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Developing Global Skills in the ELT classroom | ELTOC 2020

ELTOC 2020In the simplest sense, global skills can be thought of as the skills which are essential to being a life-long learner and to be successful in the rapidly changing and unpredictable world of the 21st century. As teachers, we need to equip students for situations and jobs which do not currently exist and which we cannot confidently predict.

Global skills are not restricted to any particular subject on the curriculum but are transferable across all subjects and to life beyond school.

Global skills can be grouped into five clusters, all of which are relevant to the ELT context.

  • communication and collaboration
  • creativity and critical thinking
  • intercultural competence and citizenship
  • emotional self-regulation and wellbeing
  • digital literacies.

While most teachers would be convinced that it is the responsibility of the teacher to develop global skills in their institutions, it is not always easy to see how this can be done when time is already limited. If we are to take on this challenge, we need ways to incorporate global skills into the classroom without creating an extra workload for ourselves, or by eating into precious class time.

Below are three such suggestions of how we might develop global skills.

  1. Think-pair-share

In a traditional classroom, the teacher will get students to work individually (think) on an activity and then check (share) the answers with the whole class. In the think-pair-share model, the same process is followed but before the final checking stage, the teacher asks students to compare their answers in pairs (pair). This stage might only take 15 to 30 seconds in total but the benefits are huge because it leads to communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and students increased confidence and motivation.

  1. Comparing to one’s own culture

Many ELT coursebooks have cultural content or specific cultural sections. The teacher can engage students in this by asking them to say the similarities and differences to the students’ own context from what is stated in the coursebook. This is feasible even if students have a low language level. For example, if the lesson is about what a person from a particular country has for breakfast, the teacher could list the items of food on the board and then ask students to say which ones are similar or different to what they would have for breakfast. The teacher could supply the English equivalents for the local food items. This could then be followed up by students using both lists to create their ideal breakfast.

  1. The option of writing or video recording

When asking for a piece of work that might typically be in written form, such as a book report, summary, the final product of a project, etc., teachers can give the option of doing it as a video recording. This pushes students to work on most of the five clusters mentioned above. It also has the added advantage of allowing the dyslexic students to flourish without having to worry about people criticizing their spelling and handwriting or having to deliberately choose simple vocabulary because having to find the spelling of the words they would like to use is too time-consuming. Many students will actually work more on producing a video than a piece of written work, especially if they know this will be shared and evaluated by fellow students.

Philip spoke further on this topic at ELTOC 2020. Stay tuned to our Facebook and Twitter pages for more information about upcoming professional development events from Oxford University Press.

You can catch-up on past Professional Development events using our webinar library.

These resources are available via the Oxford Teacher’s Club.

Not a member? Registering is quick and easy to do, and it gives you access to a wealth of teaching resources.

Philip Haines moved to Mexico from England in 1995 and currently works as the Senior Academic Consultant for Oxford University Press Mexico. He has spoken internationally in three continents and nationally in every state in Mexico. Philip is the author/co-author of several ELT series published in Mexico.

 


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Preparing students for life on a different planet | OUP

Every generation brings something new to the education table. That goes without saying. So far, however, we’ve been able to identify our students’ needs and adjust to their expectations and general potential, mainly thanks to the length of time separating one generation from another. Or have we? Nevertheless, we’ve been a group of self-proclaimed experts who have successfully (?) developed ground-breaking teaching methods based on our years of teaching experience.

But the times, they are changing…

Are we able to confidently say that we’re equipping our students with the skills that they’ll need to tackle the challenges of the future?

The gig economy

We already live in a gig economy, within which many professionals are engaged in short-term projects. Consequently, the people that work in the gig economy must be excellent at adapting to successfully compete in ever-changing global contexts, with uncertainty, and under time pressure. According to a study by Intuit, in 2020 about 40 percent of workers in the US will be employed temporarily by various organizations to carry out single projects. And it stands to reason that, since these tasks might be quite unique in nature, they will require creativity, self-management, and digital skills.

