Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom by Tricia Hedge

Detailed, accessible, practical and extremely useful

Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom is an enormously helpful and important book for those wishing to improve their teaching. It is jam packed not only with good ideas and examples, but also with great advice for better enabling your students to learn English. There are a few books out there that attempt to cover every aspect of teaching a language, but I’d say that in my reading so far Hedge’s book is the best.

The book is divided into three parts: A frame work for teaching and learning; Teaching the language system and Developing the language skills. These are further divided into sub sections on various topics, for example: grammar, listening and assessment to name but a few. Each section begins with some provocative questions that aim to activate your own experience and opinions and are supported by notes at the back of the book. Any one of these sections could be read in isolation and would be an excellent starting place for further, more detailed study.

The book starts unimpressively, with brief chapters on how languages are learned (covered much better and comprehensively in Lightbrown and Spada’s great volume) and if you’ve already read a book of this type then these can be safely skim read. With this first section out of the way however, it quickly becomes clear that Hedge has many, many useful and essential things to say about learning and teaching.

The writing is clear and direct, being mercifully free of much of the jargon that plagues the profession and makes so much literature impenetrable. This is not to say that the work is lightweight. Far from it, Hedge quotes from various respected names in Second Language Acquisition and English language teaching and really goes into details about important issues.

The nice thing about the book is that while it not only contains a lot of theory there are also a lot of practical ideas which simply beg to be incorporated into your teaching as soon as possible. Supporting these ideas are many examples of activities from course books and materials which I found were excellent, as the basis for writing my own activities and materials to help my students.

If Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener is important reading for teachers just starting out, then Teaching and Learning in the Language Classroom is indispensable for those further on in their careers, such as teachers who perhaps wish to pursue the DELTA qualification or an MA.

Using newspapers to teach skimming, scanning and reading for detail

It was while recently reading Inside Teaching by Tim Bowen and Jonathan Marks, that I picked up this great idea for using newspapers to teach reading skills which I have expanded below. My students have found this to be a very engaging series of tasks. Much of this is work that students can do with very little direct teacher input, thus giving opportunities to see students at work and reflect upon their learning styles and individual abilities.

Level: Pre-intermediate to advanced (B1 and above)

Aims: To give practice in different reading strategies such as skimming, scanning and reading for detail; to make knowledge of these strategies explicit to students; to practice making questions; to encourage collaborative work and the division of responsibilities; to explore newspapers.

Objectives: To complete a teacher-constructed quiz; to devise a quiz; to complete a student-constructed quiz.

Preparation: Multiple copies of the same newspaper (the amount will depend on your class size but I would suggest that one copy for 3-4 students is a good ratio); a pre-prepared quiz of 8-10 questions.

Procedure:

1. Create your own quiz of 8-10 questions based on a newspaper of your choice. The complexity of the questions and the type of newspaper will depend on your class. Will your students prefer to work with broadsheets or tabloids? Be aware though that while much of the subject matter in tabloid newspapers is simpler than that of their broadsheet counterparts, the language used can be just as (if not more) challenging for students.
2. Devise questions that have clear answers that can only be found by reading the newspaper. Such a question might be “Where did President Obama give a speech yesterday?”
3. Work out a range of questions that can only be answered by looking at many different sections of the newspaper. All areas are fair game here: Politics; entertainment; the weather; culture; classified ads; horoscopes.
4. Make your quiz progressively more difficult. The answer to question 1 could be in one of the headlines on the first few pages, while question 10 could be embedded in a small ad.
5. Demonstrate the activity to the whole class by writing a simple example question on the board. Show the process of skimming and scanning as you search for the answer. Stop short of finding the answer.
6. Divide your class into groups of 3-4 students. Ask the students to find the answer to the question on the board. Encourage them to make their work more efficient by dividing the paper up between them.
7. When one group has found the answer stop the class and ask them to explain how they found it.
8. Now distribute your quiz. Skimming and scanning are skills that are often performed in exam conditions and therefore must be done quickly and under pressure. Simulate this by making the quiz into a race. Give the groups a time limit (15-20 minutes is usually a good idea depending on the quiz) but also give any group the option of halting the quiz when they think they have finished (they could do this by shouting out a team name or ringing a bell for example).
9. When the time is up, or one group stops the activity, go through the answers as a class. Include all the groups as you elicit where and how they found the answers.

Now its time for the teams to shift their focus from skimming and scanning skills to reading for detail and forming questions.

1. Tell the groups that they are now going to make their own quiz based on the same newspaper.
2. Set a time limit for making the quiz and tell the class how many questions it should make. It’s a good idea to have each member of the group responsible for a certain amount of questions. In a group of four each person could write two questions, thus creating an eight question quiz.
3. Get the students to write a first draft and encourage them to edit each other’s work so that the questions are formed properly and make sense. You may need to do some work here, helping students out with grammar and spelling.
4. Eventually have each group write out multiple copies of their quiz. This ensures that everybody has something to do. Also it means when the other groups do the quiz they will have more than one copy to look at.

Now simply have the students complete another group’s quiz .

I found this got my students to read the newspaper enthusiastically. Because they were reading with a view to create questions, they didn’t worry about understanding everything. The positive offshoot of this is that they were able to relax and really engage with the content of the newspaper. It was very interesting to see people sitting down and concentrating for long periods of time on one single piece of a broadsheet. I’ve found this lesson to work with all ages too, from children to adults. Afterwards the students feel empowered that they have managed to create something quite sophisticated with the minimum of teacher help.

While the activity itself is rather artificial, it does practice many different skills and it does also use authentic material. It really is a good opportunity for exploring real world English. Students also often find interesting stories that they wish to share with the class for their own sake, or that can be exploited by the teacher at a later date.

The lesson promotes a lot of discussion, as students not only discuss what the answers to questions are, but also what could constitute good quiz questions.

I intend to repeat a similar process to this with different types of texts. It will be interesting to see how students make a quiz based on a piece of audio or video. Also, I have considered that it may be a good way to prepare students for reading exams, enabling them to get inside the mind of a test deviser and allowing them to make their own test preparation materials.

Using storyboards to teach English

Check out my interesting and fun lesson plan for teaching English using advertising and storyboards. There is a detailed lesson plan and all the materials you need.

Go to: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/try/lesson-plans/advertisement-storyboard