During my time as a summer course homestay teacher video has played an essential role in my teaching and there are several reasons for this. Some are in accordance with trends regarding our use of technology generally and in ELT in particular. Others are to do with my teaching context in which the use of a coursebook is at best ill-suited at worst a complete nuisance.

In recent years the use of video has become increasingly popular in the English language classroom. Jamie Keddie, for example, is one of the major advocates of this medium. Over the years I have made extensive use of his great lesson ideas (lessonstream.org) and since I have been on my Master course at Brighton University I have started exploring the more theoretical underpinnings of his approach. Keddie has come up with some innovative and very effective ways of exploiting video material to its full potential using a variety of techniques depending on language level, learner type (age, context), language aim (grammar, function, pronunciation) or topic. He goes far beyond just showing a film in order to let the students summarise the content and thus emphasises that the ‘how’ of using video in the language classroom is of utmost importance: “Working with video in the classroom means designing tasks which maximize student interaction with it.” (Keddie, 2014: 75). He identifies the following five principles to achieve just that.

1) Don’t turn the classroom into a cinema – The main point here is that, according to Keddie, short videos are better suited to the classroom than long ones or feature length films. From a practical point of view that seems obvious as you don’t want to waste lesson time on students ‘just’ being entertained (or, in the worst case scenario, bored).

2) Deconstruct the video – “These [deconstruction techniques] involve isolating individual components of the video and presenting them to students before asking questions or setting tasks which require them to think about the bigger picture”. Here the aim is for students to actively engage with the material, to analyse different parts in isolation in order to better understand how these are used in particular ways to collectively tell a story.

3) Don’t be a slave to the spoken text – Keddie rightly points out that most online videos were not produced with language learners in mind, i.e. they present a variety of difficulties (e.g. speed of taking, difficult vocab, non-standard grammar) that have to be addressed by the teacher in order to make interaction with these videos achievable for learners.

4) See beyond the spoken word – the whole point of video compared with audio material on its own is that the spoken word is supported by “visual narratives” which can be exploited by using a number of techniques.

5) Combine with other materials – Keddie suggests that it is usually worth finding out what context a video comes from and what connections with other materials (e.g. websites, blogs, other videos) can be exploited in classroom activities (I suppose my use of the short video of Harry Potter’s ‘Monster Book of Monsters’ might be an example of this: as part of my blog I use it – after careful editing – to illustrate what my ‘ideal’ textbook might be, but originally it is a short clip from a scene in The Prisoner of Azkaban which itself is only one out of the whole series of eight Harry Potter films, which were based on J K Rowling’s seven books…) (Keddie, 2014: 74/75)

Even without looking into individual suggestions for specific procedures these help to tailor activities using video to student needs and settings.

Apart from being inspired by Keddie, I have also been influenced by Freda Mishan’s considerations regarding the theory behind and use of ‘authentic’ materials. Mishan sees film as part of the battery of authentic materials and amongst these “the one that’s designed to appeal most directly and fully to our [our students’] emotions” (Mishan, 2005: 216). What makes materials ‘authentic’, i.e. the definition of ‘authenticity’, has been the topic of, at times, heated discussion. I won’t go into detail here apart from acknowledging that one of the main problems seems to be that any material, as soon as it gets taken out of its original context – the context it was originally intended for – loses its authenticity: “[…] texts are de-authenticated if their original context is tampered with.” (13). For example, as soon as a teacher decides to use a newspaper article in the classroom, it changes its nature from written text intended to inform or entertain a newspaper reader who can freely choose to interact with this text according to her reading preferences, interests or information needs to a text whose main purpose it becomes to make a teaching point (e.g. to examine grammar, do develop vocabulary, to hone reading skills, as a stimulus for discussion etc.). Be that as it may, I agree with Mishan who calls attention to the fact that authentic materials (in their most basic definition as any material not purposefully designed for language teaching) can add ‘currency’, provide a ‘challenge’ or make a point about ‘culture’. Regarding the first, they are usually more up-to-date than most published ELT materials and might therefore be perceived by learners as potentially more relevant and interesting. Furthermore the ‘challenges’ presented by authentic text can be very motivating as learners feel pride at being able to deal with and understand something that was originally intended for native speakers (as long as the teacher ‘packages’ this appropriately – see Keddie above). Lastly authentic materials provide an opportunity for teacher and students to reflect on and explore aspects of ‘culture’. The fact that they can be understood as products and simultaneously representations of the culture they were produced in potentially confronts learners with different concepts, a different point of view and different ideas about topics (e.g. the ‘Inner Nationality Quiz’).

In the homestay context authentic materials are both easily accessible (the entire study abroad context is essentially made up of authentic materials) and indispensable as they provide a viable and much needed alternative to coursebook content. Not just I as the teacher but also my students can easily pull them into the lesson and in doing so make lesson content more stimulating, personal, of-the-moment and basically fun and interesting. Amongst authentic materials online videos are probably the ones I have used most frequently and my students have found them the most engaging. Below is one of my recent favourites, which I came across on the British Council website (lesson idea by Nicola Crowley) two years ago:

I would like to briefly look into some lesson ideas around this video mainly to show my development regarding principles underlying classroom activities and relationships between participants in the classroom through my engagement with texts, ideas and people over the course of my MA. I won’t produce a list against which to check lesson activities in order to offer up some number. In agreement with Littlejohn (in Tomlinson ed., 2011: 185) I believe that especially in the case of pre-use (or hypothetical use) evaluation the evaluator’s considerations become increasingly subjective (objective description → subjective analysis → subjective inference) and quantifying data that results from the last step to me looks like an attempt to make this subjectivity appear more scientific than it can ever be. Scenarios where this might be justified are where several evaluators are faced with the evaluation of large numbers of textbooks, as here some sort of system is needed that helps maintain consistency across everyone’s work (Roberts, 1996: 376). In my comparative ‘evaluation’ I will simply describe the activities and see how they fare against Jamie Kedddie’s principles above.

