language teaching methodology – LanguagEd

Top 5 Teaching Ideas from the LanguagEd Day

Chiara Bruzzano — Wed, 07 Dec 2022 15:29:47 +0000

6 international speakers

8 interactive talks

100+ activities shared

200 teacher participants

… in two words: LanguagEd Day!

It was a lot of work but now that I have had some time to recover from it all, I can look back on it and say it was really all worth it.

The day was filled with loads of learning, some nice coffee breaks, e-meeting lovely people and furiously scribbling down ideas that I know are going to make my teaching better.

Did you miss it? If you did and you want to catch up over the holidays, it’s no problem: we have put all the video recordings and slides together so you can enjoy them as a mini-course in lesson planning!

You can sign up whenever you like and enjoy 100+ teaching ideas. The course includes 8 videos from the LanguagEd Day, 8 sets of slides and, as bonus content, 2 videos of the Q&A events we ran in October.

But what were my 5 favourite ideas? It was hard to pick since more than 100 were shared during the day, but I’m going to try.

Here they are in video form…

… and for those of you who like reading (can relate!), here they are in written form:

Using the coursebook to promote creativity
Gap-fills for bottom-up listening
Using emergent language for focus on form (“you said/you could say”)
Task repetition and visualisation
Performance vs. learning

If you’re keen to learn more, read on for the details and the very slides that were used during the day.

1. Using the coursebook to promote creativity, Sandy Millin

ELT writer and former International House Director of Study Sandy Millin shared and gathered from the audience a huge number of ideas to exploit the coursebook quickly and easily.

She took one single page from a very widely used coursebook, English File Intermediate. The page had a dialogue on it and she used it to show how many different ways you can use it.

She shared how we can use the coursebook for memorisation, pronunciation, adding challenge, changing interaction and promoting creativity:

The words “coursebook” and “creativity” don’t normally go hand in hand, right? But Sandy shared activities that do promote creativity, like taking the wrong answer in an exercise and creating a context where it would be right, or replacing key words in a dialogue with “banana” (or any other silly word) to see if your partner can give other ideas or remember the original words.

Sandy was a proper volcano of ideas – she shared so many not only in her presentation but also during her Q&A… can you believe she came up with a board game off the top of her head? Watch her video recording to learn more.

2. Gap-fills for bottom-up listening, Chiara Bruzzano

I know this is a little like tooting my own horn, but many of you know by now that listening comprehension is the love of my academic/teaching life. I’m close to a decade of research on it and I love sharing what I’ve learned in my journey.

I talked about what students from Italian schools say about listening in English (i.e. the topic of my research) and how listening activities may not help students learn how to listen.

Then, I shared how we can make listening activities better. One way is to have some alternative kinds of gap-fills. You know how in gap-fills, students normally have to identify content words, like key verbs, nouns or adjectives? Well, to mix it up and help them develop their bottom-up listening (i.e. ability to recognise sounds, syllables and words), why not focus on grammar words instead (e.g. “I’m”, “you’re”, “and”)? These words are super frequent in language but often pronounced in a reduced form, which makes them hard to understand. Another idea is to give students choices of similar sounding words (e.g. “ways, waze, lazy”), which again forces them to listen very carefully for the sounds.

If you’re wondering what else I talked about, it was mostly listening games to motivate students and then I gave a tutorial in which I showed how to use three free but powerful websites: YouGlish, TubeQuizard and LyricsTraining.

Based on the feedback, I think the tutorial was the bit that people liked the most (so, again, thanks guys for your words of appreciation!)

3. Using emergent language for focus on form, Rachel Tsateri

What can I say about Rachel’s talk? It was insightful, organised, creative. She went through a whole lesson plan and explained why she did what she did (which is exactly what concorso applicants have been doing). If you’re looking for a practical example of how to write a lesson plan and justify each step in relation to frameworks, theories and students’ needs, this is definitely a must watch!

My favourite activity? The use of emergent language (i.e. the language produced spontaneously by students) to “fill in the gap” between their language and the target language:

As the students speak, Rachel makes notes of what they said, puts examples of these on the board and then offers alternatives that are closer to the target language. In this example, she was teaching modals for speculation (e.g. ‘she must be your mom – she looks just like you!’): she took what the students said, like “he’s your husband” and offered a better alternative that incorporated the modals she was teaching, i.e. “he must be your husband”. This activity promotes grammatical accuracy because it helps students notice the gap between their production and the target language production – the idea of “focus on form” in TBLT.

