This post is for a collection of mini Critical Incidents – things that stopped me and made me think, but not enough to write a full CI on.

Mini CI#1: The Key Flaw in Learner Autonomy

Much has been written about creating a learner-centred environment and promoting learner autonomy. To this end, there are many websites such as peergrade.io or edmodo promoting this idea. However, in my and my colleagues’ use of these services in class, we’ve found the majority of the students do not and do not want to engage in learner autonomy in this way. They openly and vocally express a desire for the teacher to do the work, and they just receive the knowledge. If we allow the learners to choose the method of teaching, the majority of them (from my and my colleagues’ experience) would choose a ‘mug and jug’ approach. How do we square learner autonomy and learner-centredness with learners who steadfastly do not want to learn in that manner?

Mini CI#2: Tech and the Gamification of Learning

Speaking with a friend of mine who develops various educational tech for EFL, I noticed myself having quite a negative reaction to what he was saying. I see myself as quite a pro-tech or at the very least tech-friendly teacher. Every classroom in my institution has an Interactive Whiteboard which I try to use to the fullest capacity. However, as my friend pointed out, IWBs are very ’00s and are not all the cutting edge of tech. He was most interested in utilising the tech that students bring with them into the classroom – which, pretty universally, is at the very least a smartphone. While I’m ostensibly up for this, tech in the classroom has to fulfill some basic requirements before I will embrace it – and unfortunately, most new tech falls short of this. It must be easy to use and implement for both the teacher and student. I don’t want to be spending most of my time either learning how to use some new piece of tech or explaining to students how to use it. It will preferably not come in downloadable app form – if it can be accessed without the students having to download anything, generally it’s easier to get learners on board with it. Crucially, it has to be reliable. You don’t want to get half-way into a tech-based lesson only for someone’s connection to drop and they be unable to access what everyone else is doing – this seems to happen often with mobile-based learning, but it never happens with a piece of paper and pen (and yes, I realise I sound fairly luddite here). Most importantly, though, is that it needs to be useful and at least as good as if not better than how things are already done. I know students can get extremely motivated when using mobile phones, but it can be easy for learning to not occur. I’m especially thinking of the gamification of learning – if an app gamifies language learning to an excessive amount, it can lead to students just playing the game and not learning. I’m thinking of the online game Kahoot – it’s a great distraction and time-filler, but sometimes I think it’s so gamified that learners often miss the point of it.

CI#3: IWB as a crutch

I have written extensively on my Materials blog of my use of the IWB, and I think it’s worth folding that back into these CIs. Please see my posts here, here, and here. One thought I had that isn’t covered by these posts, but that came up in a comment on my blog was about how the IWB was a crutch. This was something I’ve noticed in observing some teachers over the course of my career, and recently in my own classroom. I stopped and worried if what I was doing was too much. Often, IWBs can and do dominate a lesson. Teachers can get so obsessed with preparing slides and making them interesting and dynamic or whatever that they may forget about the learners. The Whiteboard in general perhaps is a signifier of a teacher-centric environment, rather than a learner-centred one,and the IWB can make this even more apparent. When getting to grips with an IWB it is easy to try and play around with what can be done that a teacher may easily forget their learners. I know there have been occasions where and I and other teachers have been “so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should.” (Dr. Ian Malcolm played by Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, 1993). My point is that we should always make sure that whatever tool we bring into the classroom, be it an IWB or cuisenaire rods or a worksheet, supports the learners learning.

CI#4: Check Your Privilege

I am painfully aware that as a white, male teacher in England (in Brighton!) I am in the most privileged position a teacher of English can be. Some of my colleagues are, of course, women. Some are non-native. Some are people of colour. I think it is worth recognising that any one of those elements can drastically affect how one is perceived as a teacher. I don’t feel I am qualified to speak on this subject at length, but I have seen in my institute instances of teachers being treated differently because of their gender, their nationality, their race and sometimes all three (I haven’t included sexuality on this list because I’ve seen that all LGBT teachers I’ve known have kept that information from their students – which of course will affect them also, but perhaps not in the way students perceive them… or I may be being naive here…). As a result, I have a lot of respect for my colleagues who are not of my background who teach as well and often better than I and have as good or better dynamics in their class. Their job, although our contracts may be exactly the same, is far harder than mine.

