Students are always fascinated with the idea of time travel and understanding the relationship between the past and the future. I remember as a child both burying and discovering time capsules full of cultural treasures and personal stories.
We have used the theme of time relationships and time capsules in this lesson plan to encourage students to understand and communicate with the past and send students in the past information about their lives now.
This lesson plan is based on a PBL (Project-Based Learning) cycle and for its output students are encouraged to work towards some form of poster or digital document that tells students of the past about the things they feel are important in the present day.
We hope you enjoy working through this project with your students and that they enjoy thinking about life in the past and how our lives have changed.
Nik Peachey is a freelance writer, blogger, teacher trainer and consultant specialising in digital publishing, online course development and the development of digital resources for teachers. He has been involved in English language teaching since 1992 and has worked all over the world as a teacher, trainer and project manager. In 2016 after winning his second British Council Award for Innovations (ELTon) he co-founded PeacheyPublications Ltd.
Nik Peachey was manager of the British Council’s TeachingEnglish website from 2003 to 2007, Global Head of Learning for Macmillan’s online English school EnglishUp from 2014 to 2016. From 2017 – 2018 he worked with Eton College on their EtonX program of soft skills courses and later in 2018 he worked with Kings College London Online developing content for their master’s level Financial Law courses. He has co-edited with Alan Maley two books on creativity – ‘Integrating Global Issues in the Creative English Language Classroom’ and ‘Creativity in the English Language Classroom’ and published ten more through his own company.
Here we’ll discuss the role of creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration in the English language classroom, and suggest some practical ideas for giving students a challenging new take on these familiar concepts.
Global Skills
Life in the twenty-first century can be complex and stressful. Many of the interpersonal and interactive skills that we need in our everyday lives – things such as digital literacies, intercultural competence, and emotional self-regulation – have not always been formally taught in schools. The movement to embrace Global Skills in education is now looking to change that.
OUP’s Position Paper on Global Skills is a concise guide for empowering students inside the classroom – and beyond. It acts as a guide for teachers who would like to help equip their students with strategies for dealing with the challenges and opportunities of twenty-first century life.
From Four Cs to five skills clusters
Global Skills include Communication and Collaboration and Creativity and Critical Thinking as two of the key skills clusters, and these are concepts which will already be familiar to anyone who is acquainted with the Partnership for 21st Century Learning, in which they were grouped together as Learning Skills and referred to as The Four Cs.
OUP’s Global Skills are made up of five distinct skills clusters. If you would like to know more about the other three skills clusters of Global Skills – which are Intercultural Competence and Citizenship, Emotional Self-Regulation and Wellbeing, and Digital Literacies – see the OUP Position Paper.
Fresh perspectives
The skills of communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking are as important as ever, not only because they can have a positive impact on language proficiency, but also because they can be applied to the challenges of everyday life.
Communication and Collaboration
Why are they grouped together in Global Skills?
Learning to communicate involves being able to negotiate meaning – something which requires interacting with another person or people. And when we collaborate with someone else, both in the classroom and in real-life contexts, there is usually communication involved. The two skills therefore connect, and can very often be dependent on each other.
Pairwork and groupwork
The easiest way to generate conditions for collaboration is to get students to work together in pairs or in small groups. In order to ensure that there is communication as well, students need to share or exchange ideas in some way. Let’s look at a simple example.
Recalling an image
Show students the image below and ask them to pay attention to the small details. (Image source: Oxford Discover Futures, SB1, p86)
After about thirty seconds, remove the picture from view and get students into pairs. Thirty seconds is not very long, which means that students will probably have only a partial memory of the poster. Ask them to work together and recall as much as they can. Ask if they can remember:
the words on the poster – and the colour of each word
the shape of the figure – and what each ‘body part’ consists of
Some students are more observant than others – but the ones who remember the most do not always have the English with which to express all the information. For this reason, it is likely that students will use L1 to negotiate the answers to the prompts as they gather the English words that they need in order to complete their lists.
Communication and collaboration in action
This simple task mirrors real-life situations in which we need the help of someone else in order to piece together information and fill in the gaps with our own knowledge. The transfer of information is ‘communication’. The pair work is ‘collaboration’. Students help each other as they complete the task, while also checking each other, and correcting each other, as appropriate. Communication and collaboration go hand in hand.
Creativity and Critical Thinking
Why are they grouped together?