What firstly speaks in favour of using this video is that it is very short, as advised by Keddie. Secondly I think it is a nice example of the use of video to ‘see beyond the spoken word’. In fact, there are no words at all in this video. However, if you listen closely, the audio is very evocative. Now it is necessary to look at the procedure suggested for the lesson around the above video on the British Council website:

Asking students to listen without watching illustrates how video can be deconstructed and how by doing that students are given the opportunity to examine the different elements of the video in separation. I particularly like the idea of students being asked to make up their own story in their heads to go with the sounds they hear. I have done this with several of my students and especially when I have pairs it is very entertaining (and I hope therefore engaging) for everyone involved in the task. Although everyone can hear the water, different students come up with different visual scenarios that could go with the sounds surprising each other with their imagination and me, who has obviously seen the video and is now ‘stuck’ its actual images.

The next steps in the procedure on the British Council website are different from what I have tended to do with students (I cannot remember whether the procedure was like this when I first came across the lesson and I just didn’t read/remember it properly – happens sometimes under extreme time pressure – or whether the original post on the website has been changed since I first saw it two years ago). Jamie Keddie calls this ‘collaborative storybuilding’ (2014: 80). I believe that storytelling is an essentially human trait that can and should be developed because being able to tell each other ‘good’ stories helps us to make deeper connections with each other. Therefore I think it is a great activity from a humanistic point of view. Of course, it is also ideal to promote language development (writing a storyboard) while being accessible to students of a wide range of language abilities (drawing or drawing + writing storyboards if writing alone is too difficult).

What I have done with students after them listening to the video is much less exciting. After discussing their own ideas about what goes with the sounds, I let them watch the video and then first verbally and then in writing describe what is happening. In this way, students have an opportunity to practise speaking/writing as well as to attend to grammar, e.g. present continuous vs present simple forms (e.g. ‘Two men are sitting in a boat. They are fishing. Suddenly something pulls on the line…’). How boring! In my defence I can only say that students keep asking me for grammar practice and that deep down my German language training has turned me into a grammar pedant. I suppose some attention to form could still be a sideline activity but obviously ‘collaborative storytelling’ is much more interactive and creative and therefore fits my newly-discovered principles (and Keddie’s) much better. The suggested extension activity – students can read the screenplays or storyboards and vote [my emphasis] which one should be made into a film – further demonstrates how student-centredness is at the heart of all considerations regarding this lesson (it fully recognises students’ right to their voice). Overall I think this is a very good lesson idea (even my slightly deficient version) which uses a great video in effective and interesting ways.

References:

Keddie, J. (2014) Bringing online video into the classroom. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Littlejohn, A (2011) ‘The analysis of language teaching materials: inside the Trojan Horse’ in Tomlinson, B (ed) Materials Development in Language Teaching (2nd edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Mishan, F. (2005) Designing Authenticity into Language Learning Materials. Bristol: Intellect Books

Roberts, J T (1996), ‘Demystifying Materials Evaluation’, System 24. No. 3. pp 375-389

Juggler, Pixabay.com

In a comment to my post where I tried to explain my rejection of the coursebook, Paul pointed out that the coursebook provides teachers who work 20-30 hours per week with a “respite from relying on their own resources”. At first I found myself quickly agreeing that, of course, teachers who work that much should be provided (be given the skills to provide themselves) with the best coursebook for their context and that for these hard-working teachers improving their skills in coursebook evaluation and materials design is the best way to achieve ‘respite’. Later I realised that in my context I, in fact, teach 15-25 hours of formal lessons per week. However, while it seems that I can include myself in the group of hard-working teachers, the conclusion I had reached was that ‘respite’ would never come from a better coursebook but instead from a different approach to materials altogether. I also realised that I might still not have made myself clear enough regarding my views on materials – what I imagine them to be, who creates them and, importantly, how they should be evaluated in order to guarantee improvement over time. To shed further light on this I think I first have to explain in more detail what my homestay teaching situation looks like.

As I said I normally teach at least 15 hours of lessons per week. I have also mentioned before that mostly these are one-to-one lessons and that that is why many activities in coursebooks do not work often simply because the group dynamics they suggest do not exist in the homestay context and because one-to-one students (or their parents) expect a more personalised course. If I were to teach the kind of one-to-one where you and your student meet once a week I would expect to prepare at least one hour per lesson taught (after all one-to-one students pay extra for lessons tailored to their needs). In my homestay situation that is not possible. If I am lucky I have about one hour set aside for lesson preparation per day (which is laughable if your aim was to design professionally-looking, personalised materials in that time like the worksheet we were asked to create for TE714 or the worksheet in Jolly & Bolitho’s ‘Framework for materials writing’ in Tomlinson, 2001: 15-121). The rest of the time is taken up by feeding up to six people three times a day, organising afternoon, evening and weekend activities for everyone, running a six-people household and (maybe the hardest) looking after everyone’s emotional needs. I do this in the summer for several weeks in a row with students changing every 1-3 weeks – it is a 24/7 job. This situation is not the same for every homestay teacher – some do not have children of their own or their children are grown up, i.e. they (might) have more time to do lesson preparation – but it is what my teaching context looks like.

