A Peek in the Toolkit

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

The other day I sent in my third writing assignment for the methodology unit of the dipTESOL.  I was supposed to write about the, “three teaching aids you regard as most important in your teaching.”

But I have a confession to make.  You see, I was, and am still, rather unclear on what exactly constitutes a teaching aid.  According to British Council's English Online Teachers, a teaching aid is, “any piece of equipment that can be used to help the students learn.” Examples of teaching aids include: the blackboard, a tape recorder, a CD player, computers or a language laboratory.  Which seems to imply that a teaching aid is not language content, but a tool which helps in the delivery of content to students.  I would be perfectly happy with this definition if not for the fact that the other week I read an article by Brian Thomlinson (2011, p. 2) in which he defines language learning materials as, “anything which is deliberately used to increase the learner’s knowledge and or experience of the language," before providing a list which includes: photos, newspapers, food packages, and videos.  It is the inclusion of photos in the list which has left me perplexed.  The photos are themselves not language.  In fact, any language the students will be exposed to through the pictures must be generated by either themselves or the teacher.  Then, to make matters worse (or better, depending on your perspective), I decided to ask my personal learning network what teaching aids they considered a necessity, and received replies that ranged from @JosetteLB’s 'my cow-bell' to 'kitchen-timers' and @samsheps’ 'other students' to @thelanguagepoints’s 'post-it notes'. 

So is a kitchen timer a teaching aid or a classroom management tool?  Are the two things different?  And if a kitchen timer is used to exert pressure on students to perform at a level higher than usual and push students towards fluency (Nation, 1996, p. 10), could a kitchen timer somehow morph into a piece of language learning material?  In the end, I had to set aside my slightly obsessive interest in teaching aid/materials/classroom management tool terminology and get on with writing.  I did pick three teaching aids, but want to focus on just one of them in this blog post. 

Whiteboard Markers         

 

In Japan, class whiteboards come with a set of three colored whiteboard markers: black, blue and red.  In classes such as history or social studies, these colors code for level of importance of the materials written on the board.  Black is for ordinary content which the teacher expects the students to remember, blue is for key concepts or general points which can help students frame their note taking and are of higher importance than black.  Red is a warning to remember at all costs.  Students have a similar set of colored pens for note taking.  Over the years, I’ve come to rely upon my set of three colored markers and like the Japanese teachers use them first and foremost to draw students' attention to the board, specifically to certain aspects of language, which is particularly important as attention is most likely the "necessary and sufficient condition for encoding a stimulus into long-term memory." (Schimdt, 1993). 

When teaching beginning level learners, I rely on my set of three whiteboard markers to help students learn about the similarities and difference in English and Japanese spoken language structure.  Each language has its own strategies for aural decoding and these strategies are often only partially acquired by the L2 learner (Rost, 2001).  Learners who utilize strategies for listening to Japanese and apply them to English face particular problems when it comes to segmenting words.  Luckily, over 90% of words in spoken English are likely to begin with a strong syllable (Cutler, 1987) and focusing on strong syllables as the main cue of segmentation is likely to help students develop the skills they need to better hear individual words when listening to English (Field, 2003, p.329).

I use the blue marker to represent pauses in language and red to mark for stress.  Because I want students to be focusing on form (meaning is of secondary importance here), I open replace words with numbers when doing these types of basic listening exercises.  So I would write up a sentence like, "Ishikawa Ryo was the most popular golfer in Japan this year," on the white board as:

1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10    11

Then I can have students listen for and mark pauses in the sentence in blue, helping them adjust to the 12 syllable or so natural pauses that occur in spoken English (Field, 327).  I then take the next step and draw one small circle for each syllable of the word beneath the number.  While students are listening they can attempt to fill in the stressed syllables in red.  It can also be quite fun to play around with stress in this way, marking a sentence for stress in an unusual pattern but saying it in the right way and seeing if students can listen and correct it.  Or you can write up two stress patterns for a sentence on the board and have students listen and just try and pick the right English rhythm pattern.  And by keeping the focus on numbers, blue slashes, and red and white circles, you can make sure students aren’t getting all stressed out about if they are understanding the words or not.  In many ways this kind listening practice is simply a modification of Adrian Underhill's (2005, p. 154-180) stress activities using Cuisenaire rods.  And like most Cuisenaire rod activities, linking sound with a colored visual representation can help students recognize patterns which might otherwise go unnoticed.