Creativity is the art of thinking – it is based on inspiration, intuition and subjective expression. Critical thinking is the science of thinking – it is based on reason, analysis, and evidence-informed judgements. As skills, they are complementary aspects of thinking outside the box, whether that involves coming up with something new, or seeing something that others have missed. Again, let’s take a look at a simple example.
Comparing posters
Show students all four of the posters related to diet shown below. (Image source: Oxford Discover Futures, SB1, p86)
Now give them the following statements to discuss. Ask them to express their ideas, listen to each other’s views, and then try to reach an agreement, by modifying the statements, if necessary.
the posters have nothing in common
the posters appeal to emotions, not intellect
the posters are intended for children
the most effective poster is poster ____
the least effective poster is poster ____
Finally, ask them to come up with a new poster of their own, designed to raise awareness of the importance of a healthy diet.
Creativity and Critical Thinking in action
The prompts above do more than check students’ comprehension of the posters; they engage their critical faculties, too. The statements are likely to be divisive, and students might well disagree with each other. Establishing the truth of what they can agree on will require negotiation and compromise, as well as creative recasting of some of the statements. Most interestingly, students will have to consider whether they want to change their initial beliefs in the light of information received from others. That is the kind of critical thinking that can be reached through communicative, collaborative classroom processes.
The final task – the design of a new poster – is an example of a creative task that extends naturally out of the tasks that have preceded it. The task combines language skills and non-language skills, so all students have a chance to make a meaningful contribution. Done collaboratively, it will generate further opportunities for communication, collaboration and critical thinking, too.
Double duty
We don’t need extra lessons to teach global skills, nor do we need to separate language skills from global skills. The activities above demonstrate that the learning tasks of the classroom can be asked to perform double duty: to generate opportunities to practise language and to develop students’ global skills.
I hope this is useful. I’ll be expanding on this in my upcoming session at ELTOC 2020. I look forward to seeing you there!
Edmund Dudley is a teacher trainer, materials writer and teacher of English with more than 25 years of classroom experience. Based in Budapest, he has extensive experience of teaching EFL at both primary and secondary levels. He works with teachers from around the world as a freelance teacher trainer and as a tutor at the University of Oxford’s ELT Summer Seminar. He is the author of ETpedia Teenagers (2018, Pavilion Publishing) and co-author of Mixed-Ability Teaching (2015, Oxford University Press).
Almost thirty years ago, when I first started teaching, the use of feature films in the classroom was considered a ‘Friday afternoon treat’ – something to give the students as a reward and, perhaps in some cases, to give teachers a chance to catch up on some marking! Some schools used movies randomly and at inappropriate levels, meaning students often got little to nothing in terms of language learning.
Having originally studied Film at university I was always keen to use movies in class, and some years later I ran a series of workshops for teachers on the use of video in the classroom (‘video’ gives an idea of exactly how long ago that was) and how to maximise learning opportunities. I offered a selection of lesson ideas I’d used to good effect in my own classes and now 25 years later, with increased online access to materials that are often not subject to copyright issues within an educational context, I’m sharing a few of those ideas here!
Why use movie trailers?
These ideas will concentrate on movie trailers specifically as promotional tools studios use to get audiences interested in films coming soon. The interest level in trailers is unquestionable – being among the top five forms of video content viewed by users (as an example, Marvel’s Avengers Endgame trailer had 129,527,344 views at the time of writing).
You can find trailers on YouTube or sites like iTunes Movie Trailers. A typical trailer will be between 2 and 3 minutes long, although teaser trailers – those released sometime before the movie’s planned release – will be shorter, and typically give less of the plot away, aiming to create a general mood instead (these can be useful in their own right).
You should ensure you are not breaking any copyright laws in your use of movies in class and be aware of the suitability of the subject matter for the students you are teaching. Note that the majority of trailers will be suitable for class use, but ‘red band trailers’ are those which feature violence and/ or abusive language.
1) Pick a Movie
If you do show movies in your school, as part of a ‘movie club’ or similar, trailers can provide an excellent opportunity to decide what movies are shown, while encouraging students’ analytical and presentation skills!
Method: Show three trailers. Students divide into three groups according to which movie they would prefer to see. Within each group, they decide what it is about their choice that appeals to them. A help guide could be provided with keywords to assist them: words like genre/ stars/ director/ themes etc. After half an hour, selected representatives present their choice reasons to the broader group. After presentations, the choice is put to a class vote.
