A good read if you teach very young learners

A collection of extracts from various sources on what it means to be a reflective teacher, Readings for Reflective Teaching has a misleading title in that it is not specific enough. This is a book dealing primarily with the teaching of young learners and more accurately with the teaching of primary schoolchildren in the UK.

The book is divided into eighteen sections dealing with various aspects of teaching. The selection is wide-ranging, each section typically beginning with something fairly general and subsequent readings dealing with more specific areas on that topic. The book covers a large historical period, with the first reading dating from 1933 and others from the last decade. In between there are readings from landmark essays and government documents which help to give an historical perspective of primary teaching in the UK.

If you are a primary school teacher in the UK then I am sure you will get a tremendous amount from this book. Other teachers however will need to read very selectively, and may be disappointed with the amount of relevant material.

The book begins promisingly enough, with some general extracts from important papers dealing with reflective thinking and practice in general. These are very thought provoking and can be applied to any teaching and learning situation. There is a lot here on the thought processes a reflective practitioner goes through, and the practical steps that they take. Also there are nice readings on Action Research, which provide definitions and give some practical ideas.

After that the book loses relevance for all but the specific kind of teacher that I mentioned earlier. If you teach English solely to adults then this is really where you should stop reading. If you teach English as a foreign (or second) language to young learners then it is still worth reading on. You will need to pick your way around irrelevant texts, such as UK government documents, but there is still much to be gained.

In particular there are many readings that help you see things from a pupil’s point of view. The sections on motivating students, class management and teachers’ classroom talk are particularly good at this.

The book falls down mostly in that it tries to cover too much ground. Often the most interesting readings are merely snippets. Although the introduction stresses that we should read the original essays and papers if we find anything interesting, this still feels a bit incomplete.

Perhaps I am being too picky here. The book certainly is thought provoking and serves as a useful start to many a research question. Overall though, this is a book you should only buy if you are, or plan to be, a UK primary school teacher.

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.

A painless guide to statistical research in second language learning

Perhaps it is fitting that the man with the coolest name in ESL has written a book on what many might consider to be its least exciting aspect. I like this book, as James Dean Brown is certainly successful in presenting research in second language learning, and the statistics that go along with it, in an interesting way.

As Brown says in the preface, many teachers are scared about the prospect of deciphering large numbers and applying statistical formulae. The aim of this book is to explain this statistical side to the profession in as clear a way as possible, so that classroom teachers can read and critique studies and ultimately apply the knowledge they have gained to their own teaching.

The thirteen chapters can roughly be broken down into three sections. In the first, Brown covers the basics of research: how studies are conceived, organised and conducted. Also in this first section we are given an example of one of the author’s own studies, in order to see how such a thing is finally written up and presented. In the second section we are introduced to statistical theory and how this applies to second language learning. In the third and final section, Brown looks at three common kinds of study in order to apply and revise the material already presented.

If you are a person who is intimidated by mathematics and statistics then there is little need to worry here. Brown introduces concepts in a sensible, logical and methodical fashion. I found that there were sections that I needed to reread, but on the whole, the text is easy to digest and understand.

At the end of each chapter there are review questions. In this kind of book I usually find this to be a rather annoying practice but here it is really useful. Brown seems to have thought carefully about what you need to retain in order to proceed to the next chapter. Brown helps the reader further by advising you to skip certain sections of the book, which he says are for reference only.

I have learnt a lot about statistics from this book. Above all it has been easy to comprehend because it is related to something which I understand and use in my daily professional life.

The big question I ask myself is how useful is all this knowledge really? A lot of what is said, apart from the statistics, seems to be common sense, and so far I seem to have got along fine without the statistical knowledge. On the other hand, I do now feel more equipped to engage in my own action research, as I am more confident about using statistics and also know more about how to write a study.

Overall then, this book does do what it sets out to do. I am less intimidated by statistical research in my field and feel much more confident about analysing other people’s studies. As for applying this knowledge to my day to day teaching practice, I am yet to see how useful it will be.

Very accessible theory

How Languages are Learned seems very much to be aimed at teachers just starting out on their careers but also has much that an experienced professional may appreciate. At around 225 pages it is a relatively slim volume but packs in a lot of information. Beginning with a discussion on popular ideas about language learning, the book then moves through first language acquisition, second language acquisition and how this is approached in classroom settings, until finally coming back full circle, to re-examine ideas about teaching in light of current theory.

