#IATEFL13 - From my beginnings… (Part 2)

As I mentioned in my earlier post, Jim Scrivener is a name always associated with my early days in TEFL as I used to clutch to his Learning Teaching book when in need of help (as I often was in those days!)

Jim’s talk given yesterday was about ‘Demand High’ teaching - that is pushing the boundaries or what we expect from our students to make language learning more challenging for them. I have checked out the blog he created on the topic together with Adrian Underhill a couple of times but this was the first time I had the chance to see a talk about it.

If you can’t see the video, click on this link to view the session.

My reflections and thoughts were typed ‘live’ as I watched the recording so they may appear to be in a ‘tweet’ style. I would welcome your thoughts on the talk and my reflections through the comments section below. :)

• The session started by looking at typical student complaints. While I have encountered the “it’s boring” and “I want more grammar” phrases many times during my career, I find the claims to want more advanced language and study at a higher level are often misplaced with students believing this will automatically make them better…
• I liked the way ‘Demand High’ was situated as ‘an idea with mileage’ rather than a methodology.
• It interested me how Jim explained the idea was born out of observing teachers ‘covering material’ in superfluous manner - much like Scott Thornbury’s comments about the origins of dogme.
• The discussion around checking answers from a simple coursebook activity was an interesting reminder that there are almost unlimited ways to approach and utilise a task in the classroom.
• Avoiding ‘rubberstamping’ - this is something I’ve been trying to work on recently. Too many times I find myself saying ‘good’ after a student has given an answer and only asking something like ‘is that right?’ or ‘any other answers?’ if it is wrong. I need to use other ways to get the students to rubberstamp answers themselves and think about why an answer is right as well as why one is wrong.
• Playing “devil’s advocate” - I sometimes deliberately give wrong answers or dispute an obvious one (although this is usually born from my sense of humour). I fin this does push the learners to explain their answers in more detail. However, it also becomes routine and expected quite quickly, a lot like ‘rubberstamping’.
• The ideas about mistakes were interesting - asking students to recall their mistakes or highlight their favourite mistake could provide a good way to get them involved in self-analysis by reflecting on their language use.
• Adding elements of role-play (different ways to say a sentence, using facial expression, etc.) is a good way to demonstrate to students how language really works and how things like word stress, intonation and body language can affect meaning.
• While I agree that allowing processing time when drilling or working on pronunciation is important, I’m not sure that repeating the sound in your head is that useful. I tried it myself during the talk and with some Turkish phrases I could hear at home and I didn’t feel I particularly gained anything from it. Maybe the EFL teacher in me automatically wants some kind of verbal confirmation!
• Fully agree with the point that we should avoid just ‘fixing’ errors in the classroom. Getting students to do the repairs themselves is a much better idea!

A few final thoughts

There are, of course, ways we can demand more from our students and get more use out of the activities we do in class, even a dry coursebook gap-fill. The session also reinforced my belief that one of the biggest problems in ELT today is teachers following the coursebook to the letter, allowing it to be the central dictating focus of the lesson rather than something to be referred to when needed.

However, one issue kept bugging me throughout this session, something that stems from the high demands that are often placed on teachers - time. Sure, it would be more productive and beneficial for our students to put them through their paces as we check answers to activities but if I were to spend a whole lesson on one small activity like that, I would probably only be up to the start of November in the yearly plan by the time the summer holidays came around! With the school, parents and other stakeholders demanding ‘more’, it would be difficult to justify having spent this much time on this much material…

Before we start to think about demanding more, we need to look at lightening the burden placed on teachers and students alike. If the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ we are expected to cover is reduced (I’m obviously referring heavily to my own context here), then we can spend more quality time exploring and building on the materials and tasks we have to work with. So, I guess what I’m saying is we need to work with less to free up the time and space to demand ‘more’.

You can follow the IATEFL conference online at: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2013/

#IATEFL13 - From my beginning… (Part 1)

Two names that are forever associated with my first steps towards becoming a language teacher, made 13 years ago, are Duncan Foord and Jim Scrivener: Duncan because I did my Trinity Cert. in TESOL under his guidance at Oxford House Barcelona; and Jim Scrivener because his Learning Teaching was one of the main titles we referred to during the course. Indeed, I remember my course mates dubbing Jim Scrivener ‘The Man’ when it came to the ins and outs of our assessed teaching practice.