A few days ago, I was sitting next to a colleague in the staffroom who is fairly new to the world of teaching English. He was preparing for an elementary afternoon class and I saw, to my horror, a board game based around ‘will’ which included discussion questions such as “What will you do at the weekend?” and “Who will win the next world cup?”

Now, ‘will’ is a bit of a bugbear of mine and my views on it are pretty strong. I believe it is the most misused word or piece of language by students of English. I think there are a variety of reasons for this. Firstly, I believe it is taught in many places as “The Future Tense of English”. Secondly, there is a lot of cross-contamination – students of English most frequently speak with other non-natives who also misuse it. Thirdly, and most importantly, I believe that students think they understand ‘will’ and so are confident in using it and do not realise their or others’ misuse of it. Compared with something else that many learners of English struggle with – the present perfect – ‘will’ is misused on a far more regular basis than that, and I believe it is because students are at least aware of the difficulty of using it. With ‘will’, they are blissfully unaware of their own misuse.

All of this is coming purely on anecdotal evidence and my own personal experience, so in other contexts it may not be such a problem – but, from speaking with other teachers, it does seem to be a big problem for learners. From having thought about it and looked at various grammar books, my concept of ‘will’ has evolved to seeing it as having two uses: Logical Inevitability (often referred to in EFL coursebooks as ‘future facts’ or ‘predictions’ and can be replaced with either ‘be going to’ (“I think it will rain” / “I think it’s going to rain”) or modal verbs (“I’m sure the party will be good” / “the party should be good”)) and Functional Speech Acts (promises, offers, decisions, which can be replaced with other functional language (“I’ll have a cappuccino” / “Can I have a cappuccino?”). I find that students generally don’t use it when needed to in speech acts and often use it to talk about plans, at which point we get unnatural utterances.

I don’t think this problem is particularly addressed in EFL coursebooks, whose grammar syllabus seems to have been designed in a vacuum. ‘Will’ is often presented at the same time as ‘going to’ and present continuous and all of them are lumped under the heading of ‘future forms’. This may be appropriate for an imaginary and perfect learner, but seems to further exacerbate the problems for every real-world learner I have to deal with. I think it should be taught differently. Firstly, as a functional speech act used for, as I term it, ‘responding to a present situation’. With this, it should be taught alongside other functional language such as ‘can/could’, ‘let’s’, etc. Secondly, it should be taught as a future prediction, taught with ‘I think’ or ‘I’m sure’ sentence frames and alongside ‘going to’ and ‘should’. Most importantly, the teaching of this should be kept very separate from ‘future forms’ involving present continuous and ‘going to’ for plans.

So far, so fairly logical. However, where I get a bit more controversial when it comes to ‘will’, is that I would only allow ‘will’ to occur on a grammar syllabus towards the end of A2/Pre-Intermediate level at the very earliest. On top of that, I would ban any student use of ‘will’ within the classroom until that moment.

I’m aware that this could be seen as extreme. Banning language that is emerging from the students sounds a bit dictatorial. Not teaching something until the end of A2 that is such an extremely common word (just look at corpora to see how frequently it is used) doesn’t seem to make sense. But I’ve thought about it and trialed it in a previous class that I had over a long period of time (a class I took from the end of beginner through to the end of intermediate over 8 months – ‘will’ was only introduced once they reached B1 level) and it is the only time there were no problems with my students’ use of ‘will’.

The reason I recommend such extreme measures is because of the cross-contamination they will experience from other students anyway. They’re going to hear it, within my context at least, all the time. Secondly, banning their use of it may raise their awareness of how difficult it is to get right. My third reason for doing this is to do with developmental sequences.

