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Bringing the four skills together

Christopher Graham, teacher and teacher trainer, discusses what our everyday skills teach us about skills integration and how to apply this in the EFL classroom. Chris will be hosting a webinar on this topic on the 7th June.

There are many pleasures in being a father, and one of them – I’d hoped – would be helping my kids with their homework. My fourteen year old son, however, seems to have other ideas – as revealed when I recently watched him starting a homework project about Indian history.

I thought his starting point would be, “Dad what do you know about ….?”.  But no, the first thing he did after reading his homework task was to send some instant messages to a group of classmates and follow that up with a group Skype call to decide what needed doing for the project. This was followed by furious Googling, lots of Wikipedia reading and copious YouTube watching. This in turn was followed, sadly, by quite a lot of cutting and pasting and just a little rewriting. The final written version was supplemented by some ideas that came from a Skype call to an ex-classmate who now lives in India. Job done and emailed to the teacher!

It was a genuine pleasure to watch highly motivated collaborative learning in action, something that we teachers have strived to achieve for years and that for so many young people today is part of their lives. Part of their lives thanks to technology.

But the use of this technology requires us to do something else too. My son was integrating skills at high speed. Reading, listening, speaking and writing were all being used, constantly intermixed and in many different combinations. This integration of skills is a requirement to make the best of the technology that we now have at our fingertips.

Think how you might book a restaurant table for a dinner with some friends. A few SMS messages to see who is free, then perhaps a look at TripAdvisor to see where to go;  follow this with one or two phone calls to discuss options and then book online with the place you’ve chosen. A few days before the event you let everyone know where and when with an email with a nice map link embedded into it. A Facebook status update on the day will be the final element of 21st century restaurant life. With lots of integration of skills.

My webinars are based on the assumption that we are preparing our students for real life. And real life means the integration of skills. What I hope to show you is why a holistic approach to integrated skills is so realistic and thus a vital element in the EFL classroom. We will also look at why the content and setting are so important. Remember how motivated my son was to do his homework or how motivated you are when you arrange to meet your friends in a restaurant. Rich and personalised content drives our desire to communicate and this creates the learner motivation and enhanced levels of confidence that we EFL teachers need to harness in our classes.

I hope that you will come away from the webinars with some practical classroom ideas for skills integration that you can adapt and use in your day-to-day teaching. What I can’t promise is that it will make your teenagers want to do their homework!

You can sign up for the webinar here.

Christopher Graham has been working in English Language Teaching for many years as a teacher, academic manager, teacher educator and materials writer. He is now a London-based freelance consultant and travels widely, working with teachers and institutions in a range of EFL areas. His own professional interests include EAP, Writing Skills , Cross Cultural Communication and ESP.


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Receptive Skills: Resources for Independent Learning

Young woman wearing headphones and writingHelen Stepanova is an English language teacher, teacher trainer and author, currently working as a Business English teacher in Latvia. In this guest post, she looks at some of the resources available for improving students’ receptive language skills.

Nowadays the Internet provides numerous possibilities for students to improve, polish and master their English language skills. In my lessons I introduce these options, explaining how my students can use them and inspiring them with my own personal experience.

I have divided these resources into two main groups:

  1. for receptive skills, with 2 subgroups: reading and listening
  2. for productive skills, with 2 subgroups: writing and speaking

In each group there are several useful resources. Choose the most appropriate ones for your class.

Receptive Skills

Productive Skills

Reading

Listening

Writing

Speaking
1.Fiction literature 1.Radio 1. Social networks 1. Social networks
2.Professional literature 2.Audio books 2. Language learning communities 2. Language learning communities
3.Bilingual parallel texts 3. Films 3. British Council
4.Newspapers, magazines, online news 4.Podcasts 4. Speaking Clubs
5. Blogs 5. Conversations 5. Couchsurfing
6. Scripts 6.Music 6. International learning and volunteer programs

In this post, I’ll be looking at Receptive Skills. I’ll cover Productive Skills in my next post.