And so, I thought where better to start my reflections on IATEFL 2013 Online than with those two names? First, an interview with Duncan Foord about the concept of Open Space and his work with the TDSIG (I will reflect on Jim Scrivener’s session on ‘Demand High’ in my next post):

If you can’t see the video, you can watch it here

 

Open Space is a concept that has interested me for some time but I've always been a little uncertain about how to implement it. Hearing Duncan discuss how to set it up, starting with the brainstorming of questions and then people naturally dividing themselves into groups to discuss the issues that interest them, was very useful and it is something I am going to push for at my place of work when we enter our 'seminar period' at the end of the teaching year. I think this would be a great way to approach the issue of classroom management. Over recent times, we have had a few workshops and talks (or 'workshops' given as talks) on this matter but there has always been the feeling that the speaker doesn't really know our context and the issues we face. Having an open space session in which everyone discusses strategies that have worked and that haven't worked, all situated within our own context, would be much more productive.

The discussion about the difference between teacher training and teacher development was also enlightening. I feel that too much of what goes on in many schools around Turkey is based on the training model. While that is useful, it needs to complemented by some development - that is the teacher pursuing his or her own agenda and identifying areas of their teaching they would like to work on. Perhaps open space would be a good lead in...

I also liked the analogy comparing teaching from a coursebook to playing cover songs in a band. As Duncan says, the important thing is not so much what you do and what materials you do or don't use, but rather how well you do it.

You can follow the IATEFL conference online at: http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2013/

Always Look on the Bright Side of ELT

One of my favourite posts of recent times (from one of my favourite blogs of recent times - ELT Rants, Reviews and Reflections from the incomparable Michael Griffin), is The Dude Abides, in which Mike uses quotes from The Big Lebowski to explain various aspects of working in ELT. That got me thinking about doing something similar and now, 3 months on, I’ve finally got my act together to present you with a post linking the often parallel worlds of ELT and Monty Python, all thanks to that classic of controversial cinema:

Warnings: Spoiler alerts ahead! (If there can be ‘spoilers’ for a film released in 1979)
Controversial ideas and naughty language ahead!
Ripping off of other people’s blogging ideas ahead!

[… having trouble hearing the Sermon on the Mount.]

Man: I think it was, "Blessed are the cheese makers"!

Gregory's wife: What's so special about the cheese makers?

Gregory: Well, obviously it's not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturer of dairy products.

Often we the best intentions, teachers and teacher trainers talk of not taking things so literally, not following the coursebook or syllabus so literally and expanding on themes that come up to involve our students as much as possible. Unfortunately, much like Gregory here, we often miss the point. A talk I saw at a conference a couple of years ago springs to mind. The theme of the event was personalising the language learning experience and a well-known coursebook writer was on the stage. Showing us an example of one of his pages, he said “Look! The question asks ‘Have you ever been to Moscow?’ You can’t get much more personalised than that!” For truly personalised learning, we need to go much further beyond those manufacturers of dairy products.

Brian: Look, you've got it all wrong! You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves! You're all individuals!

Crowd: [in unison] Yes! We're all individuals!

Brian: You're all different!

Crowd: [in unison] Yes, we are all different!

Man in crowd: I'm not...

Crowd: Shhh!

Often as teachers we strive to help our learners become free-thinking, creative, critical individuals. We want them to engage in self-assessment activities, plan their own learning and pursue their own interests. However, we are often encountered with students looking at self-assessment papers blankly before asking “What new words did I learn this week teacher?” Or when presented with a question like “What is your opinion about….?” they slyly try to copy from their neighbour. Or sometimes, they act completely lost when given the option of a project or assignment on the topic of their choice… We shouldn’t forget that while our learners are individuals, a lot of what goes on in a school environment, whether it is a standard coursebook, tests, rules or uniforms, nullifies that and training and guidance is needed to ensure they truly work and think independently.

Nisus Wettus: Crucifixion?

Mr Cheeky: Ah, no. Freedom.

Nisus Wettus: What?

Mr Cheeky: Eh, freedom for me. They said I hadn't done anything, so I can go free and live on an island somewhere.

Nisus Wettus: Oh, oh that´s jolly good well. Off you go then.

Mr Cheeky: No, I'm only pulling your leg, it's crucifixion really!

