How useful is extensive reading?My best student ever was called Anne. I taught her for about three years. She was a very enthusiastic student, though she rarely did what I set as homework. She did read books though. A lot of them. About two books a week in fact. Anna took her Cambridge Proficiency exams at the age of 14. She got an ‘A’. Anna is now an English Language teacher herself. Make no mistake – extensive reading works. Continue reading
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:
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?
Nick 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.
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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
I have always felt that we teachers we are a bit like cooks – thinking about what we are going to serve our children the next day, worrying about how varied their diet is, the ingredients etc. Increasingly, however, I feel there is a problem with the way we approach our task: do we worry far too much about the nutritional value of our meals? The result is that our dishes are bland and our students go ‘Oh, not that again’. And what is our response? ‘But it’s good for you’.
In this short article, I would like to argue that if we have a sound knowledge of spices (psychological principles) we can select activities which are both nutritious and tasty – by which I mean useful and fun.
Activity 1: ‘Colour in the Passage’ Look at this activity. What could be wrong with it? The teacher has been teaching her class about adjectives (see the first paragraph) and now she has given them a consolidation activity where they have to fill in the gaps (see the second one).
‘One sunny day, my little puppy jumped onto our red couch and played with his fun new toy. I liked to watch him play – he looked so lively and excited, so full of life. Soon, my playful puppy yawned. He was an exhausted puppy – he tired easily. I picked him up and laid him on his soft, round bed. Soon my sleepy puppy was snoring away’.
‘One ……… day, my ……… puppy jumped onto our ……… couch and played with his ……… new toy. I liked to watch him play – he looked so ……… and ………, so full of life. Soon, my ……… puppy yawned. He was an ……… puppy – he tired easily. I picked him up and laid him on his ………, ……… bed. Soon my ……… puppy was snoring away’.
[ playful / sleepy / sunny / excited / round / fun / little / soft / exhausted / lively / red ]
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying the activity is bad, but it’s just not interesting enough. You get all your vitamins, but you can just picture the expression on the students’ faces.
Now, what if we were to tweak it a little? What if we were to give students the paragraph without the adjectives OR the gaps and we asked them to add some colour to it (‘What is the puppy like?’ / ‘What is the bed like?’ / ‘How was the puppy feeling?’).
‘One day, my puppy jumped onto our couch and played with his toy. I liked to watch him play – he looked so full of life. Soon, my puppy yawned. He was a puppy – he tired easily. I picked him up and laid him on his bed. Soon my puppy was snoring away’.
Students might then come up with something like this:
‘One day, my lovely puppy jumped onto our long, comfortable couch and played with his new, stuffed toy. I liked to watch him play – he looked so excited and care-free, so happy and full of life. Soon, my cute puppy yawned. He was a young puppy – he tired easily. I picked him up and laid him on his cosy, warm bed. Soon my adorable little puppy was snoring away’.
Principle 1: The IKEA Effect. Why is the latter activity better than the previous one? The answer is that students are free to imagine the scene for themselves and to add something of themselves to the task. They are free to invest. Psychologists have discovered that when we work on something ourselves we endow it with special value; that’s why we so often think the salad we make is so much better than the fancy risotto someone else has prepared (though of course others may well disagree). Activities where students can contribute something or better still, make something themselves are likely to be better than ones where they simply manipulate language. The moral: get students to create things.
Activity 2 – ‘AQBL’: Let us say that (for some reason best known to yourself) you have been teaching your students vocabulary related to cars, car engines, and car characteristics in general. To practice the vocabulary, you do a drill where students in pairs practice asking each other questions. You give them the second table, so they have to come up with the vocabulary themselves when constructing the questions.
| Top Speed | 230 km/h |
| Acceleration | 7 sec (0-100) |
| Fuel Capacity | 68 litres |
| Consumption | 9 litres/100 km |
| Engine Output | 180 HP |
| Boot Capacity | 640 litres |
| Reliability Rating | 7 / 10 |
| Performance Rating | 9 / 10 |
| …… km/h | |
| …… sec (0-100) | |
| …… litres | |
| …… litres/100 km | |
| …… HP | |
| …… litres | |
| …… / 10 | |
| …… / 10 |
So the interaction might go like this (S1: Prospective Buyer / S2: Car Salesman):
S1: What is this car’s top speed?
S2: It’s 230 km/h.
S1: And what about its acceleration?
S2: It goes from 0 to 100 km/h in 7 seconds.
S1: I see. How much petrol does the tank hold?
S2: Its fuel capacity is 68 litres.
S1: Does it have a powerful engine? ….etc.
By now you know what my objection is going to be… But what if we were to tweak the activity a little? The new activity is called ‘Answer the Question Before Last [AQBL]’. When S1 asks a question, S2 says nothing; when S1 asks the second question, S2 answers the first one (!) etc. etc. For example:
S1: What is this car’s top speed?
S2: (…says nothing)
S1: And what about its acceleration?
S2: It’s 230 km/h.
S1: I see. How much petrol does the tank hold?
S2: It goes from 0 to 100 km/h in 7 seconds.