Reading

  1. Fiction literature

This is the best option for those who love reading. The choice of books is enormous, from historical adventures to mainstream and children books. It’s possible to relax and learn new vocabulary and grammar constructions simultaneously. Project Gutenberg is a free online library.

  1. Professional literature

If your students are learning English for a specific purpose (e.g. Engineering), reading professional literature is a great way of improving students’ knowledge in that professional area, and in English at the same time. You could also try reading the lectures of world-renowned academics, which are now uploaded to the websites of many leading universities. MIT’s Open Courseware and Coursera are two examples.

  1. Bilingual parallel texts

On one side you’re given English text, on the other there is a translation in your native language. This option is convenient for those who like to read original texts of any complexity, without having to stop to look up unknown words. This resource is very helpful, as the structure and ability to look at the translation immediately allow students become more confident in reading and lessen their fear of long texts.

  1. Newspapers, magazines, online news

Nowadays there are plenty of news websites and online resources for reading, e.g. BBC News, Daily Telegraph, Reuters, and CNN. By reading online news, students kill two birds with one stone – they read articles that are interesting and relevant to them, and learn a lot of new words that are common in press reporting. Reading these daily and writing down any unknown words will help students develop their vocabulary.

  1. Blogs

There are thousands of blogs on the Internet dedicated to different themes – travelling, fashion, gardening, children, phychology, etc. Use a service like Technorati to find relevant blogs. Several times per week bloggers update their pages with new stories. Like with online news sites, students will be interested in keeping up with new posts and will learn at the same time.

  1. Scripts

This is one of the most amazing resources for improving reading skills. We all have our favourite films, and reading the script can be a great way of entertaining students and showing the use of English in more natural, informal settings. The same will apply to plays. Sites like AwesomeFilm, The Daily Script and SimplyScripts have loads of movie scripts available as PDFs.

Listening

  1. Radio

There is possibly no better source for listening practice than radio. There are hundreds of different radio stations where you can listen online, so try listening to a station from a different country to your own. It also helps to listen to different dialects and accents, e.g. British English – BBC Radio, American English – Voice of America, Canadian English – CBC Radio, Australian English – ABC Radio Australia.

  1. Audio books

There are advantages and disadvantages to listening to audio books. The lexis can be learned quite easily, however not everybody likes listening to books. It is a matter of preference. Audio books can be downloaded for free from, for example, the University of South Florida’s Lit2Go program, New Fiction, and LibriVox. Or they can be purchased from sites such as Audible and AudioGo.

  1. Films

This is an ideal way to master listening skills, as all three VAK styles are used: visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. If something is unclear, it is easy to rewind back and re-watch that section of the film until it becomes clear. Reading the script before watching, or watching the film in students’ native language first, will also help. Repeat words and phrases, imitating the actors’ intonation, will help to get students’ kinaesthetic memory working.

  1. Podcasts

Short audio lessons or stories recorded by native speakers are what will really help students. Choosing podcasts at the right language level for your students, and with themes that are interesting and relevant to them, is crucial to maintaining students’ interest and motivation. You can even subscribe to podcasts to be sent the most recent episodes automatically. Try a service like ESL Podcast.

  1. Conversations

Encourage students to find a friend – either a native speaker or someone with a good level of English – and to talk with them in English. Thanks to social networks such as Facebook, Skype, Google+ and Lang-8, it’s very easy now for students to connect with native speakers and improve their English effectively.

  1. Music

Listening to music is a great way to develop English skills. When you are listening and singing your kinaesthetic memory is working. Even if it is difficult to understand the lyrics, music is poetry and is often very idiomatic. Students will pick up key phrases and words to add to their vocabulary.


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Toffs and oiks: the language of social class

Union Jack flagJudith Willis, former Publishing Manager for bilingual dictionaries in ELT at Oxford University Press, looks at the language of social class.

A recent survey conducted by the BBC revealed a new class structure in the UK consisting of seven social classes. The top class is termed the elite and the bottom one, the precariat, or precarious proletariat. Leaving aside any political or sociological consequences, we will almost certainly be hearing a lot more of the word precariat, until now a rarity in everyday English.