So considering these facts – the lack of time for any real preparation, the unsuitability of the coursebook and the demand for a higher level of personalisation – in my lessons I am forced to either resign myself to using unsuitable material or improvise. I often opt for improvisation not because I am amazing at it or because it comes easy to me but because the alternative is even more ‘painful’ – like fitting Cinderella’s glass slipper on the ugly sister. In the past I mostly felt guilty about improvising, doubting that ‘making things up as you go along’ could ever be called proper teaching. What has recently helped me to see this in a different light are some thoughts on improvisation and creativity that came from a talk I attended at the IATEFL conference (‘Promoting Creativity through Teacher Education and Development’ – Daniel Xerri, University of Malta). Firstly this one:

“Creativity uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, skills. The more familiar the parts, the more striking the new whole.” (Koestler, 1964: 120).

At my best I think I can and have done things with my students that fulfil these criteria. The reason why qualifying of-the-moment materials in this way has come as such a revelation to me is that it presents them in a much more positive light. Of course, this definition of creativity does not presuppose improvisation as a necessity. On the other hand I do not think you can have improvisation without creativity:

“A good improvising performer as well as an improvising teacher are both well-trained, on the one hand and, on the other, both act and respond according to the here-and-now – to the occurrences of the event as it is taking place.” (Shem-Tov, 2015: 306)

And:

“Skilful improvisation always resides at the tension between structure and freedom. Of course, expert teachers have deep intuition and are talented performers, but their performance is rooted in structures and skills.” (Sawyer, 2011: 5)

From these quotes it appears that there is a way to give improvisation validity and that a teacher who improvises does not have to be less skilful, unprepared or uninformed. In fact, Dogme could be seen as a movement (can it be called that?) which has given improvisation in the English language classroom a bit of authority, despite the fact that is has been heavily debated since Scott Thornbury first introduced the idea. When I first came across the idea of Dogme attending a workshop with Luke Meddings a while back, I certainly was very impressed with the lesson he created out of next to nothing, a skill that in my context, I thought, was hugely desirable. However I am aware that even with this approach you need ways to improve the teacher’s and students’ skills of materials creation. Like teachers who use coursebooks and who want to get better at evaluating them so they end up with the one that fits their context best or who want to design coursebook-like, professional-looking materials by themselves, I would like to produce the best possible materials for my context and be able to systematically evaluate these. After all my homestay students, like other one-to-one students, pay a premium and I feel I owe it to them to be committed to improving my teaching. The above quotes clearly state that good training and a knowledge of “structures” are essential prerequisites for successful improvisation. But what would this training consist of and what are these structures?

Another analogy from the context of music comes to mind here. I learned to play the flute in the traditional way playing classical pieces from sheet music. During practice I would take the piece apart, analyse the different parts and practise them in separation so that eventually I could perform the whole piece. After a few years of this kind of training I became interested in Jazz music and tried improvising with some musician friends. I was absolutely appalling at improvisation! My skills were to read music, interpret the mood and deal with the technical challenges of the piece. I had never learned to have a free musical conversation with fellow musicians (the kind where you need to attune to each other). My children on the other hand are learning to play the piano by listening. Their teacher started practising improvisation with them from day one. That does not mean that my children do not learn any technical skills: they practise playing scales and recognising chords by ear and by the ‘shape’ their fingers make on the keyboard, for example. In contrast to me they are not fazed by the concept of improvisation and just take it to be part of their overall musical training. At the same time their technical training equips them with the single components they need to hold a musical conversation.

I think there are some parallels with ELT materials. Two routes need to be taken in order to improve the creation and evaluation of of-the-moment materials. Firstly materials need to be created regularly in contexts of improvisation to familiarise the teacher with the overall concept of improvisation (the feeling of being unprepared and having to deal with the unexpected) and teachers should be observed in and reflect on these scenarios. Secondly taking a closer look at the smallest elements of teaching materials, i.e. tasks (Ellis in Tomlinson ed., 2011; Ellis in Tomlinson, 1998; Littlejohn in Tomlinson, 1998), can provide the teacher with the knowledge of ‘structures’ that make up successful learning materials. This seems to be in agreement with Ellis’ criticism that much materials evaluation in ELT has been overly “concerned with macro-evaluation” and that instead micro-evaluation should play a more important role with evaluation of materials in-use (or rather post-use) producing much more reliable data than pre-use evaluation (Ellis in Tomlinson ed., 2011: 236-238). With regards to improvised materials the aim of the evaluation then does not necessarily lead to the improvement of the evaluated material in preparation for future use with a different group of learners but rather it serves to hone the teacher’s skills.

While improvisation is not something I would have considered as my natural choice for teaching, it often just happened to be the only choice that made sense. Since coming across movements (e.g. Dogme) or theories (e.g. more recent trends in mobile learning) that value ‘in-the-moment’ teaching, I am starting to take more ownership of the concept of improvisation. Finding that there are other teaching environments that necessitate a different approach to materials and seeing how other teachers have turned necessity into successful learning opportunities has made it possible for me to embrace improvisation as a form of teaching in its own right. Lastly, to go back to the point I have made consistently, being a successful improvising teacher provides learners with an excellent role model. For while improvisation is not and probably never will be the default model for the formal teaching and learning environment it is an essential skill for most contexts of language use.