The best thing about this book is its accessibility. It is an odd fact that many academics in this field seem to revel in the impenetrability of their language. Lightbrown and Spada are refreshing in the clarity they bear to the subject. The book doesn’t so much shy away from jargon as use it judiciously, always taking pains to explain new or difficult terms. One obvious way that it does this is to use capital letters to highlight words; these are then easily found upon returning to the text. The book also contains an excellent and clear glossary.

How Languages are Learned is the distillation of much research and material (including the authors’ own). A good historical overview of SLA and language teaching theory is provided which really does help one to understand where currently accepted ideas have arisen. While it appears popular in this discipline to try to discredit past approaches to teaching, (such as the grammar translation or audio lingual methods) Lightbrown and Spada don’t fall into this category. They don’t hesitate to point out the limitations of previous approaches, but do also show how in some ways, those approaches did get it right. The reader is encouraged to think critically about many methods and to use what is effective in his or her own language teaching.

This would be an excellent book to read before embarking on more difficult material such as English Language Teaching in its Social Context as it provides a good introduction to ideas and theory without overburdening the reader. I also found it to be a useful recap on other books I have read, while also being thought-provoking. The end of each chapter also provides a lot of ideas for further reading which look very interesting.

Although accessible, sometimes the book did feel a little brief; Chapter 5 “Observing learning and teaching in the second language classroom” certainly felt this way. Overall however, this is a great book and one that should be good preparation for any reader embarking on further, more in-depth reading.

This book is the third in a series published by Routledge in its Teaching English Language Worldwide series. It is very similar in structure to English Language Teaching in its Social Context, which I reviewed last month, in that it consists of a number of essays by different authors that have been collected into one volume. I found the title to be a little misleading, as while it certainly does cover innovation in general, the focus here is mostly on advances in curriculum design. This is most obvious from the contents page where the essays are grouped into four sections: Directions in curriculum change; Political and institutional constraints in curriculum development; Planning and implementing curriculum change; Evaluating curriculum change. Despite this there is much here to interest teachers in terms of day to day teaching.

Overall I found this to be both briefer and more accessible than the other book. Innovation comes across as much more practical than the other volume. There is a lot of theory here, and it is by no means a light read (especially the final chapter). However, the shorter length of the essays and their comparative reliance on and use of research made within classrooms makes it easier to comprehend and apply to teaching situations.

As the essays don’t reference each other as much as the other book it appears that fewer of them have been specially written for it, but despite (or maybe because of) this there is an interesting range of articles. I got a lot out of this book.

Highlights are the chapter on academic writing by Ann Hewings and Martin Hewings, and also the chapter on implementing curriculum change in Hong Kong by David R. Carless. This latter chapter was great for me in terms of my work here in Taiwan teacher training.

Given the title I think that this book needs to be revised very soon and not just reprinted, but it is a good book to read in tandem with English Language Teaching in its Social Context. I am now tempted to try the first in the series (Analysing English Language in a Global Context). If you are an experienced teacher I recommend the series.

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.

An absorbing collection of essays with practical applications

This book concerns itself with language students as members of society and how that influences their approaches to, attitudes towards and ability to learn English. These social aspects of the student are considered in terms of how they should influence the teaching of English, so that it may be the most effective. There are three sections to the book: How is language learning explained? ; Strategies and goals in the classroom context; and Analysing teaching and learning, which are comprised of both “classic” essays and specially commissioned pieces.

Starting off very theoretically, the book is quite hard-going to begin with. The first section has some useful points to make but it takes a lot of effort to glean them. It seems perverse but true that in academic fields such as Applied Linguistics and English language teaching, some writers seem not only to take pride but also pleasure, in using obscure language. Continued effort pays off though, as the second and third sections become much more practical and easily applied to one’s own teaching environment, with the last chapter being literally a practical guide to recording and transcribing talk in the classroom.

The final chapter reveals who the book is intended for, as it would be of great help to a student of a post graduate course in TESOL or Applied Linguistics. The book also is of use for practicing teachers who may want to do research in their own classrooms, or gain more insight into their students as members of societies. This is what I liked most about the book; teachers spend so much time and effort thinking about what to teach, that they can often lose sight of who they are teaching.

This is a collection of essays and as such its quality, accessibility and usefulness is variable. Notwithstanding this, the editors have tried to construct a whole from various parts and they are largely successful. Much thought has been given not just to the selection of the essays themselves but also the order in which they are placed. The essays build upon each other, with the specially commissioned ones making reference to the others.

