While taking this module, I have been noting down any event which I perceived as a critical incident. The five that I deemed the most noteworthy I have posted on this blog as critical incidents 1-5. However, there were some other incidents that didn’t make the cut that I think are still worth mentioning. Although I’m not planning to go into as much detail as the ones I have already posted, I will continue to number them. So here are my critical incidents 6-9:

Critical incident 6 – Students refusing to work together

This was a cultural issue. In the ESOL Entry 1 class, there was an issue where some of the male Arabic students refused to work with the female Arabic students. This was made all the more interesting because the same male students had no problem working with female students from other countries.

This was something I hadn’t come across before, as when I had taught in the Middle East, as I had taught male-only classes. During the lesson, I decided not to push the issue and let the students work with who they wanted to. However, reflecting on the incident, it did bother me.

After the lesson, I spoke with their teacher (as it was a cover class) and asked if she had experienced this problem and how she handled it. They said that this was a common issue at the beginning of the entry 1 class and that it wasn’t something she really noticed in the higher-level groups and postulated that maybe it was because the students in the Entry 1 class had not lived in the UK for long and therefore were still getting used to the cultural difference here.

It raised an interesting question for me:

‘How much should we impose our cultural norms on students, especially ones which reflect the equality and diversity policies which we adhere to?’

To follow up on this, I discussed the issue with my manager who ardently believed that if the students wanted to study in the college, then they had to respect and follow the principles of diversity and inclusion that the college, and British society, adhered to.

It is an interesting area for discussion. While I believe that equality and diversity is an important and essential part of our society, I also worry about the intercultural conflict that this may cause for learners who have grown up with different views of society.

Critical incident 7 –  Institutional needs Vs Educational needs

Last summer, I was employed as the summer school coordinator at the college I work for. My duties included inducting and testing new students, classing students, assigning teachers to classes and ensuring the smooth running of the summer school.

The critical incident happened towards the end of the summer when the student numbers had started to go down. As a result of this, my manager instructed me to reduce the number of adult classes to two. This meant that we had any student who got less than 50% in the placement test in the lower class and those who scored 51% and above in the higher class.

This was an issue for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it meant that the level of the students in the low class ranged from low elementary to intermediate, and in the higher class, they ranged from intermediate to advanced.

While myself and the two teachers understood the economic reasons for this, the strain on the teachers and the failure to adequately provide the learners with what they had expected caused what had otherwise been a very successful summer to end on a bad note.

I list this as a critical incident because it brings up the question of whether or not institutions should focus only on economic factors. If we had kept the other levels open then we would have ended up with some classes with only a few students, and of course, after paying the teachers, the profit would have been reduced, or even a loss may have been incurred. However, in a competitive industry, failing to meet student expectations could lead to less returning students and poor feedback.

I followed this up by discussing this with my manager after the summer had finished, and he agreed it was a problem that needed looking at. In the end, we decided that we would not run lessons in the last week of August and any students enrolled long term would be offered a break and then could join the ESOL classes when term started. At the time, it seemed like a fair compromise, and we will see how it turns out next summer. It has left me wondering whether financial factors are more important than educational needs and whether the two can really co-exist.

Critical incident 8 – When learner expectations don’t match my teaching beliefs

An incident which actually surprised me in class was when a student refused to participate in pair or group work because they believed that there was no value in conversing with other students and that it was only through speaking with the teacher that they would improve.

I had experienced this before but had always been able to explain the benefits of student interaction, and the issue was quickly resolved. However, this particular student refused to accept my explanation and was adamant that the only time she wanted to speak was directly with me.

I view this as a critical incident because I was unable to persuade the student and not wanting to derail my whole lesson, I bent to her will, and while the rest of the class chatted in pairs or groups, I sat with this student and did the pair work with her.

To try and solve this problem, I spoke privately with the student after class, and she very reluctantly agreed to participate in group and pair work and interact with the other learners.

I have mentioned this to several colleagues, and they all agreed that this was a learner expectation that couldn’t be catered for. Still, it did make me wonder whether the style of teaching that we employ does cause anxiety for our learners on a wider scale and whether I should be more flexible when I encounter it.

Critical incident 9 – Lessons derailed by current events

I have discussed the sudden transition to online teaching in my fourth critical incidents post. However, before the closure of the college and the move to online classes, the Coronavirus pandemic had already begun to affect classes.

A class which usually had eleven students became a class of three. Two international students had returned to their countries. One student was self-isolating because he had recently returned from Italy, and the rest were either self-isolating because of medical conditions or were too scared to come in.

I had planned to teach a lesson on active and passive forms and already had the lesson ‘menu’ on the smartboard as the students arrived. However, after a minute or so, I realised that they were not engaged at all and when I asked what was wrong, they told me that they wanted to talk about the coronavirus.