But whiteboard markers are not just good for drawing.  They make great batons.  With higher-level learners, you can use them to raise awareness around and practice phrases or speech effects used to facilitate the role of turn-taking in conversation.  This is a particularly important issue for my students here in Japan who are accustomed to the relatively long pauses that occur in conversational Japanese as well as a turn taking system that is often based on social position.  This high considerateness style (Yule, 1996, p. 76) of conversation can often feel distant or unengaged, especially if the learner is speaking with a friend or someone of the same social position. 

This activity works best with authentic, recorded conversations.  I begin by writing a transcript of the conversation on the board.  The conversation is written in black, but turn-yielding sections of the conversation are written in blue and back channeling written in red.  Students listen to the conversation and are asked to explain what the words written in red and the words written in blue might mean.  Once students identify some of the salient features of turn taking, such as a drawl on a final syllable or use of phrases such as 'you know' and 'or something' to show turn-yielding (Duncan, 1972 p. 287), 'um-hmm' and 'yeah, yeah' as back-channeling and turn-refusing, it is the students' turn to engage in a more active conversation style.  Students are paired up and given a set of three white board markers each.  As they are speaking, they are directed to pay special attention to whose turn it is and how they are signaling changes in turn.  If they want to yield a turn, they need to offer the blue whiteboard marker to their partner and attach a verbal cue as well.  If they wish to refuse a turn and are merely back channeling, they will need to be holding (and hopefully shaking) a red whiteboard marker.  If a turn is yielded and a listener becomes a speaker, the student will have to pick up a black white board marker to show it is their turn.  The physicality of this exercise really helps drive home the importance of turn taking and how verbal cues are important in maintaining a smooth conversation.

I use whiteboard markers in dozens of other ways in class (as toy microphones, sticks to tap out rhythm, juggling props), but think I’ve probably said enough about whiteboard markers for now.  Perhaps I’ll write about my #2 and #3 most important teaching aids in a future post.  But I have to say, I’m a little disheartened that after writing a 3,500 word paper and 1,500 word blog post, I’m no more certain of what exactly separates a teaching aid from materials from a classroom management tool.  Maybe James Scrivener (2005, p. 333) has made the wisest of choices by avoiding the term teaching aid entirely and opting for ‘toolkit’ instead.  Because as any do-it-yourselfer knows, a toolkit, as crammed full of things as it might be, is less about the things themselves than the ways you find to use them in any given situation.   

[Special shout out to @JohnPfordresher and @AnneHendle for not only joining in the #teachingaids conversation on Twitter and mentioning it in their blogs, but helping to push the conversation in a whole different direction…and not to get all cryptic, but more on that in an upcoming post.]

Update: I just had my 10,000 hit on this blog and wanted to send out a thank you to everyone who has taken the time to visit, read and comment.  Feeling very grateful on this Thursday afternoon.

 

References:

Cutler, A. & Carter, D. (1987). The predominance of strong initial syllables in the English vocabulary.  Computer Speech and Language, 2: 133-142.

Cutler, A (1997), "The comparative perspective on spoken-language processing. Speech Communication, 21: 3-15

Duncan, S. (1972). Some signals and rules for taking speaking turns in conversations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 23 (2): 283-292.

Field, J. (2003).  Promoting perception: lexical segmentation in L2 listening. ELT Journal, 57 (4): 325-333.

Nation, I.S.P (1996). The Four Strands of a Language Course. TESOL in Context, 6  (2): 7-12.

Rost, M. (2001) "Listening." In R. Carter & D. Nunan (Eds.), The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (pp. 7-13).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press  

Scrivener, J. (2005). Learning Teaching 2^nd Edition. Oxford: Macmillian.

Tomlinson, B. (2011) "Introduction: principles and procedures of materials development." In B. Tomlinson (Ed.), Materials Development in Language Teaching 2nd Edition (pp. 1-31). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Underhill, A. (2005). Sound Foundations. Oxford: Macmillan.

Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

"Teaching Aids." English Online Teachers. British Council. 17 September 2012 <http://www.englishonline.org.cn/en/teachers/teaching-articles/plan-preparation/teaching-aids>

Building summarizing skills, it ain't just for EAP anymore

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

There are 32 students in the International Course of my school.  Most of the classes are broken up by level and I have a lot of freedom in regards to what and how I teach the different levels.  Before summer break, I did a series of three reading classes with the lower-intermediate students which ended by asking them to write a short summary of a simplified newspaper article we had been working with during the lesson.  I cradled my head in despair was pretty shocked when a majority of students turned in nothing but a few sentence fragments.  I was pretty sure that the problem wasn't comprehension, as we had run through a number of activities which left both me and them confident they understood what was in the articles.  And the articles themselves had come from Sandra Heyer's All New Easy True Stories, which I had picked, in part, because I thought the simple grammar could serve as pretty good target examples for when students were given writing assignments.