We’ve studied developmental sequences and seen how different elements of language are acquired at different stages – the -ing suffix being one of the first things students acquire, for example. I think ‘will’, because of it’s seeming simplicity and high-frequency masquerades as something that is easy to acquire early on in a students developmental sequence. Students pick up on it early on and tend to find it easy to implement into speech immediately. However, they tend to get it wrong for whatever reason – and I feel it becomes very quickly fossilised. In my view, it should be much later down the chain in terms of the order of acquisition, and that is why I feel we as teachers have a duty to force it to much later on a syllabus than seems logical from a first glance.

With teaching learners, we are trying to get them to develop their L2, to express themselves – and giving them the language to do that. To advocate taking away language rather than giving it seems counter-intuitive. Yet, I believe that ‘will’ is a special case and needs that to happen in the classroom. When me and my colleagues talk about teaching ‘will’, it is most often in the context of unpicking the students’ interlanguage, of getting them to stop using it (incorrectly or unnaturally, I mean) than to start. I can think of no other language point where this is the case.

So, when I saw my colleague preparing this lesson, it was hard to contain my evangelicalism on this subject. I saw, in the lesson he was about to teach, the next teacher having to spend months unpicking what the students learn. But, how can you explain that to somebody without being rude or damaging their confidence in a lesson they have prepared? That is a difficult question. I tried to encourage him to re-think what he was about to do, but it didn’t have any effect other than making me seem a little fanatical.

After all, does it really matter?

I had a situation in my class over the past week which resolved itself in a way I didn’t expect, and when talking about it with my colleagues, I had a realisation or a few ideas which could be considered to be a Critical Incident.

I was teaching a fairly strong B2 class and I had a problem that I’m sure many teachers come across.It was in teaching the passive.

The passive always seems to be a bit of a problematic area in EFL and I and many of my colleagues have all had disastrous lessons in attempting to teach it. In speaking with my colleagues, it seems that different approaches have been tried out with varying degrees of success. One colleague of mine favours a long and slow inductive/guided-discovery method that takes hours. Another begins with a passive board game which is designed to be a consolidation activity and then identifies what problems learners have and works backwards to fill in those gaps. Over recent years, I’ve been using a more lexical approach – teaching students verbs that are commonly used in the passive as pure lexis (“be stolen” or “be promoted”) – with mixed results.

The class I was teaching was fairly strong, so I knew they wouldn’t have too much problem with the concept of the passive itself, more with implementing it into their interlanguage. The General English course they are doing has a syllabus that is set by a coursebook, so the reason we were covering the passive this particular week was due to that. In looking at the exercises that they had to do, I identified that the possible problems would come from a particular gap-fill activity which required students to complete verbs in either the passive or the active in a variety of verb phrases.

I think this is where the big problem with teaching the passives is – and it’s the fault of Grammar-Syllabus based courses. Students are used to dealing with one or two particular structures at any one time – e.g. the past simple and the present perfect; or the present perfect and the present perfect continuous – and rarely come across activities that require them to use a bigger variety of grammatical structures. Until the passive, at which point they have to simultaneously use all their pre-existing grammar knowledge with all verb forms and use that with this possibly unfamiliar passive construction.

I anticipated this may be a problem for my learners, so when it came to the gap-fill, before they completed it I asked them to work with a partner and decide whether they needed to use a passive or active construction in each gap. They completed this quickly and easily. After that, I asked them to discuss what was the likely verb form or verb phrase in each sentence – and why. When feedbacking this, however, I was taken aback at just how difficult they found it. The gap-fill sentences all had something in it to indicate what was needed – perhaps the gap followed a preposition, indicating a gerund; or perhaps it contained a time adverbial such as ‘at the moment’, indicating the use of the present continuous – yet the learners were unable to identify these elements as being helpful in choosing a verb phrase.

The lesson continued slowly and painfully and at the end I encouraged discussion between the students about what had been challenging for them across the lesson. The learners reached the same conclusion that I did: the problem was not the passive itself – either in meaning or forming – rather, the problem was knowing what form was needed.

