Teaching: Improving your "Teacher Language"

Have you ever studied a language for months, only to meet a native speaker and find yourself completely confused by what they're saying? Do you explain simple concepts to your students, only to have them stare at you blankly? Do you find yourself thinking how do they not understand this?

The problem might not be them - it might be your "teacher language". I watch a lot of lessons, and I have often seen elementary student bombarded with so much language that they have no idea of what is going on.

Imagine, for example, a class who is just learning to say "I can swim!", and the teacher starts to explain: "Well, you see, it's like... ability, what you can and can't do, so if you can do this, you are ABLE to do it. It can also mean something to do with what is acceptable, socially or legally. The word 'swim' here is in the base form of the verb, do you understand?" How do you think those students are going to feel? Let's add to that the fact that the teacher is speaking very quickly, mumbling due to nerves, perhaps with a strong accent. It's no wonder that students are often confused.

Here's another example: the teacher wants students to listen to a recording, and write down three words that they hear. What they say is: "OK, so in partners we're going to listen to this CD, this recording, and then pick out the lexis and write it down, then afterwards we're going to make sure you caught all the words and we'll confirm them, OK?"

What's the problem with that sentence? To a native speaker, it seems simple enough. To find out, you just have to look through a typical text book and see the kind of things that students are being taught. Yes, they might know a lot of the words individually, but you'll be hard pressed to find them being taught "in partners", "pick out", "afterwards" and "catch" (in this context) until pretty late on in their English-learning life. We use a lot of expressions, phrasal verbs, idioms and slang in everyday speech without realising it, and to a learner of English these can cause the most difficulty.

So, how can you make your English simple enough that your students will understand you? Some of these tips might seem obvious, but here they are anyway!

1) Record yourself - imagine you're telling a student about a topic, perhaps you're trying to explain a word, or just telling them something about yourself. You could even tape-record an actual lesson (if the students don't mind) and listen back to it later. You might be surprised to find how often you use complicated words and expressions, repeat what students say or give unnecessary comments!

2) Avoid phrasal verbs, expression or slang - for example, instead of saying "come up with some questions" (come up with is a phrasal verb), what could you say that's simpler? "Think of", "ask" or "write", for example. An expression like "we get on like a house on fire" is fine if you're specifically teaching it, but imagine what a learner thinks when they first hear it! Even saying "we get on well" can be confusing, as students will know the word "get" and "on", but perhaps not in this context. What would make it even simpler? How about "we are good friends". Slang can slip in to your conversation without you realising it - calling a pen a "biro", calling your friend your "mate" or "buddy", even referring to your class as "you guys" can be confusing at first! The way you speak to your students might seem unnatural at first, but over time you'll get the hang of it, editing your speech as you go.

3) Don't be afraid of giving direct instructions - it usually feels rude for us to tell somebody "write your answers" or "listen to this". Society teaches us to be far more indirect in order to sound polite - you might choose to say "OK, guys, just have a listen to this recording for me, would you?" or "Now we're going to write down our answers, if you don't mind". While other native speakers will respond to this, a learner will only hear a barrage of extra words - to a beginner, this can be very confusing. Your students will only learn what is polite and impolite in English through learning it - so don't think they'll be offended if you use direct commands. It doesn't mean that you have to use a bossy or demanding tone! Your students will, most likely, appreciate the fact that you're making task instructions as simple as possible.

4) Speak slowly and clearly - perhaps obvious, but nerves can make us speak a lot quicker than we normally would. It might also feel unnatural to speak slowly and to pause between sentences, but when people learn a language they need this pace in order to process what you are saying. When you play a listening track, students need to hear it two or three times. The same might be true for your instructions (especially if you over-complicate them). Leave a couple of seconds' pause between your sentences, and make sure you pronounce words clearly. If you have a particularly strong accent which distorts certain words noticeably, you might need to try saying them in a more "neutral" accent - the students might know the word "pen", for example, but if you come along and say it in a strong Australian accent they might be very confused until you write it down for them!