2) Film Pitch
This is a more ‘drama’ based version of the ‘pick a movie’ idea and uses the concept of familiar social events such as the Cannes Film Festival etc. where filmmakers will try to sell their films to would-be studio buyers.
Method: Show a trailer and ask the students to consider it along the lines of stars/ genre/ look and feel/ what they saw. Invite students to write a ‘pitch’ for the movie, as if they were the maker. Their job is to pick out the most positive points about it and why people would want to see it. The second group of two/ three students will act as a ‘movie producer panel’ who can buy a movie. Their job is to decide whether they would buy the film in question, based on the quality of the presenters’ persuasive powers.
3) Red Light/ Green Light
This is a variation on Film Pitch, which doesn’t even need a trailer!
Method: Students in small groups come up with their own ideas for a film, and present a 2-minute ‘pitch’ of it to a panel of students who will decide whether their ‘studio’ will give it the green light (make it), or a red light (turn it down).
4) What Happens Next
The point of a trailer is to give a feel for what the movie will be about, without giving the whole plot away (some do this better than others). They often use ‘tropes’ – a movie language shorthand which allows an audience to see there is enough in the movie that reminds them of things they have previously liked without being ‘exactly the same’. If you have students who are interested and watch movies in their own time and depending on your class subject, this can work as a fun ‘warmer’ exercise.
Method: Show a trailer and ask students what they think will happen in the movie. Students can work in pairs or individually and either fill in a response or call out suggestions (from experience these can be humorous or serious, depending on your class…). If you are using an old movie then you can tell them who was closest (although they may have seen it), if it’s a new film then there will be a period of waiting before the answer is revealed…
5) My Favorite Genre:
… a fun self-study preparation/ classroom presentation project for classes who have an interest in movies.
Method: explain to students what a ‘genre’ means in film terms. This can be a fun classroom warmer to encourage students to take part: in the past I’ve put genre headings up on a board (e.g. Western, Sci-Fi, Horror etc.), and provided post-it notes of terms or words such as ‘Ghost’, ‘Horse’, ‘Time-travel’ etc. then asked students to put them under the appropriate genre. Students can then add their own elements under the genre they think is most fitting.
To extend this ask students to think about what their favourite genre is and tell them to find a trailer which they believe demonstrates this genre. Students can do this in their own time and present it to their classmates, pointing out what ‘genre’ elements it uses. This can lead to interesting discussions around cross-genres and storytelling techniques.
How do you use movies in the classroom? Let us know in the comments below!
Simon Bewick worked in ELT for 25 years and has watched movies for nearly 50. He is the author of several short story collections for both adults and young adults, available on Amazon. He writes about films, literature and culture on his website bewbob.com
I have a question for you. Do you know your learners’ reading level in English – I mean, reallyknow it? If your learners are halfway through an A2 coursebook, does that mean their reading level is A2-and-a-half?! The cautious ones among us would say ‘Not necessarily’; the bold ones would say ‘No’. But in an age when efficacy and assessment is all the rage in ELT, plenty of pressure is put on the teaching community (by itself, parents, and other stakeholders) to measure learners’ language skills accurately – down to the nth degree, in fact.
The dark art of testing
Measuring reading level has always been something of a dark art, or at least a shadowy discipline. Part of the problem is that, as a receptive skill, it seems to take place inside learners’ heads. We can test comprehension, of course. And how we love to test it – with questions, gapfills, clozes, and multiple-choices, all of which require learners to skim and scan until they go cross-eyed! We often enjoy testing comprehension so much that we squeeze the life out of a text. It’s a wonder we don’t put learners off reading in English altogether.
There are other factors at play, of course – short attention spans in a fast-paced, device-driven world compromising the appeal of ‘deep reading’ is one of them, but that’s an easy target. The main issue is that most learners aren’t reading the right texts for them, and not in the right way.
Reading improves all-round ability
If learners want to improve their reading level – and benefit their all-round ability in English – then it’s vital we help them discover how to do this. And don’t just take my word for it. Research by luminaries like Richard Day and Paul Nation has suggested this for years. There are massive gains to be made by learners reading a lot in English – reading extensively for interest and pleasure. For more on this, see this article from El País (use Google Translate if your Spanish is rusty or non-existent).
Reading fluency over reading comprehension
So let’s go back to the question: Do you know your learners’ reading level? The important thing to appreciate is that I’m talking about reading fluency here. Can they read a text connectedly and understand the majority of words?