The students at then point requested a general Grammar Review – more activities like the one they had just completed, but focusing primarily on the verb forms rather than passive or active.

Grammar review. Generally, I hate grammar reviews. I always find that they are too cognitively demanding for students and after they have been completed, they leave the students even more demotivated and feeling that they don’t understand the language than they were before doing it. However, they were quite insistent, and as they are customers after all, I had to give them what they wanted.

I designed and developed my own grammar review for this lesson, inspired by previous grammar reviews that didn’t work (I was thinking of what to avoid). I decided to keep it simple, general, well-staged and with plenty of support for the students. I also built in a lot of discussion activities around the review designed to raise awareness of various elements of learning a language – importance of grammar, lexis; differences in culture, identity, their L1 and English, etc. It started simply (from my point of view) with types of words (verb, adjectives, nouns and adverbs), moved on to clauses (and Subjects, Verbs, Objects, Complements and Adverbials), then into time adverbials and verb phrases, and ended with a look at aspect and the function of various verb phrases. A lot to pack in!

Ironically, the elements that students struggled with the most were the ‘simple’ things like word class and sentence structure – once we’d moved on to tense, aspect and time, they were more in their element. Surprisingly, the end result left the students feeling mostly very positive – a far cry from how students have been left following previous grammar reviews I have done (and with my colleagues, it seems a common trend).

I discussed this unexpected result with some peers and the topic of conversation got on to the value of explicit grammar teaching. Obviously, there are many different theories regarding explicit teaching and whether it can have any effect on implicit knowledge. My colleagues and I often discuss this – whether there is any interface at all, and if there is how strong it is. I have to say, it does seem to be something that most of my colleagues haven’t particularly thought about before, but there are some who have been reading up on the subject.

Generally speaking, the more experienced teachers and those who have a bit of knowledge of SLA theory seem to be of the opinion that there is either no interface or that the interface is extremely weak. The idea that explicit knowledge can never become implicit knowledge is something that I can understand and whilst I’m not entirely convinced it is that black and white (what, in life, ever is?), I am more likely to take that viewpoint than anything promoting a strong interface.

So where does this leave me when teaching in EFL? All material is geared towards a grammar-based syllabus, explicit grammar teaching and the CELTA PPP method – in my institution, at least. On top of that, it is what the learners (generally speaking and openly and vocally) want, and on top of that is the fact that our learners are, in fact, customers paying for a service. In essence, we have to do something that we often don’t particularly agree with.

However, in discussing this with my colleagues, we concluded that there is a benefit to this. My learners, at the end of this extended grammar review weren’t (in my opinion) any better equipped to use the language we’d covered than they were before we started. In short, their explicit knowledge had had a bit of a work out, but the same couldn’t be said for their implicit knowledge.

However, at the end of the class, they were more confident in themselves and (seemingly) me. The lessons immediately following the grammar review were considerably more productive and a lot more learning was going on.

We’ve come across the idea that language learning is a complex and dynamic system with many variables, and when we conduct explicit grammar teaching, the intention is to develop learners’ ability with that particular grammar point. Even on a superficial level, I think most teachers are aware that is a flawed mentality to adopt as all you have to do is ask your students what they learnt in their previous lesson and you’ll generally get as many different answers as there are students in the class. People such as Krashen encouraged a full-on input-only model with no explicit grammar teaching. That seemed to be flawed too, if one looks at the results of the Canadian-immersion programme he was involved with.

So if teaching grammar explicitly doesn’t result in an increase in implicit knowledge, yet abandoning it altogether also doesn’t help and is unfeasible in terms of the kind of learners we have to work with and the kind of institutions we have to work for – what is the purpose for it? Well, I think it could be a method to lower students affective filter. If the students are receiving explicit grammar instruction that they can comprehend and that is what they want and expect, their confidence in themselves, each other and the teacher could arguably increase. The atmosphere that this then creates could allow the teacher to sneak in ways for the students to implicitly learn.