Le précariat was first used by French sociologists in the 1980s to describe temporary or seasonal workers, and has since been used in other languages including Italian (precariato), German (Prekariat), Spanish (precariado) and even Japanese (purekariāto). Its meaning has evolved into that of a social class – or underclass – as formulated by the sociology professor Loïc Wacquant and the British sociologist Guy Standing in his 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class.

At the top of the new structure we find another word of French origin, elite, which has been used in English since the early 19th century to mean a group of powerful, influential people. English may be the language of a famously class-conscious people and have given the word ‘snob’ to the world but it relies heavily on imports for the vocabulary of class.

Social class has been defined in different ways over the years. Back in classical times, there were patricians and plebeians. In our agricultural past, class was determined by a person’s family and their links to the land – the nobility or aristocracy, the gentry, including the squirearchy, the yeomanry and the peasantry. With the coming of 19th century industrialization, the focus shifted to the individual’s relation to the means of production and the bourgeoisie and the proletariat were the two conflicting classes in Marxist theory. ‘Bourgeoisie’ and ‘petite bourgeoisie’ were also used in non-political contexts to refer to the growing middle classes. Recent times have tended to speak mainly of ‘the middle class’ and ‘the working class’, with the middle class often divided into upper and lower middle class. The terms ‘upper class’ and ‘lower class’ are less frequent in serious discussion of class.

By studying corpus statistics we can see how adjectives ending in ‘-class’ are actually used and gain a better picture of our perception of class. ‘Working-class’ is typically followed by the nouns ‘struggle(s)’, ‘movement’ and ‘exploitation’. ‘Middle-class’ collocates with ‘suburb’, ‘families’ and ’respectability’; ‘upper-middle-class’ with ‘suburbanites’, ‘enclave’ and ‘accents’, and ‘lower-middle-class’ with ’background(s)’, ’ insecurity’ and ’origins’. ‘Lower-class’ is used of ‘delinquents’, ‘accent’ and ‘subculture’, whereas ‘upper-class’ is used largely in insults, followed by words such as ‘twit(s)’, ‘toffs’ and ‘snobs’.

Social class has become more fluid: in the 19th and early 20th centuries the English language adopted the French forms arriviste, parvenu and nouveau riche to speak in a disapproving way of people who, in the latter half of the 20th century, would be spoken of approvingly as upwardly mobile and aspirational. If someone is described as being of lowly or humble origins, they have usually made it up the social ladder!

More informal words describing individuals are nearly always used as insults, giving us a polarized view of a posh bunch of la-di-da, toffee-nosed upper-class twits, Hooray Henrys, chinless wonders and toffs with plummy accents at one end of the spectrum, and at the other a common bunch of chavs, oiks and plebs.

In 1990, the incoming British Prime Minister, John Major (who rose to the highest office from working-class origins!) vowed to create a ‘classless society’. It seems Britain still has some way to go.


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Ten things you might not have known about the English language

Mystery boxAlex Hammond writes for ESL – Language Travel. In this guest post, he reveals a few little-known facts about the origins of the English language.

Hey, English speaker! Congratulations. You speak a language that straddles the globe like nothing before. Statistically, English is unlikely to be your first language and you are likely to be from an educated background. Again, congratulations.

Here are ten things that you may not have known about this wonderful language of ours:

1. It is the only major language without an academy to guide it

L’Académie française, based in Paris, is in charge of overseeing the French language. Part of its job is suggesting alternatives for the English words that are pouring into French. That’s how email became courriel, for example (although you will still hear it called e-mail in French).

For Spanish there is the Real Academia Española. German has the Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung. There is no equivalent to L’Académie for English. Of the 10 most-widely spoken languages in the world, only English has no academy guiding it.

There are political reasons for this. The closest Britain ever came to having a language academy was at the start of the eighteenth century, when Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift was lobbying hard for an academy because “our Language is extremely imperfect… its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions (and) in many Instances it offends against every Part of Grammar.” Queen Anne supported the idea but died before a decision could be made, and the issue was largely forgotten.