Most publishers have an online test which claims to tell learners their reading level. Take the Macmillan Readers Level Test, for example. In actual fact, it’s a series of grammar and vocabulary sentences with multiple-choice options, i.e. it doesn’t test reading fluency at all. It features prompt pictures for all the items but most are decorative rather than functional. In addition, some of the sentences are unnatural or misleading, e.g. I’ve got an ache in my throat; Did you hear the thunder last night? with the prompt picture showing lightning. The maximum level the test can give is Upper Intermediate and, if you retake it, the questions and options are all in exactly the same order… so you can improve instantly by virtue of having done the test already.
A tool instead of a test
Here at OUP we’ve come up with something different and something new. And we’d like you and your learners to decide how useful it is. For a start, we’re not calling it a test – it’s a tool. A semantic difference perhaps, but an important one. This isn’t a grammar check based on a random text, but something which genuinely attempts to gauge how fluent learners are at reading a page of a published story.
How does it do this? With a disarmingly simple innovation. Learners themselves decide whether they know the meanings of the words or not. They also decide whether a page of a story at a certain level is ‘Too easy’, ‘Too difficult’, or ‘OK’. This is known as the Goldilocks Principle and is common in cognitive science and developmental psychology.
‘But students will cheat!’ I hear you cry. If they do, they’re only cheating themselves because they’ll be shown a range of stories at the wrong level. It’s like buying clothes – why would you choose trousers which are two sizes too big if they fall down round your ankles? Instead, what learners need is something that ‘fits’ – something that’s right for them at that stage in their development. This means being able to read confidently at a comfortable level.
What’s the point?
After all, the point of learners finding their reading level isn’t so they can brandish it on a certificate or boast about it on social media. The point is to open up a world of texts, stories, and information which they will find digestible and rewarding – even life-changing.
If YOUR learners want to find their reading level in English, they can try our new tool here. Why don’t YOU try it, too? It’s free and takes less than 10 minutes. Because it’s a beta version, we’re also interested in getting feedback about ways to improve it, so please ask your learners to complete the survey too. Happy reading!
Andrew Dilger is a Managing Editor at Oxford University Press. He has been involved in English language teaching as a teacher, trainer, and editor for over a quarter of a century. He is passionate about the power of reading and claims to have read something every day of his life since he first went to school.
The Curse: When Adam was expelled from Eden, it seems that God had an afterthought… ‘[Because of what thou hast done]… in sorrow shalt thou eat of [the ground], thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee …in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread… Oh – and thou shalt have to study phrasal verbs as well’ (Genesis 3:14 – 19). Yes, I do realise that the last bit is an addition to the original text, but I am sure that this is how many learners of English feel…
What is so special about phrasal verbs? Actually not much. Phrasal verbs are just like any other lexical items in English; that said, there are some good reasons why learners find them such a pain:
They are verbs and as such they are less concrete and ‘free-standing’ than most nouns (a hammer is a hammer, but what is ‘look up’?);
Many phrasal verbs tend to have more than one meaning (e.g. make up [an excuse] / make up [as in ‘kiss and make up’]);
The verb often has no direct connection with the meaning (e.g. ‘What have you been getting up to?’);
The fact that there are many, unrelated phrasal verbs with a similar form which mean totally different things (e.g. make up/make up for/make for etc.).
How to approach phrasal verbs: Here is the main idea: just because phrasal verbs can be difficult for our learners that does not mean that we have to come up with new ways of presenting or practising these lexical items. In fact, I would like to argue that in trying too hard to help our learners we often do more harm than good (yes, there is going to be a list of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ in my upcoming webinar).
So – why should I attend this session? As it happens there are a number of new ways to help our learners. In my webinar, I am going to recommend three research-based strategies discovered by cognitive scientists which are certain to make your teaching far more effective. In fact, I would go so far as to say that by using these simple strategies, you are going to become at least 30% more efficient in teaching phrasal verbs. Here is an added bonus: these strategies also work for anything else you might want to teach your students – whether this is tenses, writing, functional language, history, biology, economics – anything! Here’s a taster of how it works.
Generation: This strategy involves asking the students to do something which they lack the knowledge to do. This could be asking them to solve a type of maths problem they have never encountered before or to list the reasons for the French Revolution which they have not been taught. In our field, this could involve asking students to describe the picture of a living room when they do not yet have the vocabulary to do so, or to write a formal email when they have not been shown how to do it. The idea is that the frustration students experience actually prepares their mind to receive the new knowledge and heightens their level of alertness so they experience an ‘A-ha!’ moment when they see the right answer or the right model. ‘Unsuccessful attempts to solve a problem encourage deep processing of the answer when it is later supplied, creating fertile ground for its encoding, in a way that simply reading the answer cannot. It is better to solve a problem than to memorise a solution. It is better to attempt a solution and supply the incorrect answer than not to make the attempt’ (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel 2014 – p. 88).