So, how can you prepare yourself and your students for this very alien future? Developing the following key competences will come in handy:

  • Communicating in a mother tongue
  • Communicating in a foreign language
  • Mathematical, scientific and technological competence
  • Digital competence
  • Learning to learn skills
  • Social skills
  • Entrepreneurial skills
  • Cultural awareness

Use it or lose it

An old rule in neuroscience says ‘use it or lose it’. All of these crucial competences should be applied every day in class. To do this, we need to take a more individualistic approach with our students. Since most of us don’t have the privilege of teaching our students individually or even in small groups, we must instead harness technology to reach our students with personalised teaching approaches.

According to the World Economic Forum (2016), “Technology can personalise learning, engage the disengaged, complement what happens in the classroom, extend education outside the classroom, and provide access to learning to students who otherwise might not have sufficient educational opportunities.”

 The locker problem

The locker problem…

Last but not least, let me tell you about my personal New Year’s resolution. I decided to join the gym. It’s like travelling to a different planet for me. I entered the changing room and realized most people didn’t put their shoes in the lockers, but on them. Why? I’ll have to use all my key competences to figure it out. Any ideas?

Radek Krzyżanowski is a speaker, teacher trainer, and a sworn translator. He’s currently running his own language school, which keeps him up-to-date with the latest trends in glottodidactics. Teaching Business English and exam preparation are among his favourites. His general interests include American literature and second language acquisition.


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Learning and teaching pragmatics | Anna Krulatz

Successful communication entails much more than following the rules of grammar, having a large lexicon, and speaking in a way that is intelligible to the listeners. What language learners also have to attend to is how meaning is constructed in context. They have to select appropriate language forms depending on the situation and the person they are speaking with. Pragmatic competence (sometimes also called pragmatic ability) refers to using language effectively in a contextually appropriate way. People who interact with each other work jointly to co-construct and negotiate meaning depending on factors such as their respective social status, the social distance between them, the place of interaction, and their mutual rights and obligations.

Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences in pragmatics

Pragmatic norms vary across languages, cultures and individuals. They are so deeply intertwined with our cultural and linguistic identities that learning pragmatics norms of another speech community, especially in adulthood, can be quite challenging. This is because culturally appropriate linguistic behaviours in the target language may differ in many ways from those in the first language (or languages). Think about the language and culture you identify with most closely (it can be your first language or another language that you use extensively in your daily life). If your language is like Russian, German or French, and makes a distinction between formal and informal ways of addressing another person (i.e., ты/вы, du/sie, tu/vous), it may be difficult for you to use informal ways of addressing people of higher status such as your boss, supervisor or professor. Conversely, if your language makes no such distinction and you are learning a language that does, it may be unnatural for you to differentiate the forms of address you use depending on whether you speak to a friend or to someone of a higher social status. Languages also differ in regards to speech acts, or utterances that are intended to perform an action, such as apologies, requests, invitations, refusals, compliments and complaints. Think about compliments. How would you respond in your first or strongest language if a good friend complimented you in the following way?

Friend: “Your hair looks great! Did you just get a haircut?”

You: “…?”

A native speaker of American English is likely to say something along these lines, “Oh thanks, I just styled it differently today. I’m glad you like it.” On the other hand, a Russian may say something like, “Oh really? It’s a mess. I spent a whole hour this morning trying to style it, and that’s the best that came out of it.” It is all good if these speakers are interacting with someone of the same language background or someone who is well versed in the pragmatic norms of the same language. But put an American and a Russian together, and the interaction may end in an awkward silence because the compliment was turned down (if it’s the Russian responding to the compliment), or a bewilderment at the other person’s immodesty (if it’s the American who is responding). This and other instances of pragmatic failure can cause much more misunderstanding than grammatical or lexical errors.

 Why teach pragmatics?