If I’m honest, I wasn’t even sure if I was allowed to talk about the pandemic with my students, so I immediately felt like I was being put in an awkward position. Ultimately I made a judgement call and decided to speak about it with them. In fact, what they actually wanted to talk about was if the college was going to close and if it did how would that affect their studies. I’ve reconciled that it was ok to talk about that, but what the critical incident was for me was:

• Should I abandon my lesson plan to discuss issues that learners want to discuss?
• And if I do, how do I decide which issues are valid enough to abandon my lesson plan?

These are still questions that I don’t know the answer to. Maybe it is just a matter of making a judgement call at the time.

I wanted to try something different when reflecting on my fifth critical incident.  While the critical incident itself happened to me while I was teaching, I had read about collaborative reflection in Mann and Walsh (2017: 178). I thought that engaging in this kind of reflection with a peer may be something useful.

I chose my wife to collaborate with because a) she has a DELTA and b) due to the lockdown it made sense. My partner passed her DELTA in 2003 and was the Academic Manager at Embassy English language school in Hastings. Over the years, she has observed countless teachers, and I value her experience and input.

The critical incident itself didn’t seem too important at the time, but the ensuing discussion I had with my partner about it was quite thought-provoking. While teaching my 1:1 student online, she commented that the language she studies in her English lessons at college is different to the language that British people use in real life.  She has mentioned this on several occasions as she struggles to communicate in ‘real life’ situations despite moving up levels at college.

It was something that I hadn’t given much thought to  and I didn’t really know how to respond to my student. When I discussed it with my partner, I was surprised that she said she agreed with my student. We discussed how the language we teach in our lessons is pre-determined and very controlled and asked ourselves whether without real-life exposure to the language could learners really achieve fluency.

The more we wrestled with the question, the more we realised that there are so many areas of real-life communication that we don’t teach in our language lessons. For example, the vocabulary used by the younger generations or modern slang words or phrases, although we admitted that we didn’t keep up with these ourselves.

Another area that we thought was not focused on as much as it could be was humorous language.  Both of us had encountered some materials based around jokes, but we both agreed that we had rarely seen any material that teaches learners about irony and sarcasm, which are two types of humour that are extremely prevalent in British society.

Salvatore Attardo (2017) discusses the need to recognise and understand the ‘tone of voice’ that is used when people are being ironic or sarcastic and talks about the multifunctional aspect of humour and how it often serves several functions at once. This led us to wonder if it is something that can be taught at all or if it is something that can only be acquired from real-life experience.

My partner had also discussed this issue with other teachers before and they all noted that for certain nationalities sarcasm and irony is more embedded in their culture which makes learning real-life communication, even British humour, in English a lot more accessible to them.

To help me explore the subject more, my partner showed me a book by Widdowson (1978), which discusses teaching English as communication and focuses on language use, which I am currently reading.

Ultimately the discussion did open my eyes to the possibility that the language that we are teaching in the class is indeed different from the language that people actually use. I think this relates back to what we studied in the SLA module and whether or not second language acquisition is viewed from a cognitivist or social viewpoint. Although If I’m being honest, I’m not really sure how to deal with this piece of information and how it might influence my beliefs as a teacher.

Cognitivist and social views of LA – Larsen-Freeman (2007)

• Attardo, S. 2017 Humor in Language, oxford research encyclopedia, linguistics. Oxford University Press USA.
• Larsen-Freeman, D. 2007, “Reflecting on the Cognitive-Social Debate in Second Language Acquisition”, The Modern Language Journal, vol. 91, no. 1, pp. 773-787.
• Mann, S. & Walsh, S. 2017, Reflective practice in English language teaching: research-based principles and practices, Routledge, Abingdon;New York.
• Widdowson, H.G. 1978, Teaching language as communication, Oxford University Press, Oxford (etc.).

Source – skynews-boris-johnson-coronavirus

The COVID-19 has resulted in schools shutting all across the world. As a result, my role as a teacher has changed dramatically. The sudden shift away from the classroom and onto online teaching has been both challenging and instructive. For most teachers at my college, not just the ESOL department, the rapid and unplanned move to online learning was somewhat nerve-racking as very few people had any experience  in online teaching and no time to receive any formal training from the college.

For the ESOL department, moving to online classes presented itself with its own set of difficulties. Most of our students come from disadvantaged backgrounds and didn’t have the technology to participate in digital learning. To overcome this, the college provided digital equipment such as laptops or tablets to students in need, but even then there was the issue of connectivity.

From a personal viewpoint, although I approached teaching online with some trepidation, I was also very keen to develop my skills in this area. I’m quite tech-savvy, so I didn’t think using the technology would be a big issue, but I was worried about how my teaching style would translate to online classes. Also, I wondered whether this transition from face-to-face to online teaching would require me to abandon all my teaching and classroom management techniques. After twenty years of classroom teaching, would I, in effect, be starting out again as a teacher?