When learning about complex systems and the endless variables that are present within them, we learned that what we do in the classroom has an effect – just not necessarily the one you think it had or wanted it to have. I think knowledge of this is important when considering what we do in the classroom.

So I think the conclusion I am reaching is that despite all the evidence against explicit grammar teaching having any kind of positive effect on students interlanguage, it is still a useful tool that should be used in the classroom. It has an effect – just not the effect it is designed to. If we as teachers embrace this and have this at the forefront of our mind when we go and stand in front of class, it could become an incredibly useful tool to create affordances for real learning to take place.

In the SLA module, we’ve recently covered aptitude and motivation. This got me thinking, but not about the students – about myself.

We’ve learnt that motivation is a dynamic system, many things affect it day-day and its ever-changing. My motivation for this diploma and for teaching in general is much the same. There are many factors that affect my motivation, here are a few:

• Personal life (it’s my first year of marriage, my relationships with friends – often positive, yet sometimes challenging)
• Hobbies (I run a micro-record label, organise events, produce and perform music in various guises for various projects – rewarding, yet time-consuming)
• Work (an unstable industry with no job security – currently more work than I can handle, yet can be rewarding – and it pays the bills)
• The course (regular and fairly heavy workload for the Materials module, big essay on the fast-approaching horizon for SLA, disappointing lesson observations, yet I’m also learning a lot, developing as a teacher and occasionally doing good work)

I think the main things affecting my motivation currently is a sense of lack of time. Lack of time to spend with my wife, lack of time to do my hobbies, lack of time due to amount of work (the other day I left my house at 7.45 am and got back at 8.30 pm and was either teaching or preparing to teach that whole time, minus 12 minutes for lunch and 45 minutes for walking between locations), lack of time to do work for this course, pressure on knowing I have 3 lesson observations to do in less than two months… That feeling of pressure and stress can really affect me, my teaching and my work both at my school and at university.

A happy teacher is a good teacher, a stressed teacher is often not. A friend of mine remarked that complaints about teachers at our school always increase when they are doing their DELTA or diploma due to the stress the teacher is under. It is vital to maintain good motivation in not just our learners, but also ourselves.

How to do this, well, I’m still figuring that part out!

I’ve also been thinking about my own aptitude for teaching. We learnt in SLA that there seems to be some truth in the statement that some people learn languages better than others, and I think it’s probably true that some people teach better than others. I don’t consider myself as particularly having much aptitude to teaching – it definitely does not come naturally to me, it is something I really have to work at. It is hard work.

Elements of teaching I feel I do do well. We’ve recently completed a worksheet-designing seminar on the Materials module, and I feel fairly proud of what I achieved. Designing tasks – that, I feel I can do.

I was also fairly proud of my performance in the Language Awareness module. I ‘get’ grammar and feel I have a good understanding of how language works.

But the actual in-class performance? The actual teaching? That is something I feel I struggle with.

It probably doesn’t help that the last few observations I’ve had I felt were disappointing. I felt I didn’t do we as well as I could have. That, compounded with the affect on my motivation due to a sense of pressure and lack of time, adds to the stress of the next assessed observation I have next week.

On the bright side, regardless of aptitude for language learners, they can still achieve. I know that I can still teach well – and I do – aptitude isn’t everything. But it is a factor that I’ve become increasingly aware of – I feel I have to put more effort in to deliver a good lesson than some of my peers who seem to have a much more natural ability in this area.

UPDATE: I think this Critical Incident was written at a time when my motivation for teaching and learning was in a trough. I believe motivation is something that is dynamic, that fluctuates extremely from time to time. Since writing this Critical Incident, I have felt that my aptitude for teaching has improved and this has affected my motivation in turn. As a result, I no longer feel that much of what I have written for this Critical Incident is exactly true. However, it was an essential incident for me to write about – as once it was out of me, down on paper (so to speak), I felt I could move on from it which resulted in me, almost by accident, improving the situation. 

What I guess I’m trying to say here is that I now think that this Critical Incident may no longer be ‘true’, but it was an important stage for me to go through.