5) Use gesture, pictures and props to help you out - if you are teaching new words, for example, it really is true that a picture speaks 1000 words. Don't over-complicate things for yourself. What do you think is easier - saying "What's a word for a ceremony where two people promise to love each other forever, marked by the exchanging of a ring?", or just showing them a picture of a wedding? When teaching lower levels, you might sometimes feel as if you are playing charades - this is fine, and all part of the fun! The more expressive you are, the more easily your students will understand you. If you have a whiteboard, you can always add drawings, scales or timelines to help illustrate what you are trying to say.

6) Learn a new language - a slightly extreme step, but it helps! Learning a new language puts you in the shoes of your students. You'll know how they feel when an English native speaker overloads them with "natural" language, and you'll understand how much they appreciate slow, simple instructions. You'll find out what helps you learn, and it will make you a better teacher in general, as you'll gain an understanding of how hard it is not only to understand your teacher but also to remember what you have learnt from one lesson to the next.

7) Script your teacher language - instead of going in to a lesson with no plan, no instructions to yourself other than "explain the term 'easy-going'", plan it beforehand. You might think that you know a word, but how do you explain it in the simplest way possible? Try it now, quickly - what does 'appreciate' mean? How about 'please'? It can be tricky to think of explanations on the spot. If you plan your "script" before your lesson, you can work on exactly how to word it. Plus, you'll feel more confident when you have the words in front of you, rather than trying to make it up as you go.

8) Look at the grammar/vocabulary that they already know - this generally means looking in the text book that your class is currently using, and only going above that when you're teaching something new. So, avoid words like "spectacular" or "brilliant" if they have only just learnt "good". If they can barely create a sentence using "if", then asking something like "What would you do if...?" will mean nothing to them. In effect, you are toning your language down as much as possible - simplifying it and stripping it down to the bare bones. Let's take a sentence like "What would you say about restaurants in Prague? Do you generally find them to be positive or negative experiences?" - how many elementary level students do you think would understand that? What's a simpler way to say it? You could just say "Are restaurants in Prague good? Do you like to go to restaurants?".

9) Make friends with non-native speakers of English - the more learners and non-native you know, the more practised you will become at speaking to them. My own "teacher language" was improved a lot just by having friends at university who were from different countries - when I said something to them the way I normally would, they looked confused or pretended to understand. I soon learned to adapt my way of speaking into a careful, deliberate way that cut down any excess talk and avoiding strange expressions as much as possible.

10) Have an awareness of their native language - it's good to know which words are similar in English and the native language of your students. This will save you a lot of time explaining a word that they already know, and will allow you to drop some more complicated words into your speech. There may also be "false friends" - words that sound similar in English and their language, but which have very different meanings. This is good to know as students might assume that the meanings are the same - for example, in Czech, the word "angina" means "sore throat" (this can lead to some misunderstandings, as you can imagine!). They might have a word that looks similar but that they pronounce very differently. Knowing some of the grammatical rules can also give you an insight into which particular things your students will find really difficult, and which things they will breeze through, will also help you plan your lessons!


Practice! 


So, let's see how well you can do this! Grab a pen, read these examples, and write down the simplest way that a teacher could say these things. Look below for my answers!

a) "OK, guys, I'm thinking of a word. It's like... what you feel when something really good happens. For example, you just won the lottery, or you got a promotion."

b) "What particular dish or beverage do you enjoy the most?"

c) "So, pick out three examples and come up with your own. You can look up the words in your dictionary, you know, if you want to. Try to work them out on your own, though!"

d) "I can't make head nor tail of it. It's completely messed up - I have no idea what's going on!"

e) "What is anxiety? Well, it's really a kind of psychological disorder, for example when you feel very stressed or worried... let's say I have a big test coming up, so I feel anxious. My palms are sweaty and my heart is beating. I have butterflies in my stomach. I'm nervous! It can be a clinical condition - you can be chronically anxious - or it can just be temporary. Sometimes I feel anxious before I teach class, haha, but I didn't have to worry because you're all so nice! I don't know the etymology of the word, but we say you feel anxious if you have anxiety, and if it's a long-term thing you have an anxiety disorder. Does that make sense?"

Answers (of course, they're not the ONLY way to say it, but my idea):
a) Draw a smiley face or act very happy. Ask "How do I/does he feel?"
b) "What's your favourite food or drink?"
c) "Choose three sentences and write your own. You can check the dictionary, but try to think without it!"
d) "I am confused!"
e) Act anxious. Say "I am very stressed. I am worrying/panicking!"