This is the second book of a series entitled Teaching English Language Worldwide. I am now reading the third book of the series; Innovation in English Language Teaching and so far it seems to be very similar but with a focus on new ideas and approaches.

Overall this is an absorbing book with a lot of theory that can be applied usefully to many different types of classrooms and students. It is great for the teacher who wishes to consider students and their contribution to the learning process in order to maximise the effectiveness of their teaching.

I have an equivocal attitude to Michael Jackson. I’ve never been a fan of his music anyway, but having said this, the bassline to Billy Jean is a killer and fantastic to jam to in a band.

No, the first thing that struck me when I heard the news today was that I will no longer be able to use him to teach the present perfect tense for describing changes. I’m now forced to find someone else who has drastically changed in appearance over the years to elicit “He has grown his hair”, or “His nose has got smaller”. Now all of the amazing ways that Jackson changed himself have to be reported in the past tense. Bah!

The Queen springs to mind as a possible replacement for Mr. Jackson, but she’s really not as easy to recognise as the king of pop.

RIP Michael as I search for another icon to exploit for pedagogical reasons.

Assessing Reading by J. Charles Alderson – Cambridge University Press

Assessing Reading is a look at the process of testing reading in a second language. Comprising of a review of past and current assessments of reading, the book also looks at how reading assessment might change in the future.

The book explores what reading is and how it is assessed in different situations. Alderson is never able to make our understanding of this complete, but this is due to the nature of reading itself. As is made clear throughout, though there are many theories as to what reading could be, nobody really knows exactly what it is. This seems rather at odds with common sense, but Alderson reveals how problematic our understanding is by looking at the social, psychological and cognitive aspects of reading.

I never found out exactly what reading is, but the journey was interesting and valuable in itself. On a more practical level it gave me a better idea of the purpose and structure of formal tests which I prepare my students for, such as the IELTS test. It also helped me think about how I assess my students’ reading level in more informal situations.

There are a few downsides to the book, like very obvious statements such as: “…insofar as students find test situations threatening, we may risk inducing an understanding of the text which is “lower” than the same individuals might be able to achieve in other settings.” – surely not news for teachers. Also, although Alderson probably feels he must provide comprehensive coverage, there is a repetitive feel to some sections, which is only enhanced by the cyclic nature to his vocabulary and sentence structure. If you are able to get over these barriers however, the effort is worth it.

Though the book purports to focus on second language reading, I felt it would be useful for other kinds of language teachers too. Much of the discussion is about reading as a phenomenon in itself, whether in a first or second language. Though not for the casual reader (I found myself assessing my own reading skills at times), if you are involved in test design, preparing students for reading tests, or teaching reading in general, then I think that there is something useful for you here.

Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener

With seventeen chapters plus two appendices and running to 430 pages, Learning Teaching is wide-ranging. It is a crucial book for new teachers, as it gives a lot of support that is useful in the first few years of work. As an experienced teacher I found parts of it to be a little redundant. Having said this, if you have a number of years under your belt, it is still worth a look as Scrivener encourages you to try to do things that you may have ignored so far. I thought it very useful for reflecting on my own practice and also for inspiring new ideas.

The good thing about Learning Teaching is that it gets you to focus on your students rather than yourself. This is an important aspect of teaching because many of us are far too concerned with what we are doing as teachers, rather than what students experience as learners. Also, shifting the focus away from the teacher makes classes both more interesting and relaxing.

Apart from this shift in emphasis it is also simply a good reference book. It is jam-packed with ideas; not just in the toolkit chapters and resource sections but throughout. This is a book that you should come back to again and again so as to remind yourself of strategies you have forgotten. Also useful would be to periodically do one of the many observation tasks in Appendix 1.

On the whole this book is fantastic but it does suffer in some sections precisely because it tries to be so comprehensive. While I found the chapter on speaking to be very good, many of the ideas in the reading chapter were simply old hat. One section of the book that really is disappointing deals with teaching large classes. This is a problem that many teachers around the world face every day and drives many of them to despair. Scrivener’s treatment is brief and inadequate, something I wasn’t expecting after the thorough writing elsewhere.

Occasionally Scrivener also seems to enjoy including some rather silly comments, such as in his advice on lesson planning where he encourages you to try dreaming through the lesson. Despite this, he should be commended for his encouragement to try everything, no matter how outlandish. It is only through experimentation after all that new things are learned.

In conclusion, Scrivener’s book is a very positive and encouraging guide to teaching English language. It is an important read for anyone who seriously wants to teach.