References:

Ellis, R. (2011) Macro-and micro-evaluation of task-based teaching. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.212-235.

Ellis, R. (1998) The evaluation of communicative tasks. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.217-238.

Jolly, D. & Bolitho, R. (2011) A framework for materials writing. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.107-134.

Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Act of Creation, p38. Penguin Books, New York.

Littlejohn, A. (2011) The analysis of language teaching materials: inside the Trojan Horse. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Materials Development in Language Teaching. (2nd ed) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sawyer, K. (ed.) (2011) Structure and improvisation in creative teaching. St Louis: Washington University (http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/psychology/educational-psychology/structure-and-improvisation-creative-teaching?format=PB)

Shem-Tov, N. (2015) Improvisation is the heart of creativity. RiDE: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, Vol. 20, No. 3, 306–309

Since my post about how hard it can be to be and stay ‘engaged’ I have become increasingly unhappy with the word itself. It is as if once I had identified the emotional associations I perceive, I noticed that it did not seem to fit the kind of feeling I have in the state I would have normally called ‘engagement’. In an attempt to get to the bottom of my discontent I have looked at the origins of the word to see whether some deeper layer of meaning might be the source, at an almost unconscious level. This is what my online search came up with:

Origin

late Middle English (formerly also as ingage ): from French engager, ultimately from the base of gage¹. The word originally meant ‘to pawn or pledge something’, later ‘pledge oneself (to do something’), hence ‘enter into a contract’ (mid 16th century), ‘involve oneself in an activity’, ‘enter into combat’ (mid 17th century), giving rise to the notion ‘involve someone or something else’.

Maybe my dislike of the word comes from it originally referring to a business transaction or even confrontation. I realise that today it is frequently not used in this sense, that many see mainly positive connotations. Besides it seems to have gained a certain status as a buzzword in educational contexts. However, the connotations I perceive – possibly to do with the word’s origins – really put me off using it to describe the kind of response I am hoping for from my learners or the quality of my own interaction with them.

I have therefore been looking for an alternative and was surprised to find that the answer might have been with me for a while in a paper that I came across some time ago during my travels through ELT literature. In it Prof Dr Peter Lutzger, who has worked as an English teacher and language teacher trainer in Steiner education for many years, writes about the concept of ‘attunement’ and what it might have to do with teaching. The introductory quote by Boss (1979: 110) already uses language that strongly resonates with me:

“Every attunement as attunement is a particular mode of the perceptive openness of our existence. The prevailing attunement is at any given time the condition of our openness for perceiving and dealing with what we encounter; the pitch at which our existence, as a set of relationships to objects, ourselves and other people, is vibrating.”

Here attunement is seen as an essentially sensory concept of openness to our environment. While ‘engagement’ brings up an image in my mind of a practical relationship between involved parties who interact mainly on the level of cognition, ‘attunement’ emphasises the sensory and emotional component of the interaction maybe through its strong connection with music. When I was younger I learned to play the flute and for a while played in the school orchestra. I like the idea of comparing the classroom to an orchestra: everyone has their unique talent (different instruments – ‘individual differences’ in SLA) and if you all work in harmony you can give expression to a new reality together (a piece of music – e.g. a conversation in the L2). In order to reach harmony in an orchestra the director must make sure that all instruments are in tune (in themselves and in relation to the other instruments). The musicians themselves, although their ears might not be as trained as the director’s and although they might not be as skilled at fine-tuning, know when the whole orchestra is in tune or not – you can ‘feel’ (your ear senses) harmony or the absence of it (Have you ever been around when a violinist is out of tune? It actually ‘hurts’!). Similarly in the classroom the teacher is the language expert but importantly she also needs to make sure that she recognises her learners’ unique talents and how these can complement each other when they work in harmony in the class as a whole.

Lutzger points out that today the visual mode of perceiving the world, with deep roots that can be traced back as far as Ancient Greece, has unquestioned dominance. He proposes that there might be benefits in making listening our primary mode of perception and consequently understanding of the world. To support his argument he quotes another favourite of mine, John Dewey: “Vision is a spectator, hearing is a participation.” (1927:218/219). In order to get a grasp on the concept, Lutzger explores what expression the concept of attunement has found in medicine, psychology and spirituality.

I imagine many would like to avoid the topic of spirituality in connection with teaching either because of their secular worldview or because they recognise the many negative effects radical religious beliefs have had or are having on education. I think that would be wrong firstly because religion and spirituality, while often connected, are essentially two different things and secondly because witnessing or at least reading about the capacity for deep listening to their environment of some great spiritual leaders helps to shed light on the concept itself (Lutzger, 2014: 67/68).