I first started to realise the importance of focusing on pragmatics in language teaching when I worked with international students at the University of Utah. Email use on campus was just beginning to gain in popularity as a medium of communication, and I would get emails from international students that came across as very informal. In fact, I started wondering if these students thought there was no difference between emailing a friend and emailing a professor. Here is a typical example:

Clearly, the goal of this message is to make a request for an extension on a deadline and a meeting during office hours. Although the email is mostly grammatically correct, it contains want- and need-statements, both of which are very direct ways of making requests. The student is also not using any hedges such as “please,” “thank you” or “would you.” Because of the context of the interaction (university campus in the United States), and the social distance between the two parties involved (student – professor), the message comes across as overly direct, bordering on impolite. As I received similar emails very frequently, I decided I had to do something to help my students develop their pragmatic competence. If your own students also struggle with the rules of netiquette, you may find this lesson plan by Thomas Mach and Shelly Ridder useful.

Unfortunately, few language courses and fewer textbooks focus explicitly on the development of pragmatic competence. Research shows, however, that language learners may not be able to notice that target language pragmatic norms are different from those in their first language, and can, therefore, benefit from pragmatics-focused activities. We looked at several examples of those in my webinar! Click here to watch the recording.

Do you have any examples of embarrassing or funny moments caused by pragmatic failure? Or ideas on how to teach pragmatics? If yes, please share your thoughts in the comments! 

Anna Krulatz is Professor of English at the Faculty of Teacher Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, where she works with pre- and in-service EFL teachers. Her research focuses on multilingualism with English, pragmatic development in adult language learners, content-based instruction, and language teacher education.

References

Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Mahan-Taylor, R. (2003, July). Introduction to teaching pragmatics. English Teaching Forum, 41(3), 37-39.

Rose, K. R., & Kasper, G. (2001). Pragmatics in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ishihara, N., & Cohen, A. (2010). Teaching and learning pragmatics. Where language and culture meet. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited.


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Teaching more than English – giving students the professional skills to succeed

Image by © Laura Doss/Corbis

Disrupting our definition of Business English in the 21st Century

In a recent Washington Post article entitled ‘The surprising thing Google learned about its employees – and what it means for today’s students’, it was reported that Google had carried out a survey into the key characteristics for achieving success as a Google employee. Surprisingly, knowledge of STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) did not appear first. Instead, the survey placed skills such as coaching, insight, empathy, critical thinking, problem solving, dealing with complex ideas at the top of the list.

As a Business English teacher and course book author, I have a natural interest in these emerging ‘soft skills’ which reflect the needs of the 21st century workplace skills. I feel it’s my job to make sure my course materials and the contents of my lessons reflect the English needed to support these emerging skills. However, I also feel that for sometimes Business English materials have resisted integrating these skills into course programmes because they don’t easily fit into our longstanding definition of what Business English is.

If we go back about 25 years, the prevailing definition of ‘Business English’ has been:

  • Language: Like General English course it covered grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, the four skills etc.
  • Communication Skills: Unlike General English, Business English aimed to train students in how to present more effectively, how to run a meeting, how to negotiate etc.
  • Professional content: Business English books also dealt with topics such as production processes or marketing and sales; in other words, we taught business concepts alongside the vocabulary required to talk about them.

Since then, this three-part definition has dominated the contents and structure of most Business English classrooms and courses. And yet, some of the new skills don’t fit comfortably into the definition. Where exactly would you place ‘insight’ or ‘empathy’ into the three categories? Do thinking skills (critical or creative) require their own category? Is it even the job of a Business English to ‘teach’ these items alongside English?

These were just some of the questions that confronted me when I returned to work on the second edition of Business Result. The first edition of Business Result was published exactly ten years ago and so it naturally reflected the three-part structure of language, communication skills and professional content. But on returning to re-author the materials a decade later, it was apparent to me that we needed to incorporate the demands of newer 21st Century workplace skills. It’s the same challenge that faces many Business English teachers today – that we strive to prepare our learners not only with English but also with the professional skills they will need in the next few decades.

On March 16th Oxford University Press holds its first Business English Online Conference and my webinar, entitled ‘Teaching more than English’, will assess the kinds of professional skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. We’ll consider how we might integrate them into our course design and lessons, and our approach to teaching and training our students to operate more effectively. The session encourages you to participate and comment based on your own experiences and I’ll also share some practical ideas to include in your Business English lessons.