Your students don't need to know every possible nuance of a word or its etymology - teach them only what's relevant for now. They can build up the rest of their knowledge over time. Hopefully this will help you regulate your own teacher language, and before long you will be able to make yourself understood even to complete beginners of English!

Teaching tips: Lesson Planning Without Set Material

(Adapted from my blog The Prague Thing, posted on 19/10/2011)

While many of us sing the praises of free choice, give us free reign to do whatever we want to and we draw a blank. An open road that goes in a million directions or a blank slate on which we can write anything we want to can be massively daunting. Have you ever been overwhelmed because a menu contained just too many options? Torn apart by career decisions because there are just too many interesting things to do? I know I have, and so I know that many of us as stumped when we are given a class to teach for a year and zero to little instruction on what to teach.

“Oh, they’re level B2,” they might say, or “well, it’s kids, just do colours and stuff.”

When you have a year’s worth of lessons to think about, an entire language and a sea of topics to choose from, it’s hard to think of a lesson plan without plucking random strands of thought from mid-air. So, if you’re one of those who hasn’t been given a syllabus/curriculum to work from, I’d suggest that you get hold of a book anyway. At the moment I’m using New Cutting Edge, with a bit of Market Leader thrown in for when they want business English, some New Headway or New English File when the activities in the first don’t quite cut it, and a sea of internet resources as my back-ups.

Modern English textbooks are full of pretty pictures and ideas for topics, as well as level-appropriate sound clips and articles and convenient examples of grammar and vocabulary in context that are easy to draw upon. What’s better is that the chapters usually follow a logical progression of difficulty as well as containing a mixture of reading, writing, speaking and listening. They are definitely great for those days where you can’t think of anything, although be careful not to rely too heavily on a textbook. Even if you are supposed to be teaching from a book, you’ll bore yourself and your students if you do nothing but move robotically from one activity to the next. So, here are my tips for creating your own lesson-by-lesson plan (be it for a term or a year), making the most out of your books and drawing on authentic materials.

1. What’s the target language? Identifying the purpose of the section and breaking the textbook dependence 

Every section of every chapter has a point – whether it’s teaching new grammar, vocabulary or just letting students practice perceptive or active skills using things that they already know. If the aim is to teach new words or grammar, highlight the examples in the text and think about other ways in which you could present it. Let's say that the first chapter of New Cutting Edge is a review of the tenses - you don't have to use the book at nothing else. Could you find something more interesting, at the same level, from another textbook? If you take a look at the contents page, you’ll find that textbooks of a similar level often follow the same pattern. You might find some exciting examples to draw upon from other textbooks.

Is there a more exciting way to present the language to begin with? Perhaps there’s a song or video that you know which uses a lot of the target language – students could listen to it and fill in the blanks. If you can think of something off the top of your head that’s full of target vocabulary or grammar, then use it – you can spend some time building up students’ interest in the video by asking questions about the topic or showing them screenshots and getting them to guess the story, as jumping straight into a video without any scene-setting can rob you of an exciting discussion if you let it.

For grammar, I highly recommend Teaching English Grammar by Jim Scrivener. For each piece of grammar, he outlines (in wonderful step-by-step detail) how to present it, what concept checking questions to ask, and some great practice and production activities. Just because your New Headway wants you to teach the present continuous using its own piece of listening doesn’t mean you have to (and some schools won’t even have given you the CD) – the important thing is that they’re learning the underlying structure.

2. The formula

Of course, remember the presentation, practice, production formula. First, show the students something that features the target language in context, so that they might understand it based solely on the situation. Just giving isolated sentences can be more confusing (and less interesting) than an article, video, interview or story that sneaks in the grammar/vocab. Then, highlight the key sentences or words (ideally by eliciting them from the students) and draw them on the board. This is when you concept check, draw timelines and other similar visual aids to help them understand. After that, I’d give them some practice – the simplest form would be in a worksheet. There are tons of great, free worksheets at http://busyteacher.org, who I highly recommend registering with.