In the USA, a bill for the incorporation of a national academy was unsuccessfully introduced into congress in 1806. Fourteen years later, an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres was launched with John Quincy Adams as president, but broke up after two years after receiving little political or public support.

Nowadays, the only English-speaking country to have a language academy is South Africa. Because the English language has become so ubiquitous without any guidance, there is little prospect of anyone starting an academy any time soon. Where would it be? In Britain, the home of the language? Or the USA, where the largest English-speaking population lives?

2. More than 1 billion people are learning English as you read this

According to the British Council, around 1 billion people around the world were learning English in 2000. This figure is now likely to be significantly higher.

3. 96 of the 100 most common English words are Germanic

Of the hundred most frequently used words in English, 96 have Germanic roots. Together, those 100 words make up more than 50% of the Oxford English Corpus, which currently contains over 2 billion words found in writing around the world.

Surprised? The most frequently used words are the meat and bones of the language, the essentials that make communication work, including I, you, go, eat, and so on. Old English developed from various Germanic languages that came to the British Isles in the second half of the first millennium AD.

Whereas the language has changed almost unrecognisably since then, including the grammar, the basic words have remained.

4. …but most words that have entered the language since 1066 have Latin origins

If English is your first language but you find French or Spanish easier to understand than German, you are not alone. This may seem strange when English and German are on the same branch of the Indo-European language tree.

The Renaissance, which started in Italy and reached England via France, was a massive source of new vocabulary. New ideas, or old ideas rediscovered, started flooding out of the southern cities but there were no words to describe them in English. So the language adopted or adapted the Latin words. During the Renaissance, the English lexicon roughly doubled in size.

The shift away from the Germanic languages, however, had started much earlier, because…
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#IATEFL Liverpool 2013 – The “people people’s” conference

Old friends shaking handsOxford teacher trainer, Veríssimo Toste, reflects on his experience of the IATEFL conference in Liverpool.

It has now been several weeks since I was in Liverpool for the IATEFL conference. I have had time to catch up on work and to get back into my daily routine. This week I took out my conference bag and leafed through the various pages of notes, hand-outs, and promotional materials I collected during the week. I found myself reflecting on the conference and how much I had enjoyed it.

It was simply a pleasure to be around so many teachers. Listening to them talk about their students was both inspiring and highly motivating. Some of the ideas I wanted to try out for myself, and tell others about. There were ideas I already knew about but was amazed by what other people had done with them. More important was the excitement and enthusiasm with which I was told these stories. Being a great fan of class libraries, I was especially thrilled to hear how different teachers use readers around the world. I came out of each conversation feeling overjoyed about working in ELT.

I also realised I had learned about some possible future trends in ELT. I appreciated the focus on demanding more from students as a way to motivate them. This seemed to be a theme for many speakers – easy success is not much of a success at all. Many sessions focussed on how to help students succeed, including critical thinking skills, the use of technology, or the flipped classroom, among many other strategies – ideas that put the learner at the centre of their learning.

Unlike previous years, the different sessions I attended on technology seemed to emphasize learning more than the technology itself. Whether it was for improving pronunciation, for helping students with critical thinking skills, or for learning outside the classroom, it seemed to me that this year’s sessions recognised that technology is just another tool to support learning and that the aim is not simply the use of the technology itself.

I thought about this as I rummaged through my conference bag and realised the ideas and trends were not what made this conference special for me. I have come away from previous conferences with new ideas. I have always talked to teachers and felt good about sharing ideas. So, what made this conference stand out for me?

It took me a while to realise what I especially liked about this conference – and it finally dawned on me over dinner with friends. It was talking to people from all over the world. What a privilege! To share ideas with a university teacher from Colombia on classroom observation; to talk to a teacher trainer from Turkey who was nervous about doing her first IATEFL session; to meet people who I consider friends, although we only meet at the conference each year.

ELT people are ‘people people’ – they enjoy each other’s company and talking about what they do. I am delighted to be part of such a group. Bring on IATEFL Harrogate 2014!

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