Nisus Wettus: [laughing] Oh, I see, very good. Well...

Mr Cheeky: Yes I know, out the door, one cross each, line on the left.

However, despite our desire for individual expression and students who break from the norm, we often end up taken aback when it comes!

The next one is more of a scene than a quote so I decided to use the (official) video clip from YouTube:

The classic case of obsessing so much with grammar that we overlook the meaning of what the student is trying to communicate - this is the equivalent of a student sadly saying “My grandmother… she die” only to be corrected “She die? Present or past time? She died…” While grammar instruction and correction is no doubt necessary, we should be careful not to impede communication or fluency on the part of the learner and not to incite fear when correcting as our centurion does above.

Reg: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

Teachers like to complain. We complain about our students, our school administration and, of course, those poor publishers of ELT materials. But we shouldn’t forget that however much we get annoyed by such things, the are always positives as well. Take the publishers - sure, an overloaded generic coursebook can be restrictive but a readily-available bank of materials can also be a life-saver when asked to cover a class at short notice. They also do a lot to make sure seminars and conferences happen thus contributing to our professional development. The same goes for admin - sure, at times they seem out-of-touch and unreasonable but they also try to make life easier for us foreigners in a foreign land (for example at my school, extra days off at Christmas, furnished accommodation, flight tickets home and letting us get away with radical things in class that other teachers are not allowed to do like moving desks about and doing loud speaking activities).

Hermit: I hadn’t said a word for eighteen years before he came along!
Followers: [in unison] A miracle! He is the messiah!

I do not work miracles. I am often faced with high expectations from stakeholders whether they be the school admin, parents or the students themselves. Students don’t learn foreign languages overnight and can’t be expected to communicate readily and fluently at a young age (an expectation I have witnessed many times when bumping into students with their families outside school). Nor am I the messiah. I am just a very silly teacher!

Another clip:

While it can be entertaining, amusing and engaging, modern technology, if used with no clear purpose or context, can be completely baffling.

Lead Singer Crucifee: Some things in life are bad.
They can really make you mad.
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle,
Don't grumble. Give a whistle.
And this'll help things turn out for the best. And...
[music]
Always look on the bright side of life.

Be positive. Teaching can be a stressful job but there are plenty of worse things you could be doing. When we do our job well and approach it with a positive outlook, we can make a significant contribution to our learners’ lives. Oh, and we get to go home at 4 o’clock with long summer holidays as well.

IATEFL 2013 Registered Blogger

As I slowly attempt to get back into the blogging swing of things, I was glad to be offered the chance to be a registered blogger for the upcoming IATEFL 2013 Conference in Liverpool.

You can also follow the action at http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2013

For someone in my position, far-removed from the ELT conference ‘hubs’ (while Turkey does have its fair share of events, the majority of them are in Istanbul - not that close to Ankara at all) and lacking an employer or sponsor willing to foot the costs of travel, accommodation and registration (and it seems charging non-keynote speakers to attend is still rife as shown by the one major ELT event to be held in Ankara this year asking for a significant fee from presenters even if it’s just for one day), attending an event like IATEFL remains a distant dream.

However, we can experience a taste of the event thanks to IATEFL and the British Council’s comprehensive online streaming of talks, interviews and other sessions. Over the past couple of years, I’ve enjoyed some great sessions this way and I’ll be looking forward to doing the same this year with the added bonus of being a registered blogger.

I’m aiming (perhaps somewhat ambitiously) to review one session and/or interview per day with the option of catching up on archived footage later on likely to be exercised as well.

So if you are not going to IATEFL, why not join me in watching and discussing online? If you are going, why not suggest a few enticing sounding sessions for me to focus on? :)

Cool goings-on

It’s been a while… yet again… Various things have kept me away from the blog over recent times, the main and most exciting of which was the birth of my second son.

As ever, there have been many things I wanted to blog about but just couldn’t find the time for. A lot of them have remained as snippets in my blogging brain so what better way to bring them together than in a belated response to Michael Griffin’s ‘Cool Things’ blog challenge.

Cool waters - Image by @asalinguist via eltpics

First, a couple of caveats: Mike’s original post and challenge focused on events from the past day but mine, following a lengthy absence from blogging, will cover the last several weeks; also, due to the birth of my son and spending some time away from work, some of the cool things are baby-related (but most have a link of some sort to language learning as well.