The answer was, of course, no. My teaching style and techniques are still applicable, although of course, I have to adjust and adapt to the online environment. I think my most significant difficulty at first was in the lesson planning stages. Having no training or experience of delivering online classes, I felt like the effectiveness of my first few lessons diminished because I was doing no more than attempting to replicate the physical classroom through online video.  My response to this was also problematic as I began using the fact the lessons were ‘online’ as my starting point when lesson planning which meant that the lesson aims and learner outcomes became secondary to the technology.

I think I am still a work in progress when it comes to online learning, but I feel that after the initial teething problems I have developed an approach to planning my lessons that works for me, which I have attempted to show in the following diagram:

Peer discussion and sharing of ideas has been valuable, and as a cohort, I believe we are improving every day.  An area of online teaching that I think was overlooked at the beginning but which came up during our peer discussions was about how the students had to adapt to online learning and the challenges that they faced from the transition to online classes. Learner motivation has been an issue, as has the loss of the social aspect of attending class. To address this, we have encouraged students to set up Whatsapp groups and are supporting the learners to set up their own virtual meet-up sessions with each other.

Is learning online as effective?

Personally, I would say no. Although I believe this has a lot to do with my lack of training or experience of teaching online. It has been a learning curve, but as I discover more online tools and resources, I can offer my students more, such as interactive quizzes and learning activities which are gradually raising the effectiveness of my online lessons.

I think that due to the current situation, online learning may become a permanent fixture of my teaching for the foreseeable future. Even with talk of the college possibly reopening in the autumn, the idea of offering blended classes is being seriously considered.

I think, as a teacher, this is an important stage in my continuing professional development which I have to come to terms with and I hope teaching online is something I can become proficient in. For now though, as I mentioned earlier, it is still very much a work in progress. I think the most important thing I have learned though, is that throughout my teacher career I have adapted to different contexts and teaching environments and that the move to online teaching is just another context for me to adapt to.

My third critical incident is quite an interesting one. The Entry 1 ESOL class at the college had been together for almost five months when two new students joined them. It very quickly became apparent that both of the new students’ level was at way below the level of the other students and it was decided that they would be taken out of that class and a new ‘pre-entry’ class would be formed specifically for the two students.

Both of the students were from Arabic countries (one from Qatar and the other from Saudi Arabia), and it was decided that because of my experience with Arabic learners, I would teach the class.

Why I think this was an interesting critical incident is that despite both students understanding that they needed to be in this lower level class, they were both unhappy about being taught separately from the other students.

At the beginning, it was explained to them that they would have 1:2 teaching, which would mean they would get a lot more teacher attention, and their individual problems would be addressed. Initially, they were hard-working and had a positive attitude, but after a few weeks, they began to lose interest and frequently asked when other students would be joining their class and their motivation levels dropped.

From my perspective I felt that we covered a lot of work, and they definitely improved their speaking confidence and pronunciation and were able to use new vocabulary effectively. But as their motivation decreased, their general attitude in class changed. They began arriving late for class or even missing days and more often than not, they hadn’t done their homework.

I think that one of the main reasons for this was that their expectations of coming to the UK to study English were not solely based on learning the language.  At the beginning they  appreciated that they were learning.  However,  the feeling that they were missing out on the social element of being in a larger class with learners from other countries overtook any of the positives of the extra teacher attention they were getting. It also didn’t help that they were both Arabic speakers.

It was an interesting situation, and even I wondered if they would be better off in the higher level class. This caused me to ponder:

• Could the benefits of being in a multilingual class and the social interaction that they would get from it both in and out of the class, actually aid their learning more than being in the correct level without any other students?

I believe the answer to this question is no, as I feel the gap between their knowledge and what would be taught in the higher level class would be too big.  Instead, I think they would pick up random phrases and snippets of the language being taught but wouldn’t be able to develop any meaningful structure to their language. However, I do recognise the high value of  social interaction between learners in multilingual classes and how this can aid motivation and accelerate learners’ progress.

I spoke at length about this issue with my manager, and we thought about ways to resolve the issue. In the end, we offered the learners a choice between carrying on as they were or stopping the lessons and letting them join the Entry Level 1 class at the beginning of the next academic year. Interestingly enough they both opted to continue with the lessons in the ‘Pre-Entry’ class with the view to extending their stay here and joining the Entry Level 1 in September.

To follow up, I spoke to the teacher of the Entry Level 1 class. She agreed to let my two students join her class for the second half of her Friday morning lessons as that was the time when she played games with her learners or had social events such as the learners bringing in traditional food from their countries. I think this gave my two students the best of both worlds. They were able to develop their language in a class that suited them and still get to interact and make friends with some other students.

With regards to my teacher development, I think this was an ‘eye-opening’ moment. As a teacher, I believed that if the students are learning, then everything is ok. However, sometimes I forget that other issues can affect learner motivation and attitude, and this is something I need to be aware of in the future.