Rachel shared her whole eclectic method for teaching grammar. If you’re looking for a flexible method you can use to teach grammar or plan a lesson with a grammar element, Rachel’s is the talk to watch.

4. Task repetition and visualisation, Sarah Priestley

An idea that was discussed from various perspectives during the LanguagEd Day was that of task repetition. Task repetition means repeating a task at different times or in different ways: for example you may first do an activity in pairs, then individually. Task repetition has long been known to help second language acquisition – see what Scott Thornbury has to say about this, for instance.

Sarah discussed this in the context of helping lower level students and managing mixed ability classes in speaking activities. Mixed ability classes are not only, like Sarah said, pretty much all classes; they are also the reality of most school-based learning, particularly in Italy.

One activity that I loved from Sarah’s talk was the Venn Diagram:

Here, two students don’t just do a speaking activity in which they say what they are/aren’t going to do at the weekend: they build a Venn Diagram to show which activities they have in common with their partner. They then repeat the same task with another partner. This helps them visualise their learning, use a tool that they know from maths, make their learning more tangible and consolidate the vocab/grammar by doing the task twice.

5. Performance vs. learning, André Hedlund

Our cognitive scientist in charge André Hedlund closed the day with his talk on aims, assessment and outcomes, a topic that I know is close to the heart of many who are doing or have done the concorso.

André shared what I think is a very important truth:

So how do we assess what sticks with us? André suggested doing it through “visible thinking routines”, i.e. activities that make thinking visible, so we can access what our students are really learning. You will find loads of examples of visible thinking routines on the Project Zero website at Harvard University.

So, what is your favourite activity? Let us know in the comments!

If you would like access to the 100+ teaching ideas that were shared during the LanguagEd Day, access them via our website:

Grammar teaching, grammar translation: Q&A video

Chiara Bruzzano — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 14:15:45 +0000

In this video, I answer two interesting questions we got from one of our course participants:

Is the grammar translation teaching method still used in secondary school?

How is it best combined with other methods?

Martina

Here is the video, followed by the transcript:

Hi and welcome to this Q&A session. Today, we’re going to answer a question from one of our course participants about grammar translation. So Martina asks:

Is the grammar translation teaching method still used in secondary school?How is it best combined with other methods?

Two important and interesting questions. Now, in terms of whether Grammar Translation is still used, there’s one important caveat, which is: what do we understand by grammat translation? If we are talking about strict adherence to the method used centuries ago, then I think the answer would probably be no. There are lots of factors at play in today’s secondary schools including, among other things, technology, availability of authentic materials, the introduction of CLIL, interdisciplinary projects, and the fact that students themselves speak different first languages, so they wouldn’t always be translating into their L1. So all this leads me to think that strict adherence to GMT is pretty unlikely.

However, if we consider GMT a little more loosely as using deductive rather than inductive teaching, then yes, the likelihood that it’s still in use is higher. It’s also the case that there isn’t a lot of empirical classroom research on this in the Italian context, which makes it difficult to assess the extent to which it may be the case. I’m personally not one for making assumptions and piling on school teachers for being «old-fashioned», especially without evidence to back these claims. Even if we know that GMT is deeply rooted in our educational system because of the importance of teaching Ancient Latin and Greek, which were the original languages associated with GMT, I think lots of teachers have innovated and moved towards inductive teaching, and some coursebooks have nudged teachers in this direction too.

Now, in terms of how to combine it with other methods, I think it’s important to specify again that these methods and their boundaries aren’t written in stone, so teachers shouldn’t be looking at them as individual, self-contained units. In terms of grammar teaching broadly speaking, what we do know is that a lot of grammar acquisition happens without the learner realising, a little like when we learn a grammar pattern by noticing it in songs. According to research, explicit grammar instruction, in which we explain a grammar rule to our learners, may be useful but only in small doses. It should be part of an approach in which learners are exposed to a lot of input, produce output, have opportunities to notice and try out the language, and when a gap arises between what they know and what the language is like, then some moments of explicit instruction may be appropriate. One such approach is called Focus on Form, and we discuss it in our course Language Teaching Methodology.

So, rather than adhering to a specific method, which may be too limited, I think the best thing for teachers is to do activities that follow these principles. Doing tasks, from the TBLT approach, is one way of doing this. Another important point is that, as we explain in our course Language Teaching Methodology, teachers nowadays hardly ever follow specific «methods», unless this is somehow mandated. We tend to talk more about eclectic teachers, who pick and choose techniques and activities that are appropriate for their classes.

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