Readers' digest1

January, 2006

Engaging Students as Learners

In this article Jeremy Harmer speculates how to sustain students' motivation over a certain time, within the whole lesson or throughout a series of lessons. He outlines four crucial factors:

• students need to enjoy the lessons

• they need to feel involved

• they need to be able to discern both the short- and the long-term outcomes of what they are doing

• students need to be given some kind of agency.

Agency means 'responsibility for self' (Taylor) or, as Harmer explains, it's when the teacher hands over some of the task of learning to students.
Some examples of handing over agency are the following:

• allow your students to suggest what kind of homework they think would be useful

• ask students if they choose to be corrected or not during fluency activities

• let students choose what books they wish to read.

Thus students are taking responsibility for their own actions and becoming more autonomous as language learners.

We can involve students by means of letting them take over the language. For example, after they unjumble the dialogue and put the lines in order we can ask them to create their own dialogue or when studying for exam, they can write their own test items.

We can also offer students the choice of writing genres they would like to study and encourage them to find examples of these in their coursebooks for analysis. Another powerful tool we can equip our students with is the ability to use a monolingual learner's dictionary.

To ensure mandatory participation such activities as 'story circle' where each student writes a line and passes the folded paper over, or jigsaw reading, where three students read three different texts and then have to share information, are very useful and provide the beginning of agency.

'ENGLISH TEACHING PROFESSIONAL' Issue 42, January 2006

Skills

Speaking spontaneously

David Heathfield continues his series of articles on developing students' speaking fluency. Due to the rapid increase in mobile phone ownership he suggests three speaking activities on practising telephone conversations.

This is one of the activities.

Say to the students, 'You are at home and your phone rings. Who could it be?' Write up to 20 people the students suggest, eg relative, friend, etc.

Arrange chairs for half the class (As) to sit directly behind the other half (Bs), so everyone can see the board. As choose who to be from the list on board and start a telephone conversation, Bs should respond appropriately. Bs cannot look at As and have to work out who As are and what he or she wants and speak as naturally as possible so that the conversation can continue.

After 40 seconds, interrupt all the phone calls and ask the Bs to say who the As are and what they want. Then ask them to swap roles. Keep swapping roles and partners for four turns until the game is well established. In the fifth and sixth rounds, develop the game further by telling the students that the As have good news, then bad news for the Bs to develop the encounter into a two-minute scene.

Two other activities, 'Catching up' and 'Duty calls' follow on from the above activity.

'ENGLISH TEACHING PROFESSIONAL' Issue 42, January 2006

Oh, bananas!

Who hasn't come across the problem of how to deal with students' questions about swear words? The fact is that students come across them in books, films and real life situations.

Andy Coney suggests a very interesting and logically planned lesson which you can teach to late intermediate students who are not under 18 and on the condition that ALL the students in the class agree to do this and the school administration is not against it.

You set the context by asking two questions:
1. When was the last time you swore?
2. When and where can you hear swear words?

Then you encourage students to come up with as many emotions as possible, eg anger, frustration, shock, etc. and write them up to the board. The students, in pairs, then take turns to say the word banana, expressing one of the emotions and guessing it. Then you hand over a copy of the dialogue which contains numerous instances of the word banana, which has been used to substitute a swear word. Students work in pairs and perform a dialogue. The next step is handing out a sheet of swear words, perhaps styled as a mini-dictionary and ask students to think of the equivalent expressions based on the use of the word or expression. As a conclusion to this part you may like to ask the students to look at the dialogue and replace it with a genuine swear word. An interesting follow-up is to look at swear words in context through an analysis of film extracts.

'ENGLISH TEACHING PROFESSIONAL' Issue 42, January 2006

Teaching Quieter Students

The author of this article tries to analyze the causes of quieter students' behaviour and puts forward some suggestions on how to teach reticent students.

Language anxiety is one of the causes of quiet behaviour and there are three major sources of it:

(1) personal factors: low self-esteem students worry what peers think of them and feel nervous speaking in front of others;

(2) teachers' beliefs about language teaching: some teachers insist on playing a dominant role in the classroom believing that otherwise the class will be out of control;

(3) high performance expectations: many students feel a sense of anxiety simply because they don't think they are performing well enough just as they themselves don't evaluate their abilities positively.

The author suggests the following techniques to encourage the quieter students:

• Create a low-anxiety climate, an emotionally safe environment so that students wouldn't be afraid to make mistakes.

• Value different personalities by making sure both dominant students and shy ones take equal turns participating in interactive activities, and making every effort to praise any progress they have made.

• Develop positive beliefs and attitudes to learning by helping students understand that a good command of English may result in higher self-esteem and better opportunities in society.

• Design interesting interactive tasks - two-way communication tasks, eg information-gap communication games, which engage learners in using English for a variety of communicative purposes.

• Increase intrinsic motivation - to develop in the students a sincere and personal interest in the English language, culture and people.

• Take advantage of extrinsic motivation by introducing a score system based on the students' classroom participation.

'ENGLISH TEACHING PROFESSIONAL' Issue 42, January 2006

Colourful Phonemes

The author of this article has invented a very memorable colour-coded chart to help newly qualified teachers memorize phonemic symbols. She also describes some classroom activities based on its use.

Phoneme	Colour	Phoneme	Colour
	grey		Royal blue
	green		gold
	pink		white
	blue		brown
	plum (SE)		orange
	plum		scarlet
	red		fawn
	black		terracotta
	purple

Grammar dictations could be made child-friendly by distributing a simple picture to be coloured in by learners while you dictate using the colour coding system. Students could then reconstruct the original text.

e.g. This is Bill. He's got a red neck and three green ears! He works in an office. His office is orange and he sits behind a big red desk and plays with his white tie when he talks on the gold phone.

Sometimes he wears his purple shirt to work, but when it's very cold he wears his black jacket to keep him warm. He cycles his white bike to work in summer, but in winter he doesn't cycle, he rides his blue scooter!

'ENGLISH TEACHING PROFESSIONAL' Issue 42, January 2006

www.teachingenglish.org.uk	Ideas on teaching: Keeping teens interested Latest activity: 'The new students role play' Literature: The life and work of Benjamin Zephaniah. Audio Bank: Teachers talking about learning English Arts and crafts with YLs Lesson plans
www.longman.com/cuttingedge	Teaching Tips, Resources (for each level!), Using the Course, Language and Culture
www.oup.com/elt/englishfile	Grammar, Word list, Pronunciation
www.onestopenglish.com	Teacher's Tips, Resource materials, Grammar and Vocab activities, Business and ESP, Warmers Competition, Lesson share