But after thinking about it during summer vacation, it seemed to me that I had been expecting quite a lot of my students.  Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it usually helps if expectations are realistic.  And considering the fact that most of my students come from a non-academic background, missed large chunks of their middle school career, and are rarely asked to summarize in Japanese, let alone English, my expectations in this case were just a tad bit on the flowers-spontaneously-blooming-in-the-desert variety. 

So just what makes summarizing so difficult?  Well, as Kirkland and Saunders (1991, p. 100) rightly point out, "The L2 skills needed in summarizing include adequate reading skills and comprehension level plus adequate control of grammar, vocabulary, and writing skills to manipulate and express the information."  And to make things even more difficult, summarizing, "is highly interactive and recursive process."  It requires moving between reading and writing a number of times, holding portions of the text in memory, manipulating it, and comparing and contrasting it with what is being produced in the summary.  In light of this, it makes sense that most articles focused on summarizing are for the EAP community.  But it seems to me that even students of a lower proficiency level could benefit from training around summarizing skills.  As Shih (1992, p. 307) points out, summary writing is excellent practice for tests with an essay component. And in a few months from now, my students will be heading off to university, many of them to major in English, and they will be asked summarize texts as well as sit for tests with essay questions, regardless of whether such tasks and tests could be considered level appropriate or not.

So since the students came back from summer break I tried out some  summary skills building classes.  The classes were 90 minutes in length.  Here's a rough outline of how I prepared, what I did in class, and how things went down:

1. Preparation and article selection: First I chose an article with a clear chronological story line, something that would be easier to summarize than say an article on global warming which might require students to not only keep track of key ideas, but a incongruous time line as well. I settled on "Election Day," a ~250 word simplified news article about a man trying to become the mayor of his town.  Here is the first paragraph:

The Election

                       

Herb Casey wants to be mayor of his city.  So he works hard.  He puts up signs.  "VOTE FOR HERB CASEY," the signs say.  He knocks on doors and talks to people.  "Please vote for me," he says.  He mails letters to thousand of people.  "Please vote for me," he writes.  He gives speeches.  "Vote for me!" he says in his speeches.

                  --- Heyer (2004)

2. Vocabulary/word and phrase comprehension: instead of pre-teaching vocabulary, which has it's advantages, I passed out a worksheet which contained the full ~250 word article.  When making the worksheet, instead of a standard font I used a dotted font, the type usually reserved for writing practice.  I had the students read the first paragraph and the first paragraph only.  As they read, they were instructed to trace over every word they knew.  In this way students were left with a nearly completed paragraph.  I find drawing students attention to what they can do as opposed to what they can't (such as by having students circle the words they don't know) usually starts us off on a better psychological foot.  I also read the text out loud to the students.  At lower levels, students often fail to recognize words that they actually know and produce in speech.  I was pretty thrilled when two of the students, after hearing the word 'election' pronounced, traced the word on their worksheet. 

3. Comprehension check/main point examples: Next I gave students a question which, if answered well, would naturally lead to a summary of the paragraph's contents.  I got this idea from Simcock's (1990) ask and answer technique (and there's a pretty good write up in this Paul Nation article http://www.melta.org.my/ET/1991/main1.html), which is an oral activity to build fluency activities, but which is highly adaptable for written work.  I also provided a series of yes/no statements.  

[image: student notes]

As you can see, I did a bit of paraphrasing and word substitution within these answers.  Out of 14 students in the class, all fourteen marked the correct yes/no box for each answer.  I did have to give a bit of a description of the phrase 'face to face' and link it up with the idea of 'knocking on doors' from the paragraph from the text.  While overall this seems like a basic comprehension question/activity (and of course it is that), it also helps provide examples of what constitutes main ideas in a paragraph and how word substitution is perfectly acceptable when paraphrasing.