Another formula that you can use with more advanced students is test-teach-test. In does what it says on the tin; first, you use a worksheet to discover how much your students already know, before going over it thoroughly. During the “teaching” part, students should be able to see the grammar/vocab in a natural setting, answer concept checking questions about it and try to give their own sentences using it. How well they do on the initial test should determine how deeply you teach it – if they already know it, there’s no reason to bore them with too much detail again; although a refresher is often welcome and helpful, constantly reviewing the same things can make students doubt whether they’re learning anything new. At the end, you can give students another worksheet and see how much better they do on it after your explanation.

3. Generating ideas for discussion

A lot of students just want conversation, and while a lot of us have been trained to believe that the customer is always right, my time at TEFL Worldwide taught me that a lot of students don’t know how to learn. Many believe that by simply speaking all the time, they will pick up the intricacies of the English language and become fluent speakers. While speaking is definitely a key skill, it is important to make sure that their other skills (listening, writing, reading and perhaps use of English) are not neglected. This can be as sneaky as using an article or sound/video clip at the beginning, getting students to answer questions about it to check understanding, and then leading into a discussion. Students could write down what they are going to say in a discussion, debate or role play.

The problem, of course, is that going into a room to “teach conversation” is a lot harder than it sounds. You might go in and think “I’ll just ask them about their weekend – that will fill in some time!”, and while I could easily spend 90 minutes asking my Japanese students what was “new”, I find that Czech students respond with something like “oh, I didn’t do anything special” and seem to get bored very quickly. If you sit there trying to get them to elaborate and ask each other questions, you might find – as I do – a few yawns and rolling eyes. It’s quite demotivating as a teacher, but don’t worry. Come armed with topics for discussion, and a variety of ways for them to talk.

What do I mean by ways for them to talk? Well, if you have a few students, mix it up. Have some speaking activities be in pairs, while others are in groups. Let them discuss whether they agree or disagree with a statement. Get them to work together to answer questions about an article/video. Get them to discuss a topic in an interview style. Perhaps  - if you have a large class – they can walk around interviewing various members in order to discover things. They could have debates, work together to try agreeing on a solution. Role-plays are another good idea, especially if you are teaching business English. You can use games in which one person describes something and another has to guess what it is. Just because they say that they want to talk doesn’t mean that it has to be exclusively conventional conversation. Most schools have plenty of books with titles like Communication Games, which are full of great activities to help you.

As for topics, there are plenty of places that you can look. Textbooks are full of ideas for stimulating discussion, and the website www.instant-ideas.com releases reading and listening materials and worksheets every week featuring up-to-date news topics – they are designed to easily fill a 60-minute lesson. For more advanced learners, how about looking at news sites? I find that The Guardian features some very interesting articles, and BBC News has a lot of short videos for listening practice. You could even adapt the news stories for lower level students, making sure to check for idioms and phrasal verbs that we take for granted and to simplify the more complicated vocabulary. I find the Cambridge Leaner’s Dictionary a great resource for coming up with simple explanations for more advanced words.

Finally, why not sneak in a clip from your favourite TV show or film? You could use a fill-in-the-blanks listening activity, ask questions about what happens and lead into a discussion about related topics. I recently used a clip from The Amazing Race (on mute) and had half the students describe what was happening to the other half (switching halfway through) – letting them practice present continuous. Then, I gave them slips using the past simple and continuous to describe what had happened, and asked them to work together to put them in order, before playing the clip again (with sound) to help them confirm their answers. This activity let them practice spontaneous speech, grammar, meaning, a little reading and listening, and discussion, letting us lead in to a conversation about competitions, gameshows and travel.

By the way, I’ve heard a lot of people say that they can’t rely on Youtube clips because of volatile internet connection… well… www.keepvid.com is your new best friend.

Overview

So:

Cambridge Leaner’s Dictionary - to find simple explanations for words and phrases

BBC News and The Guardian, for up-to-date news stories

www.instant-ideas.com - for up-to-date, ready-made reading/listening lessons

www.keepvid.com - to download youtube videos

http://busyteacher.org - an amazing (free) resource for worksheets (includes children’s lessons)

http://www.eslflow.com/ - even more resources, worksheets and ideas

http://www.sparklebox.co.uk/ - for printable children’s flashcards

Teaching English Grammar by Jim Scrivener – for explanations and fun activities using grammar

Communication Games – Beginner, Elementary, Intermediate- for speaking-based activities

English Grammar In Use  by Raymond Murphy – perhaps the best-selling grammar book, full of overviews and exercises