Anyway, here goes:

• So much for the language barrier - I passed my theory driving test (taken in Turkish) with only one wrong answer, outscoring all of my native-speaker classmates in the process.
• I then proceeded to pass the practical test first time and (perhaps the biggest achievement of all) I successfully negotiated the bureaucratic process of actually getting hold of my licence.
• Birth, the miracle of life - all very cool indeed.
• Even when my new son was just a few hours old, I noticed a flicker in his eyes as I talked to him and he seemed to recognise that I was somehow speaking differently to everyone else around.
• I listened as my older son brilliantly explained to his little sibling how to pronounce our family name using Turkish phonics, something I have made a mental note of for the next time I encounter someone saying ‘Dadson’ or ‘Dogson’ instead of ‘Dodgson’.
• Witnessing my older (seven year old) son challenge an answer in one of his text books even though the teacher and answer key both said it was right. He had his own interpretation and stuck to it.
• Having an official government inspector sit in on my class the very first lesson I was back after paternity leave wasn’t so cool but finding out that when using ‘internationally produced and published’ text books, the teachers’ book is acceptable in place of a lesson plan was (especially great for someone like me who hasn’t planned a lesson for years!)
• Class Dojo is still having a positive effect with most of, if not all of, my classes.
• One of my most difficult students has now calmed down considerably and is now trying to actively participate in lessons.
• I submitted my first ever book proposal. Hoping for a positive response to come back.
• Some PLN initiatives such as eltpics and The Round were nominated for ELTons - big thumbs up to both.
• I wrote my first blog post for several weeks - feels good to be back.
Hopefully, I can keep a regular flow of posts coming now.

The value of student-generated stories in the YL classroom

This is the first in a series of posts related to the presentation I will give for the British Council Turkey Story Sharing Conference, which takes place February 9th-10th, 2013. This has been cross-posted on the British Council Turkey’s blog on the Teaching English website and can be found here: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/britishcouncilelt/value-student-generated-stories-yl-classroom-dave-dodgson

Quote from John W. Gardner, image from Langwitches

The above quote is one that really resonates with me and my approach to working with young learners in the foreign language classroom. There is a massive variety of EFL material available for children of all ages these days but, while that represents the increased importance YLs have in the world of ELT, I can’t help but feel these materials are ‘cut flowers’ in our students’ hands.

This is especially true of stories, which are often reduced to language learning exercises, with highlighted grammar points, key word lists, and gap-fills to test ‘understanding’ of the text. The same is true of writing activities which often restrict our learners within the confines of a particular topic or starting point and demand use of specific words or structures. Stories then become ‘boring’ rather than engaging and writing is seen as a chore.

Over the years in the primary school classroom, there is one resource I have come to value over all others that really helps students move away from ‘cut flowers’ to the idea of ‘growing plants’ – children’s imaginations. By exploring our students’ imaginations, we can really bring out their creative side, engage them and involve them in the learning process.

Story writing provides one of the best ways to achieve this. My students always love creating characters, settings, and developing plots. Because of this, I always ensure there are as few restrictions as possible when they write – if they want to deviate from the original plan, make changes or add new elements, I let them. In fact, I encourage it!

But the benefits of student-generated texts don’t just lie in the production process. They also provide a great ‘home-grown’ resource and I often utilise my students’ stories for classroom activities. Why? Well, this is extra motivation for the students when they are writing, knowing that their story may become the central focus of a future lesson. It also provides a bank of texts that are relevant and pitched at the right level for my learners. Furthermore, it means students are more willing to engage in what would otherwise be ‘boring’ post-reading activities because they are working with something that as produced in class.

Of course, there are issues to address such as getting our students to write in the first place (something they are often reluctant to do!) and how to address the inevitable errors that appear within second-language learners written work, and these are points I will address in the following posts. In the meantime, I would love to hear about your experiences of story writing with students. How do you approach story writing? What do you do with your students’ texts when they have finished?

Please join me and a host of other speakers for the Story Sharing Web Conference on February 9th-10th. My presentation, entitled ‘Student-generated stories - What happens next?’ is on Saturday February 9th at 1430h Turkish time (1230h GMT) in the Shakespeare room - check the full programme for details. Hope to see you there!