4. Increasing text familiarity/use of structures within the text: Now that I was pretty sure students had comprehended the text, I really wanted to give them a chance to actually do a bit of production work with the text.  But I was pretty sure they weren't ready to jump into writing a summary yet.  I decided to do a read/think/say + listen/think/write exercise (Fanselow, n.d.).  Students were put in pairs.  One student was the reader, the other the writer.  The reader would read as much of the texts as they could easily commit to memory, at which point they would turn the paper over, count to three, and say the memorized portion of the text to their partner.  The listener, pen on table, would wait until the reader finished speaking, count to three, pick up their pen and write what they could on the paper.  If they wanted, they could ask the reader to repeat what was said.  But the reader could not provide assistance in the form of suggesting missing words, spelling corrections, etc.  After the paragraph was completely transcribed in this manner, students compared what they had written to what was on the paper.  They circled any differences in red.  Now some of the changes made were perfectly acceptable substitutions or simplifications.  For example, one student took the sentences, "He gives speeches. 'Vote for me!' he says in his speeches," and changed it to, "He gives speeches and says, 'Vote for me.'"  So not only does the read/think/say + listen/think/write help students memorize a text by giving it a chance to loop around in short-term memory (West as cited in Nation, 2009a, p. 67), it also helps students notice that they are already have the skills necessary to paraphrase, an important component of summarizing.  

5. Personalization: I think one of the biggest hurdles to students producing a decent summary is the distance they feel with the text material.  Even the article used for this class, while having a strong narrative thread and being wildly slightly more interesting than your average academic paper, was content-wise, still pretty far away from my students' daily life.  If students were talking about themselves, they would have little trouble using the grammar structures or even most of the vocabulary found in the article.  A personalization activity is another way to help show students that they already have many of the skills they need to write a summary.  In this case, I helped students personalize the grammar by asking them to answer the question, "How did you do to become a good English speaker?"  The following is one student's answers:

6. Production of first summary: well, it's been a long process.  It took about 60 minutes of class time to get here.  For this step of the process, I had the students put away all the materials we had used up to this point and erased the white-board.  Then I wrote the sentence, "Herb Casey wants to be mayor of his town…" and started soliciting sentences to put in our summary.  What I ended up with was:

Herb Casey wants to be mayor of his town.  He works very hard.  He puts up signs.  He talks to lots of people.  He asks people for their votes.

7. Winnowing it down: Chambers and Brigham (as cited in Nation, 2009a) suggest a process of winnowing away a text with a group of learners, deleting elaborating sentences, unnecessary clauses from main sentences, and finally any remaining unnecessary words.  It seems like a great idea for showing higher level students how to carve their way to a decent summary.  But I also think it requires a pretty complete comprehension of the text and wouldn't work very well with lower level students right off the bat.  But as a final step in this process, it worked quite well and only took about 5 minutes in total.  By this point of the process, students were really primed to simplify and came up with the following:

Herb Casey wants to be mayor of his town so worked very hard.  He puts up signs, talked to lots of people and asked for their votes.

The entire process from start to finish took seventy-five minutes.  But the next day, when I ran the class again, it took a total of 40 minutes per paragraph. 

Modifying the process:

Like the act of summarizing itself, one of the benefits of using a detailed, step by step process like that above, is the fact that it can be simplified and condensed.  Both comprehension checks and personalization were put aside when students in my class were working to summarize the third paragraph within "The Election" article.  And once students can summarize articles with a strong linear narrative, they can be exposed to different and potentially more difficult genres of text, such as simplified government reports or academic articles.  And when exposed to a new genre, steps which had become superfluous with previous genres can be reinserted as necessary. 

As Newman and Strever (1997) say, "if a student can decipher the meaning of an article, differentiate the main ideas from the details, and transfer that knowledge into writing, then many teachers would feel the student has understood the material."  By helping even lower-intermediate students develop the skills necessary to summarize, we provide both ourselves and them with an important tool to measure their comprehension of a text.  But more than that, we are preparing them for the ways in which they will be using English in the future.  Because waiting to teach a set of skills until they have suddenly become necessary for language production, is a recipe for a classroom with an overabundance of stress, an emotion better left out of a summary of any successful language classroom.     

References:

Fanselow, J. (nip). Albabka fur: tapping students' positive feelings about oral reading and overcoming their dread of the activity.

Heyer, S. (2004). The Election. All New Easy True Stories: A Picture-Based Beginning Reader. Pearson Longman.

Kirkland, R. & Saunders, M. (1991). Maximiing student performance in summary writing: managing cognitive load. TESOL Quarterly 25 (1): 105-121

Nation, I.S.P. (2009a). Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing.  Routledge: New York.

Nation, I.S.P. (2009b) Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. Routledge: New York.

Newman, K. & Strever, J. (1997). Using electronic peer audience and summary writing with ESL students. Journal of College Reading and Learning  28 (1): 24-

Shih, M. (1992).  Beyond comprehension exercises in the ESL academic reading class. TESOL Quarterly 26 (2): 289-318