Retrieval: Retrieval is the single most effective strategy cognitive scientists have managed to discover. Here is the discovery in a nutshell: whereas most of us teachers focus on input, thinking that the best way to help our students is to structure the information in such a way that it ‘goes in’ more easily, it turns out that students learn best by trying to retrieve the information, that is when they try to get information out of their heads! ‘Retrieval practice occurs when learners recall and apply multiple examples of previously learned knowledge or skills after a period of forgetting’ (Agarwal & Bain 2019 – p. 37). Put another way, you just ask your students to remember things you have taught them. The simplest form of retrieval is when you just ask your class to write down everything they can remember at the end of the session. The more often we do this, the better. As cognitive scientists have shown, the problem with ‘forgetting’ is not so much that we forget – we just cannot access the information inside our head. ‘The more times we draw information from memory, the more deeply we carve out the pathway to it and the more we make that piece of information available for use in the future’ (Lang 2016 – p. 28).
Spacing: The last strategy is the simplest thing you have ever heard: researchers have discovered that while massed practice (cramming) helps students remember things better in the short term (which is why they invariably do this before exams), in the long term this leads to very little learning. Instead, if one were to study exactly the same material but spread the study over a number of shorter sessions, allowing some time to elapse between them, the difference in the resulting long-term retention can be truly impressive. In Carey’s words ‘nothing in learning science comes close in terms of immediate, significant, and reliable improvements to learning’ (Carey 2014 – p. 76). It seems that when we stop studying and we engage in something else, our brain keeps working in the background, organising things and making connections without us realising it. ‘When we let time pass and space things out, students’ knowledge has the time to solidify and ‘simmer’ ‘ (Agarwal & Bain 2019 – p. 100). So, instead of asking students to engage in retrieval at the end of the lesson, you might ask them to do so at the beginning of the next lesson. Here is another idea: instead of giving students homework on what you did during the lesson, why not give them homework on something you did the previous week?
What about those phrasal verbs? So how can we apply all these ideas? How can we use them to facilitate the learning of phrasal verbs? Well, if I were to tell you everything here, you would not need to attend ELTOC 2020, would you?
Suffice it to say that I intend to make the session a practical one and give you at least four practical, actionable ideas. So do please register, and feel free to bring a friend along!
Nick Michelioudakis (B. Econ., Dip. RSA, MSc [TEFL]) has been active in ELT for many years as a teacher, examiner, presenter and teacher trainer. He has travelled and given seminars and workshops in many countries all over the world.
He has written extensively on Methodology, though he is better known for his ‘Psychology and ELT’ articles in which he draws on insights from such disciplines as Marketing, Management and Social Psychology and which have appeared in numerous newsletters and magazines.
His areas of interest include Student Motivation, Learner Independence, Teaching one-to-one, and Humour.
References
Agarwal, P. & Bain, P. (2019) Powerful Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Brown, P., Roediger, H., McDaniel, M. (2014) Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Cambridge Massachusetts. Belknap Harvard
Carey, B. (2014) How We Learn. London: Macmillan
Lang, J. (2016) Small Teaching. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
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Students are always fascinated with the idea of time travel and understanding the relationship between the past and the future. I remember as a child both burying and discovering time capsules full of cultural treasures and personal stories.
Here we’ll discuss the role of creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration in the English language classroom, and suggest some practical ideas for giving students a challenging new take on these familiar concepts.
Almost thirty years ago, when I first started teaching, the use of feature films in the classroom was considered a ‘Friday afternoon treat’ – something to give the students as a reward and, perhaps in some cases, to give teachers a chance to catch up on some marking! Some schools used movies randomly and at inappropriate levels, meaning students often got little to nothing in terms of language learning.
The Curse: When Adam was expelled from Eden, it seems that God had an afterthought… ‘[Because of what thou hast done]… in sorrow shalt thou eat of [the ground], thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee …in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread… Oh – and thou shalt have to study phrasal verbs as well’ (Genesis 3:14 – 19). Yes, I do realise that the last bit is an addition to the original text, but I am sure that this is how many learners of English feel…