S1: Does it have a powerful engine?
S2: Its fuel capacity is 68 litres…. etc.
Principle 2: Incongruity. I am prepared to bet money that students are going to like the second activity far more than the first one. The principle behind it is that of ‘Incongruity’. Psychologists have discovered that when things unfold the way we expect them to, our brain switches to autopilot; we almost fall asleep, a bit like that puppy in the previous activity, and consequently, we learn very little. However, if something unexpected happens, then our brain goes ‘Ooops! What was this?’ and then we are wide awake, we pay attention and we remember things (no wonder advertisers love this idea!). To get your students to pay attention, break the script – get them to do something unexpected!
Five New Recipes for your Vocabulary Cookbook: So this is the idea behind my upcoming webinar. I hope to demonstrate five activities which both help our students learn vocabulary better and which stand out in some way. Each task will help illustrate a principle of Psychology which I believe is worth bearing in mind when cooking our Lesson Plans.
Here is an extra insight: How can you tell if your idea has worked? Well, how do you know if your dishes taste great? If the diners are licking their fingers, you know your food is good. Similarly, you know an activity is good if, when it is over, the students want to keep going.
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.
Nick Michelioudakis has been a teacher, examiner and trainer for many years. His most recent webinar ‘Here Today, Here Tomorrow: Vocabulary Learning Strategies’ sparked an interesting dialogue on the ways students learn new words. Here are the answers to some of the questions from the webinar.
I would like to start by thanking everyone for attending the Webinars and for their positive comments at the end. If you would like to read an article based on these ideas that we discussed, here is the link: http://oxelt.gl/2zBMc58
OK, on to the other questions now, which I hope will help me raise one or two interesting points.
This is an important question and it is something I forgot to stress during the Webinar. It is useful if students first encounter the words in texts. In this way they can get all kinds of information, including (hopefully) a useful collocation.
If for whatever reason the text does not help much, students can use this amazing tool, SkELL, to look at examples from other authentic texts. As you can see from the screenshot, simply enter a word in a box and you get a number of sentences. This will help students immensely.
This is a hugely important question – and far too large an issue to cover here. As I see it, this is where the teacher’s knowledge of the language comes in. There are all kinds of ‘chunks’ out there and they differ in size, in how ‘fixed’ they are, and in their level of idiomaticity. The teacher must use their judgment to decide where to direct students’ attention, it could be a simple collocation (‘dress a wound’) or a whole phrase (‘let’s cut to the chase’), or something with a ‘movable’ part (‘reported a % increase’). The chunks you focus on will depend on frequency, coverage (whether they can be used in many contexts), students proficiency, and the needs of the syllabus.
There is nothing wrong with using opposites provided students really understand what the word used as an explanation means. For instance, if you want to explain the meaning of the word ‘cowardly’, there is nothing wrong with telling students that it means the opposite of ‘brave’. However, it is generally not a good idea to present two unknown words which happen to be antonyms in the same session (e.g. ‘generous’ – ‘stingy’) if students are unfamiliar with both, in case they mix them up.
The two techniques are very similar. However in ‘linking’, students start with a set of words, and then try to discover ways to connect two or more together. When students use ‘anchoring’, they start with a particular word, fix it in their mind, and then try to discover connections with other words themselves. If the starting word is ‘nostalgia’, they may come up with ‘memory’, ‘think back’, ‘miss someone’, ‘nostalgic song’, ‘pensive mood’, ‘sad’, ‘melancholy’ etc. They may even come up with personal associations which will only make sense to them.
Well, personally I am not sure we should be discouraging this. In fact, this is one of the strategies I mentioned in the Webinar (‘expanding’). As I see it, there is nothing wrong with allowing students to use their L1 as a springboard for discovery. It’s natural for students to reflect on their knowledge and say to themselves ‘OK – this is something I can say in the L1; how can I say it in English?’ What we do want to do though is encourage them to think in terms of sentences rather than single words. What I do if a student asks me ‘How do I say ‘άγκυρα’ (anchor) in English?’ is ask them to give me a sentence.
I really hope you found these techniques useful! If you get the chance to try them out, I would be interested to hear how the lesson went. Contact me via my email address: nickmi@ath.forthnet.gr.
Nick Michelioudakis has worked as a teacher, examiner and trainer for many years. He has given talks in numerous countries and 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. He is particularly interested in student motivation and humour (he has his own YouTube channel – ‘Comedy for ELT’). You can visit his blog at www.michelioudakis.org.
It’s probably true to say that as teachers, we face the same problems the world over:
So how will this webinar help? Well, the idea is to offer some principles which will make vocabulary learning more effective. In addition, the talk will demonstrate ten very simple, very practical strategies which should help students practice on their own. Let me explain…
Advantages: Did you notice something about these activities? That’s right. They are student and teacher-friendly; i) they are extremely easy; ii) they require no preparation; iii) they require no extra materials; iv) they can be adapted for all levels; v) students can learn to do them on their own.
Not bad, all things considered… So there you have it: Three down, only seven to go! Hope to see you at the webinar.