Lutzger continues by questioning the applicability of the concept of attunement to teaching and wonders, if it is possible for a teacher to attune to a class of 30-40 students, i.e. if there is any point in even trying to make the concept of attunement fit the context of teaching. According to Lutzger it is a worthwhile undertaking because thinking of teaching as ‘deeply listening’ emphasises simultaneously the importance of attending to and allowing ‘silence’ in the classroom – “listening in the deeper sense of attunement often requires an absence of sound – silence” (Lutzger, 2014: 68). He points out that silence nowadays is often not given much attention and that instead our senses are bombarded and as a consequence become ‘dulled’ (unfit to enhance the learning experience?). He gives examples of past great musicians and poets who needed silence to allow their creativity to become activated. To show that encouraging silence and creativity can improve learning Lutzger also refers to Enja Riegel (2006) and her award-winning Steiner school in Germany, Helene Lang Schule, where amongst other things a ‘room of silence’ was introduced: “Learning to use and respect this space became an essential part of their entire school lives and for those educators from all over the world who came to observe the Helene Lang Schule, this room was often what impressed them the most.” (Lutzger, 2014: 70)

In an earlier post where I reflected on the TE714 session in which we were trying to identify our principles I concluded that personally I really valued a ‘silent period’  in my own learning and wondered whether I was allowing my students to experience this. Looking at Lutzger’s argument it seems that there certainly is a need for silence in the classroom and that is as a pre-requisite for creativity. As such ‘silence’ is maybe the teacher’s most valuable and essential ‘resource’. It allows the teacher to become attuned to her students and students to each other – listening to what is inside themselves as well as around – in order to make space for everyone’s creativity to emerge.

This reminds me of a session on ‘creativity’ I attended at IATEFL. Gloria Gil (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina) reported on her research on how creativity was interactively  [own emphasis added] constructed in a group of high intermediate students at a Brazilian university. As a teacher researcher she realised over the course of her project that “her being sensitive to spontaneous contributions resulted in more creative interaction than following a script”. Her overall conclusion was that creativity in the classroom is a collective undertaking: “all participants are the resources used to paint the canvas and the realization of it will be creative interactions and outcomes”. It seems to me that in this kind of environment, although the imagery comes from art rather than music, the concept of attunement is fitting because here creativity is valued and because creativity is seen as something that happens between people and not just inside the individual. This is not the case in every teaching context and maybe not even in many, but it need also not be confined to ‘alternative’ environments (such as Steiner education) only. However, as Lutzger points out himself (2014: 70/71), whether you can accommodate deep listening, attunement and creativity in your own practice does depend on your view of the human being in general terms and specifically in education. If you think teaching/learning is mainly about passing on/acquiring skills then this might not be for you. If you think, however, education is about teachers and learners attending to each other as whole persons then the concept might have value and it might be a guide to a deeper understanding of yourself and your learners.

Pixabay – Symphony Orchestra, Concert

References:

Boss, M. (1970). Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology. New York: Jason Aronson.

Dewey, J. (1927) The Public and its Problems. New York: Henry Holt.

Lutzer, P. (2014) Attunement and Teaching. RoSE Journal. Special Issue: 65-72

Inner Nationality Quiz – Earthables

Today I want to write about a lesson idea I had in the context of using digital technologies for language learning. I don’t think this is necessarily what we were meant to do, but I see some potential and would value any comments or thoughts. So here goes…

A Facebook friend recently shared one of these silly personality quizzes with me and I and a few other friends completed it which resulted in an entertaining message feed. The quiz claimed that it would help you find your ‘inner nationality’ (Your Inner Nationality). This was the introductory sentence to it: Did you ever have the feeling that you were born in the wrong country? My immediate reaction was: Yes, of course! That’s why I don’t live there anymore, isn’t it! That was all the motivation I needed. There were ten questions in total, supported by images and the whole quiz only took a few minutes to complete.

There are several reasons why I think the quiz might be usable in a classroom situation. Firstly the language is quite simple and besides text is supported by images (in the questions as well as the results), i.e. as far as language is concerned the quiz should be suitable even for learners at lower levels. Secondly, it is short and only takes a few minutes to complete, i.e. it is easy to integrate into many teaching situations. Furthermore, some of the results when I ‘played’ it with my friends were surprising and this encouraged participants to make comments (How is it possible that of those people who are apparently Italians on the inside nobody chose ‘pizza’ in the food question? Out of the people who were already not living in their country of origin nobody’s inner nationality matched that of their new chosen country!). One negative feature of this particular version of the ‘inner nationality’ quiz is that ‘Question 4’ touches on a taboo topic. However, compared with other versions of the quiz, I thought it had the best visuals (some do not have any supporting images) and while students might feel uncomfortable discussing taboo topics with classmates and teacher, in this instance they do not have to share their personal choices regarding individual questions, i.e. their preferences remain anonymous (obviously I still would not use this activity with my under-16s!).

The above reasons already speak in favour of using the quiz in class. However, the main benefit I see for using this particular quiz is that it could introduce the topic of ‘national identity’. In the past I have often taught a lesson on ‘national stereotypes’. It seems an appropriate topic when suddenly three or four nationalities live under one roof (as is the case in my homestay teaching context)! We often claim that we do not treat each other according to stereotypes (national, gender, age etc.) but in reality, I think, many of us have pre-conceptions about people who we see as belonging to a certain group. For example, if I had a penny for every time someone said to me ‘Oh, you Germans are so efficient!’, I’d be a millionaire! Of course, I don’t take comments like this too seriously. In fact, I play with this little ‘label’ myself quite a lot. Besides, I also have my own ‘labels’ for other nationalities. But sometimes the labelling does annoy me or I catch myself using labels inappropriately. Therefore I think it is worth bringing the labels to the surface from time to time. I think the language classroom is the perfect setting for this. As Kohonen remarks in Experiential Learning in Foreign Language Education (Kohonen et al, 2014: 20): “A natural task for language learning is to connect people from various cultural backgrounds and to increase the tolerance for diversity and ambiguity.”