Driving Mr David - The Triple Teaching Engine

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, the theory part of my driving school experience has come to an end. It was a pretty intensive few weeks (hence the lack of recent posts on the blog) with 2 hours of class after work and plenty of home study to do. The course was divided into three parts (trafik, first aid, and motor), each with a different teacher. As  a teacher myself, I couldn’t help but cast a critical eye over how they did things and that’s what I will share in this post.

Motorised learning - Image by Julien Bertrand via Wikimedia commons

Each teacher, of course, had a different approach. There was, however, one trait they shared - they all started by explaining why their particular lesson was the most important part of the course… The traffic teacher pointed out that recognising traffic signs was the driving equivalent of being literate and also that knowing and following the rules of the road would keep us safe. The first aid teacher emphasised that what she would teach us could save lives and not only in the vent of a traffic accident but in other daily life situations as well. The motor teacher took a more immediate practical stance reminding us that the section of the written test he would prepare us for was the most difficult so we should pay careful attention.

In a way, they all had a point but, sitting on the student side of the classroom, it all seemed a little over-stated. As a ‘conversation and skills’ teacher, I have on occasion lectured my students on how important my lessons are, how they offer a chance to really use the language and express themselves… Having had a student’s reaction to that kind of teacher talk, I now think I will refrain in the future!

Onto individual analysis: I have already shared some thoughts on the first teacher, who went over the rules of the road, traffic signs and road safety. In short, he did a good job of presenting the topics and reviewing them but there was a severe lack of interaction of any kind, not even any introductions on the first day.

The first aid teacher somehow managed to be even less interactive. Despite her claims about how important her lesson was, she whipped through the topics very quickly and each day, we finished the lessons (scheduled for two hours) anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes early (and that was with late starts and over-long tea breaks as well). All of this led to students not really taking the lesson seriously and it was no surprise that this was the most sparsely attended part of the course with only 4 or 5 students out of 12 present most days. The only practical part of the course came when we were asked one by one to perform CPR on a dummy. “You’re pushing on the chest too hard” was the only feedback given, ignoring the fact that the dummy was on a soft stretcher positioned at waist height rather than on a hard ground surface as would be the case should this skill ever be needed. No practical examples meant a lot of the explanations about stopping bleeding and treating broken bones went over my head and the heads of the other students as well.

After that experience, I expected the motor lessons to be even worse - most likely, out-of-date examples of engines from older cars and lots of technical questions that serve little practical use I though. I was right too!However, there was a crucial difference that made this part of the course better than the others - the teacher.

First of all, he asked us about ourselves at the start of the first lesson - our names, occupations, where we were from and why we wanted to learn to drive. After two weeks, my course mates were surprised to learn that I was not Turkish but foreign (shocking that we hadn’t learned basic things about each other but also reassuring that when I had spoken up in class in previous weeks my use of my second language hadn’t obviously marked me out as a yabancı). I also found out that one of the younger people in the class was training to be an English teacher, which opened up a whole avenue of tea break chats that hadn’t been there before (of course, we could have found this out ourselves but, with little to no interaction in the previous weeks, most people had spent the breaks looking at their phones).

Learning about how a car engine works was also quite complicated and a lot of the students, myself included, were apprehensive about it. The teacher did his best to put our minds at ease by giving us plenty of hints and strategies for the test, pointing out that the multi-choice answer was often obvious as long as you know the basic parts of an engine. He also used some very good daily life metaphors such as comparing the fuel ignition to a stove or the fuel filter to a coffee filter, which facilitated easier understanding.

This teacher was also the only one to give us work to do in class. This provided a nice way to break up the lesson and also to give immediate feedback about what we had understood both to ourselves and the teacher.

One more thing I liked was his willingness to seek feedback. During tea breaks, he would ask me, as an educator, what I thought of his teaching style. He also had a survey ready on the final day about the course and himself as a teacher. I told him that whatever I felt I would do differently was not that important but the fact that he was interested in asking students’ opinions and improving himself was. His colleagues could do with following his lead…

How I Did Test

There have been a few changes at my workplace this year and one of them is that I am now in charge of the ‘conversation and skills’ programme in the 5th grade, meaning I oversee things like the class blogs, project assignments and testing.