Register now for Oxford’s first Business English Online Conference where John Hughes will be presenting a webinar on Teaching more than English – giving students the professional skills to succeed.

John Hughes is an award-winning author with over 30 ELT titles including the course book series ‘Business Result’ (Oxford) and the resource series ‘ETpedia’ (Pavilion). He has trained teachers at all levels of experience and background. In particular, he specializes in materials writing and offers consultancy and training in this area. His blog is www.elteachertrainer.com.


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Using games for win-win learning | Q&A

Over a thousand teachers attended the webinars on Using games for win-win learning and there was plenty of discussion in the chatbox with teachers sharing their ideas and opinions on using games. Here are some of the comments and questions that were raised.

With reference to Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of Flow, how do we take students from A1 to A4?

Early on this webinar we looked at the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his theory of Flow. In his book of the same name, the author presents the idea that when we are truly engaged in an activity we enter a state of ‘flow’ or the ‘flow channel’, as shown in the diagram below. In pages 72-77, Csikszentmihalyi makes particular reference to the use of games as a form of activity which encourages flow. For example, when we present new language to students and they start using it, they are probably engaged at A1 in the diagram. If we drill that language repeatedly, then after a while student might become bored and go to A2. If we then add too much challenge to the task, students can become anxious and go to A3. If we add the right amount of challenge to the new language, students continue up the flow channel to A4. The author suggests that playing games offers an effective way to achieve this.

Diagram from Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2002). Flow. Rider publishing. p74.

Are all games a form of controlled practice?

This question came out of a discussion on what type of classroom practice games are useful for. In particular, there is a view that games are a type of classroom drilling. In other words, that when we introduce a new language structure and drill it with students, games can offer another kind of drill where students practise the target language in a very controlled way. With many types of language games based on the idea of dominoes or pelmanism (also known as memory) this is probably true. However, there are also types of role-playing games which encourage fluency practice and authentic communicative situations. So the answer is that it depends on the type of game you are using as to how controlled the practice is.

Sometimes students become so interested in the game, they forget to use English and slip back into their mother tongue. How can we make sure they keep using English? 

There was a lively discussion on the topic of how to make sure students keep using English when they became so focused on winning the game itself. Participants shared various experiences and views on this. One option was to take points away from a student or a team when they didn’t speak English. On the other hand, one teacher, Helen Beesley, also pointed out that points should be given for use of English during a game for positive reinforcement. Similarly, when playing a boardgame, students could miss a go if they don’t speak English or have another go if they use English well.

What kind of authentic board games on the market are useful for language learning? Participants answered this questions with various suggestions including Monopoly and The Game of Life with Business English to practise the language of finance, or word-based games such as Taboo and Pictionary.

 Some students don’t like competitive games in the classroom, especially adults. How do we get them interested?

This question probably created the most debate with teachers agreeing and disagreeing that adult students don’t like playing games. With regard to competitive games, we looked at the idea that competition is often more useful when a student competes against him or herself. For example, if I set up a telephone role play where students practise calling to arrange to meet, I could give students this card with phrases on that I want them to use.

As they speak, they tick off phrases. At the end of the first role play I ask them to count how many phrases they used and get a score out of ten. Then I ask them to repeat the role play and try to get a higher score by using more of the phrases. In this way, a student competes against him/herself. This ‘self-competition’ approach is very similar to principle behind online games such as Quizlet where you try to beat your previous score and reach the next level. It was also noted these online games also offer rewards and badges as well as points and that teachers sometimes need to offer ‘prizes’ to winning teams as well as points.

Overall, it was a very active webinar and I’d like to thank everyone for their enthusiastic participation.

Missed the webinar? If you’re a member of the Oxford Teacher’s Club, you can catch the recording right here in the webinar library. If you’re not yet a member, registration is free and shouldn’t take long at all.

John Hughes likes using games in his own classroom and he designs games for his course books. He is a lead author on Business Result, Successful Meetings and Successful Presentations (published by Oxford University Press). He also runs teacher training courses, and is a regular ELT blogger: www.elteachertrainer.com.