When I taught this lesson about stereotypes in the past, I would often introduce it with one of the postcards you get in town everywhere:

The quiz to me is a more interactive way of achieving a similar goal (funny stimulus) while also being less UK-centric. I could envisage setting it as ‘homework’ before a lesson, if a class group exists somewhere on social media (as I say I first came across the quiz on Facebook and ‘played’ on my mobile). The task would be for students to complete the quiz and leave at least one comment after completion. In fact, I asked some of my TE714 seminar buddies to join in for presentation purposes and here is some of the resulting message feed (I have tried to anonymise people, but let me know if I haven’t gone far enough!):

Benefits of doing this would be that it increases out-of-class exposure to the language and that students are asked to act autonomously (in the end their participation in the quiz is up to them). It would also encourage interaction between students (through the comment feed) as well as getting students to practice their writing skills (with the added benefit that it would provide the teacher with written data of learner language).

However, the fact that the quiz does not take very long to complete would also make it possible for students to do this in class, either with that being part of the lesson plan all along or as a fall-back for students who decide not to do the quiz as homework. As a follow-up students could then compare and discuss results with a partner leading subsequently to whole-class feedback. At this point language issues could be addressed, e.g. problems with vocabulary (e.g. ‘skipping straight to dessert’, ‘on rare occasions’, ‘maybe by accident’), grammar-related questions (the famous present perfect question – ‘have you ever…?’; question formations in general), or even concept questions (What are ‘mixed emotions’? What does it mean to love s.o./s.th. ‘heart and soul’?).

For the next step in the development of the topic, I thought it might be interesting to recreate the quiz in Socrative, an online polling tool. Like the original quiz this can be accessed by students via their personal devices http://www.socrative.com/. While Socrative is probably mainly used to create quizzes that have questions with either right or wrong answers, in this case the teacher and students can use the tool to see whether they can discover patterns. What question results point to what nationality? Why might that be so? Do students agree? Why/why not?

It is worth noting here that in Socrative it is likely that students won’t remain anonymous (although they are free to choose any name they want for themselves) and therefore it might be necessary to remove ‘Question 4’.

Socrative – Teacher Screen

Socrative – Student Screen

I realise that, throughout the process, I have been treating the ‘inner nationality’ quiz as if it were a serious instrument for assessing human nature. Of course, that is not the case! The quiz is really only a game and not very deep.  It is unlikely that patterns will point to some underlying truth or there might not even be much of a pattern in the first place. However, I like the idea of introducing Socrative because it encourages students to look at the topic from a different angle, while also teaching them about how Socrative works. At this point I would hope that students start questioning the categories of the quiz itself and why these should determine nationality, i.e. treat it less like a ‘proper’ task in its own right. They might realise that only a very select number of nationalities have made it into the quiz. Discussions could therefore now move on to questions like: Why is my nationality not represented? How does that make me feel? What are my feelings about my own national identity? What do I think makes national identity? How important is it to me? How important is it in my relationships with people from other countries? Etc.

Quiz Chart

This could then lead to a task where students create their own categories and maybe create a quiz on Socrative about their own nationality, this time with right and wrong answers, maybe along the lines of: How German are you? One or more students (from the same national background?) could work together to come up with questions about their nationality determining what is essential knowledge or behaviour to belong to this nationality (questions could be serious or fun – students decide the tone of the quiz). If this was set as a homework task, then students could present their quiz to their peers in a future lesson with students completing each other’s quizzes.

My hope for the activity as a whole would be that students enjoy it for being unusual and maybe even fun but that they also see, how it can move forward their language learning. Furthermore I think it could make them aware of how we/they relate to each other on various levels, nationality informing and shaping at least to some extent their own as well as other people’s identities. As a combination of different tasks it has all my favourite ingredients: it starts with ‘authentic’ material (ignoring the debate about the term for a moment, I go with the definition ‘not originally created for language learning purposes’), it’s game-like and interactive (the quiz itself – especially when first played within social media – and the Socrative extension), it can be out-of-class and, my personal favourite, it’s (or rather it could be) about ‘learner identitiy’.

Refercence:

Kohonen, V., Jaatinen, R., Kaikkonen, P., Lehtovaara, J. (2001) Experiential Learning in Foreign Language Education, Harlow, England: Longman.

I feel that in the context of ‘using visuals in the classroom’ I should explain, why I have chosen to head my blog with the artwork by Brighton artist Petrusco (incidentally but equally unintentionally in the same week we started talking about visuals in TE714). I think it is a good example of a visual with multiple layers of messages intended partly by the creator but also leaving room for interpretation by the ‘reader’.

I came across this quite by chance in a side street off the London Road in Brighton and instantly loved it for several reasons. Firstly, I like the message or rather the messages – both visual and text (in my opinion it effectively illustrates how the two modes can enhance each other). It conveys that a change of your mindset – at least at deeper levels (‘revolution’) – cannot be achieved without some significant ‘pain’ (the gun to the head) but that after the initial trauma the result can be something rather beautiful, a new freedom (the butterflies). The ‘join in’ communicates furthermore that changing your mindset is not something that should be kept to yourself. Instead it becomes even more powerful if you do it together with other people. Applied to the context of education it could stand for my belief that education needs a bit of a ‘shake-up’ with less attention being given to individual testing and top-down policy decision-making towards more collaborative approaches that value teachers’ and learners’ input, processes and project work and the emotional component in learning. I recently wrote an essay on the potential of using an experiential learning approach in study abroad contexts – an approach that could be considered quite ‘revolutionary’ as it adovates the kind of things I just mentioned – and I found that both teachers and learners find it difficult, at least initially, to move away from the understanding of teacher as instructor and learner as ‘consumer’ of knowledge bites to teacher as guide/facilitator but not necessarily expert and learner as agent and producer. However, by ‘pushing through’ this intial discomfort and by teachers working collaboratively for support, experiential learning practices can be very rewarding for teacher and learner alike (see for example Kohonen et al., 2001 & Kolb et al., 2014).