This is something quite new for me as I had never written a ‘proper’ test in my twelve years as a language teacher (I say ‘proper’ as I have made short tests for things like vocabulary and spelling before and I have also had my students make their own mini tests but this is the first time I have been asked to prepare a test that all students in the year group will take). As long-term readers of my blog may remember, I had some issues with the assessment that was done last year, particularly the listening tests which were not relevant to the course and ended up demotivating some students. Having also recently read and enjoyed James Taylor’s (aka @theteacherjames) post How I Would Test, I though I should use the opportunity to do something different.

If life is an open book, why not assessment as well? Image by muffin9101985

Now, I did not do anything radically different like having the students do the test in groups or rip pages/questions out of the test paper as any such sudden shift would be too extreme (and I also had to take the fact that other teachers would administer this test with their classes and might not be willing to go along with a turn-it-upside-down approach). I did, however, use the chance to make a few changes in the preparation and administration of the test to make it a less stressful and more productive experience for my learners.

First of all, as it had been suggested by those higher up that we do a reading test, I decided to base it on two texts we had read in class this semester and then insisted it be in open book format. Granted, that might not seem very radical but for the school I work in it is! Students, especially in the middle school, are regularly tested on passages from their coursebooks and also entire readers without being allowed to refer to the book during the exam. The have to memorise the content/plot, information about the protagonists/characters and all the vocabulary as well. I have always thought this is asking too much.

The were some voices against the idea. “It will be too easy for them,” was one. “They will just copy answers from the book,” was another. Also heard were “they won’t bother to study”, “that defeats the point of having a test” and “they might fill their books with cheat notes”.

As ever, I had a few answers for those. First of all, when did tests become something that should be difficult? Surely, they should be aimed at the right level depending on the age and language ability of the students.

As for copying answers, making cheat notes and not bothering to study, I emphasised that this test would not be one that asked the students to produce facts and direct quotes from the book. Instead, it would be one that required them to make inferences, offer opinions and generally process the information from the text. In that case, an open book format is the only fair option.

And if we want to talk about the ‘point’ of testing, I guess it depends what the ‘point’ is. One of my duties in class this year has been to improve the students’ abilities to think critically and creatively and to explore deeper issues in texts rather than just scraping basic information off the surface. An open book test with appropriate questions offered the best way to assess their development in those areas.

I also included a section on vocabulary that had come up in the texts (the book presents between 4 and 6 ‘key words’ with each text). Here, I brought the students in and asked them to write their own vocab questions for the test. They worked in groups to do this, producing various questions such as gap-fills, multi-choice and definitions. We then edited and revised them, rejecting ones that were too easy or too hard and then making a decision together on which ones might be included. I didn’t use all of them, instead saying I would choose 10 questions from the list of about 20 we had drawn up so they still wouldn’t know exactly what was coming (in the interests of fairness, I supplied the same list to my colleagues so they could use them for revision in their own classes).

I firmly believe that getting students to write questions is a powerful way to get them engaged and learning. They went through the vocabulary in fine detail in order to write the questions and got a lot out of the editing and revision process too. And shouldn’t tests and test prep be part of the learning process, something that helps the students consolidate and expand what they know? Activities such as this really help them do that.

And so, the test day came and the students were ready with their books (well, most of them - there were a few in each class who, either because of conditioning or the fact that they really don’t listen, had left their books in their lockers or, even worse, at home). But I wasn’t finished there. I told each of my classes as I gave them the test that each student had the right to ask three questions. They could ask for the answer to one difficult question they were stuck on, the meaning of one ‘key word’ they were unsure about and they could ask me whether or not one answer they were unsure about was right.

Why did I do this? First of all, to reduce stress. It’s happened to all of us at some point I’m sure that we get hung up on one difficult question or word in a test and then hit a brick wall. By offering the students the chance to ask me for help, they could jump over that brick wall and get on with the rest of the test. It also encouraged them to look at the questions carefully and critically assess their suitability and difficulty. There was no point asking me for the answer to an opinion quest,on, for example, and, as they could only ask each question once, they had to choose carefully making sure there wasn’t another more difficult question or word they might need to ask about. As it turned out, many of the students didn’t ask me anything at all, saying they didn’t feel the need to!

