at her and shouted: 'Overwhelmed!!!'

Consequences on the Computer - Part 1

I guess most of us have played consequences at some point in our lessons. If you don't recognise the name, it's that activity where a student writes the first line of a story, prompted or otherwise, folds over the paper and passes it on for the next student to continue.

Consequences is good for motivating students to write, helping uncreative students develop an imagination, handwriting practice, reading practice...

To be honest, this isn't the kind of activity I was thinking of giving my Advanced teenagers today, but suddenly I wondered whether I could give it a modern twist on our class blog.

The advantage of using the blog is that it will encourage my class to check it more often, to see the next line of the story. They could even all be online at once, vying to post the next sentence before their classmates.

The disadvantage of course is that they can see the story as it develops, so there is no element of surprise at the end.

I could get around this by asking them to do it in class time, where each student will have, say, only 90 seconds to write the next line, forcing them to skim the text or just pay attention to the last line. The previously written part could actually be hidden from view until the end.

What I'd like to do most is take all the students to the computer room, give them a computer each, and have the students change computer after every line, instead of swapping papers. Fast typing in another alphabet is a useful skill for my group. If I were more familiar with twitter, that would be a third option for Consequences on the Computer.

If we do one of these activities, I'll post our results...

Report cards for teens

It's the end of the academic year in our school. Last year I used continuous assessment with my teens, so at the end of the term I hand-made little cards and wrote some personal comments inside for each teenager. The categories followed the FCE papers, since that is what the kids were studying for: Reading, Writing, Use of English, Listening and Speaking. I simply wrote my subjective comments about each student under each heading.

The goal of this was more to encourage than to provide serious feedback. I wanted my weaker students to feel that their progress had been noted and that grammar was not the be-all and end-all of language learning. I wanted to give the stronger students some tips on how to continue excelling outside the classroom.

I must admit, the idea seemed better in the teachers' room than in front of the students. I felt rather silly handing out hand-made cards....

Only this year have I noticed the effect these cards had (exam students, please note the use of inversion!). I handed out certificates a little early as some students were leaving the course before the actual end of year, and heard to my surprise, "What about those cards we had last year?"

Happy Teacher went away from class feeling that not everything she does is useless and unnoticed.

Stressed Teacher now has to go make those report cards..... :-)