Secondly, the image’s location to me seems almost as important as the image itself. The fact that it was simply out in the street, reaching a wide and varied audience in that way, represents a very particular definition of ‘art’ and what/who it is there for. It perfectly illustrates one of Pertrusco’s main messages about art: that it should not be hidden away in galleries, the artist at the mercy of the gallery owner’s decision and the art only accessible to a select few (Petrusco’s eye – Outdoor Activities). Related to this is that the image also addresses the issue of ownership and copyright. The fact that it is signed ‘Agent Petruscioni’ suggests that the individual artist is not considered to be of that much importance. What is important, on the other hand, is that the message of the artwork is spread/shared and that it reaches the intended audience, i.e. everyone. This is what enabled me to easily ‘lift’ it and open it up to a new, different, bigger audience by using additional media – my phone’s camera and subsequently this blog. It also opened up the possibility of using the image for my own context of education and language teaching. As I said, this is a very particular view of what art/the purpose of art is and it raises the question of how one can combine this noble vision with the artist’s need to have some financial recognition of their work in order to be able to continue practising the same.

And lastly, the image felt very ‘Brighton’ and as I do consider myself to be a ‘Brightonian’ by choice – heart and soul – I can use it to show my connection to the city and what it stands for. To elaborate on what I consider to be the spirit of Brighton and just for a bit of fun, here another nice visual – this time a video which recently went viral on Facebook. Interestingly it was first brought to my attention by a friend who did the TESOL course with me last year but who has since (and at the time of sharing the video with me) moved abroad. Hail the power of social media!

“Pure joy on the streets of Brighton” by Ezda Beevers

What would our students make of this?!

I think overall Petrusco’s artwork is a great example of how images can hold powerful messages which can be encoded as well as decoded at different levels with different layers of messages being present, sometimes with the intention of the original encoder and sometimes with new messages being perceived and added by the decoder. As teachers we would do well remembering this when using images in the classroom. There is a lot we can teach our students about the reading of images but I suspect equally a lot we can learn from our students. After all, especially when it comes to ELT, the different cultures and backgrounds our students come from will have an effect on how they read an image and consequently on how we communicate about this image.

References:

Kohonen, V., Jaatinen, R., Kaikkonen, P., et al. (2001) Experiential Learning in Foreign Language Education, Harlow, England: Longman.

Kolb, D. A. (1984) Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development, Englewood Cliffs, [N.J.];London;: Prentice-Hall.

I have just discovered Ryot, an online virtual reality and immersive storytelling company which has recently become part of The Huffington Post. The main idea behind Ryot is to make news stories more personal and to create opportunities for the audience to join in and develop the story rather than just consume it in a detached and often helpless way. In their words:

“We wanted to make the news empowering rather than depressing. To turn people on by what was happening around them rather than turn them off. Throughout RYOT’s journey, we searched for the next technology to bring us closer into the story and we found virtual reality.”(http://ryot.huffingtonpost.com/welcome-to-ryot/)

The short films in particular are very powerful and I could see them being used in class to stimulate discussion and develop critical thinking (if that is appropriate in the teaching context). They are also great for showing off new technology at its most impressive and innovative – virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality (with the App you get 360 video on your phone). I am hoping to look at one film in more detail in future and work on some ideas for a lesson. For now I would just like to make people aware of the existence of the site and give an example of what kind of films there are…

For our last seminar one of the tasks we could choose to work on was to create an infographic to use in class. The other tasks were more to do with exploring what visuals added to language teaching materials and how/to what extent certain textbooks had achieved this. I do not need any convincing that visuals can enhance the learning process (in fact, I believe that the more senses you get involved the better!) and neither does it particularly surprise me that visual messages are often not encoded/decoded successfully, especially if the context is not understood sufficiently or known to the encoder/decoder. So I was quite happy to leave it to the seminar to address these issues.

What I wanted to do was to experiment with my own visual. As usual I was faced with the problem that I did not have a particular class/group of learners in mind for whom I was creating this visual. In this instance, however, this was quite liberating as it meant I could experiment with different elements of the process and the technologies needed along the way without having to worry too much about the result. As it turned out, I am not particularly proud of the end product and I doubt it will ever find its way into my classroom (at least not in its current state). I am, however, pleased with the process that got me there.
Before I looked at the preparation sheet for the seminar I had never given infographics much thought, not reflected on how I ‘consume’ them, not used them in class and definitely not thought of designing one myself. So my first stop was the suggested TED talk by David McCandless which I found absolutely fascinating (The beauty of data visualization – David McCandless). It was amazing to watch how facts/data appeared in a completely new light when they were transformed into visual information. However, in the talk infographics were very much about clever design and aesthetics and I felt that in an educational context and with my task the information element might be the one to concentrate on first.