By doing everything this way, I feel that the students were more involved in the test and less stressed about it. We were also able to stay true to our yearly objectives of going beyond mere comprehension and improving the students’ critical thinking skills, while at the same time satisfying the expectation/demand of a sit-down pencil-and-paper test. Changing those expectations is something to slowly tackle in the future.

Driving Mr David - First Lessons

We sat in the classroom waiting. Apart from a few muttered ‘good evenings’ as people came in, nobody was talking much. We were all there for the same purpose, learning to drive, but we were all very different - young university students, older retired ladies, bikers looking to get the ‘B’ licence for automobiles… and me, a 34 year-old foreigner with no idea what to expect.

The room itself was fairly small with about 15 chairs, a small whiteboard and a somewhat obtrusive overhead projector in the middle of the floor. There was writing on the board detailing the programme over the next three weeks of the course (one week of trafik, one week of first aid, and one week of mötor) and the written exam date with a message reading ‘write this down’ next to it all. Some of us started to write as soon as we sat down, others chose not to.

Looks good but it’s still old school & traditional - Image by @sandymillin via eltpics

At 6 o’clock on the dot, the teacher came in. He was an older man of about 50 and his entrance to the room had an air of authority about it. He then introduced himself, revealing that he was a former school teacher who had retrained as a driving instructor after retiring. The TEFL part of me then anticipated him asking us to introduce ourselves in some way so I started to formulate what I would say in my head, not wanting my second language to come stumbling over my tongue.

Ah, but of course, this was not a TEFL classroom, was it? Following his introduction, our teacher launched into his first topic, ‘What is traffic?’ Before long, we were onto the next topic, definitions of various kinds of vehicles and transport. As I listened, I couldn’t help but look around the room and wonder who the other people were, the people I would share a classroom space with every evening for the next three weeks. Over the years, I have become accustomed to the language learning environment, which is (or at least should be) a communicative social space. I guess driving, by contrast, is a much more anti-social activity (any observation of the way different drivers interact with each other is more than enough to confirm that!)

Also, by this point, the exam had already been mentioned several times with references to ‘this topic regularly comes up on the test’ and ‘you might be asked a question like this’. Much as my experiences in getting all the paperwork together taught me, this whole ‘learning experience’ is to a great extent about going through the motions and getting things done just to show that they have been done.

Having said all that, it wasn’t all bad. I was surprised at the ease with which I was able to follow the lesson with only a few words coming up that I didn’t previously know and was unable to work out from context (applying some of those strategies I try to train my students in definitely helped). The teacher in me couldn’t help but make some observations about my own teacher though and I shall wrap up this post with those:

Things I would do differently

• Introductions - ok, this is not a language course and getting to know each other does not help with passing the exam in anyway but I still feel that it would have helped establish a more relaxed atmosphere in the class.
• More interaction - most of the lessons so far have been lecture format but there have been a few questions thrown our way. Nobody seems particularly keen to answer, however. Again, this comes back to the above point. Had we talked a little at the start of the first class, we may have felt more at ease in answering and asking questions later on. Likewise, had we been asked more frequently, we might have been more responsive rather than being caught off guard.
• Coloured board markers - that may sound like nit-picking but I think red and green are pretty important colours to use in a traffic lesson and blue could be useful for some signs too. As it was, everything was in black with the teacher commenting on what colour it should be.
• Better equipment - ok, so this one has little to do with the teacher and more to do with the school but the use of an OHP was problematic as the projected image was too large for the board and, in our small room, much of the information was obscured anyway by the projector itself. A computer and a ceiling or table mounted projector would be much less obtrusive.

Things I would keep the same

• Reviewing and previewing - the teacher has started each lesson so far by summarising the previous day’s topics and explaining the objectives for the current class. I have found this incredibly useful, especially in my situation as a non-native speaker of Turkish.
• Explanations - again, this has been very helpful for me but the teacher explains a lot of the vocabulary that comes up. He does this because we need to know the exact definitions of, for example, various types of transport and different kinds of road in case such a question comes up in the exam. For the other students, it may seem like he is stating the obvious but this has been invaluable to me.
• Concept checking - the majority of questions he asks (though rarely so) are designed to ensure we have understood correctly. Again, this on the spot review has helped me even if I haven’t provided a response myself.

Next time - a few reflections on what I have noticed about myself so far both as a learner and a teacher.

Passed Masters - Journey's End...

More detailed reflections on the whole postgrad experience to come soon....