In order to find out more about how infographics can be used for language teaching I therefore turned to Nik Peachy who provides the following useful definition which can also serve as an explanation why it might be good to use them in educational contexts:

An infographic is a visual representation of, what is often, quite dense statistical information. This is the kind of information which can be very difficult to read as prose/text but which, when transformed to a visual, can become accessible very quickly. (Exploiting infographics for ELT – Nik Peachy)

That made me think of another area I have been wanting to explore: corpora research. I thought that information you gather about language from a corpus is very much about numbers and could therefore benefit from being supported visually. I have never used an online corpus for research or in teaching but love the idea of it being about the language of ‘real’ people in ‘real’ life providing data that can be used by students to make their own discoveries about the language they are learning (I realise that this point is controversial as some put forward the argument that this ‘real’ language loses its ‘authentic’ meaning as soon as it is taken out of its original context, but this is not the place to go into detail).

I found phrasesinenglish.org (via the British National Corpus website) and chose the word ‘learn’ – quite a random choice and probably not the most useful but I am really into ‘learning’ at the moment – theory and practice – which seemed as good a reason as any at the time (especially considering that I did not have a real class in mind, i.e. no real teaching point to make). I then asked for any two-word combinations which delivered the following list:

To turn this information into something visual I used the draw.io programme on Nik Peachy’s recommendation (https://www.draw.io/). I went down the list and created bubbles of different sizes, the size relating to the frequency of the combination. I then decided to leave the visual at that, as I thought that in a proper teaching scenario students could find additional information themselves and choose their own examples. That way they might find out that ‘learn to’ and ‘learn how to’ are used in the same way, that both of these are followed by verbs whereas ‘learn from’ is followed by a noun/nouns (e.g. from our mistakes, from their masters) and that the ‘at’ in ‘learn at’ does not really belong to ‘learn’ but to the phrase following which tends to give information about where the learning is taking place (e.g. at school, at college) or how fast (e.g. at his or her own speed, at different rates). For me the important thing was that students, at least in principle, would be free to make their own discoveries which we could then examine together.

The last stage in my learning process was to find out what format this visual would best be saved in (jpeg or gif seem to be the obvious) and where (e.g. Google Drive or One Drive) in order to share it most conveniently with the other people in my study group but also with prospective students.

In summary, although I am not that happy about the infographic created, I feel I have learned a lot in the space of a week and I am confident that the process could be applied to a real teaching scenario. The task also illustrates how proactive I have become with regards to using technology for teaching. It shows that, if even a technophobe like me is able to come up with at least something over the course of a week, then anything is possible! This goes back to what I said in my very first post on this blog: I like to think of teaching as ‘leading by example’. If I want my students to be curious, I need to give them a taste of my own curiosity; if I want them to be comfortable admitting their ignorance, I need to be able to prove to them that not knowing something does not have to be embarrassing; if I want my students to be creative and proactive, I need to give them examples of something I have created.

A tweet by Alec Couros about the BcCampus Open Textbook Project caught my eye the other day as it reminded me of something I had read about in Brian Tomlinson’s introduction to Materials Development in Language Teaching. In the article I had particularly liked the parts about textbook projects (Tomlinson in Tomlinson ed., 2011: 10 &  24/25), i.e. material design collaborations between teachers, curriculum designers, publishers, researchers and other experts. I am not particularly fond of centrally produced, prescriptive textbooks so the idea of a collaborative enterprise of this kind is very appealing and I can certainly see why Tomlinson would call it “productive”. Unfortunately I was unable to find anything more about the projects Tomlinson was involved in. However, I believe the contributions below also have relevance to ELT.

The purpose of the textbook project in British Columbia, Canada, is to make educational resources affordable and accessible to a higher number and a wider range of students. These open educational resources (OERs) are based on the following principles of open education:

1. Retain – i.e. no digital rights management restrictions (DRM), the content is yours to keep, whether you’re the author, instructor or student.
2. Reuse – you are free to use materials in a wide variety of ways without expressly asking permission of the copyright holder.
3. Revise – as an educator, you can adapt, adjust, or modify the content to suit specific purposes and make the materials more relevant to your students. This means making it available in a number of different formats and including source files, where possible.
4. Remix – you or your students can pull together a number of different resources to create something new.
5. Redistribute – you are free to share with others, so they can reuse, remix, improve upon, correct, review or otherwise enjoy your work.

I also came across the ‘Global textbook project: new horizons in textbook marketing’ (Pitt et al, 2009). Here the context of teaching is not ELT but Business Studies. This project was the brainchild of Professor Rick Watson of the University of Gerogia’s Terry College of Business. After failing to source a textbook he deemed appropriate for his graduate class he decided “that the textbook for the course would be written, reviewed, and edited by the course members and ultimately used by the course members” (299/300) using Wiki software to create a Wikibook. The main goal was to create teaching materials that were relevant and free to the student-authors as well as students on subsequent courses. Although the students had to work extremely hard to produce a textbook of a high enough quality to pass on to future classes as well as management of the project being considerable, the end product (maybe not so much ‘end’ as future users can make contributions of their own) and the concept were a success overall. The project continued to grow into the ‘global text project’ which aims to open up more textbooks that are freely available to the user.

I don’t see why the above principles could not be transferred to ELT. While the workload involved in the projects seems considerable for both students and teachers, the obvious attraction of the products they generate lies in the fact that these are affordable, likely to be more relevant to the unique teaching context, flexible (as they allow changes over time) and encourage a high level of interaction between all interested parties.

References: