Learners and lexical phrases

The teaching tip in short
If the course book has a group of functional frames / phrases (agreeing / disagreeing / giving an opinion etc) that learners are supposed to go on and use in a communicative activity, type the phrases out. When you have done the stages that help them work out meaning / form / use, give a set cut up into individual phrases to each learner. Then as they go on to the speaking stage of the sequence where you hope they will use them, they should try to get rid of as many as they can as they speak, discarding cards as they use a phrase. This works best when there is a more controlled stage of practice before something more natural (because you can use the game like cards system in the controlled step), but can still work in an otherwise genuinely communicative discussion.

Writing an LSA background assignment

When people start Module Two they want to see examples of background assignments and lessons. It is hard to explain why lots of examples is not a good idea, but writing a background that can serve as a sample has helped me begin to understand why in ways I hadn’t envisaged. Only begin though. I need to read more about genres and communities and social processes. It has also made me see other areas I should focus on soon in terms of reading / research.

Writing the background
I liked …
I liked reading to write, haven’t had to do that in ages. Kept reading things that I wanted to pursue, but were slightly off the topic, the two most persistent of which were ..

• Feedback – feedback is fundamental to Delta and though some of what I read was specifically about feedback on language and language development, some was on students in general or in higher education (note to self: start in Hyland 2003 for this) and would apply to teachers doing any Module. Whether they read it at all, whether they can react to it / understand it / know what to do next even if they do understand it. How we can make it so that there is a chance of all of / any of those things happening. Can I find research / ideas to help me work out how we should be doing it or how it is most effective ? Much of what we are doing now has evolved in the face of demand / practical contexts / experience and it works, but if I looked at it more systematically could it work better ?  add some science to our craft ?

Why write ?

Early in 2012 there was a call on the Delta lists for trainers who would like to take part in a research study for Cambridge. The study was designed to find out what trainers did in input sessions and why and the last line was interesting.
Trainers will be encouraged to adopt a participatory role in the project (rather than to feel they are simply being studied); in this way, the study will provide them with the opportunity to talk about and reflect on their own practices and may thus contribute to their professional development as trainers. 
And it turned out to be true.  It felt like free therapy for trainers. A series of phone calls where I was asked questions about why I did things and that made me think hard about what I did, especially when the transcripts turned up a few weeks later in my mail and I’d read it back, frustrated at how I had failed to articulate some ideas in the way I thought I had.
Those conversations made me realise that my reading had become mostly reactive (reading specifically to solve problems that arose in the short term, so I could deal with sessions or assignments) since I finished my Masters.

While I do reflect and tinker (does that lesson / session / worksheet / group project / course work ?  or does it need tweaking / changing / completely rewriting ?) the phone calls made me think I didn’t question fundamentals enough … e. g. I take (with a pinch of sense / balance) learning by doing / learning through experience as automatically desirable (as opposed to being told things). Why ? Where did I get that from ? Is it actually even true ? Has it been researched ? Can I validate it ? In fact that has been worrying me for ages now, but the day to day gets dealt with first because some of it is urgent and because often reactive things are easier to deal with.
So I am constantly reflecting on and tinkering with an educational house built on sand.

The classroom management session rewrite

Do we all get caught in the same traps ? Me and the CPs ?
Are they inevitable ? Are they traps ?
Maybe you should just tell people things.
I really ought to try and dig out research to support learning by doing as more effective … it might feel instinctively right to me, but it clearly doesn’t to everyone (going by many lessons I’ve watched), shall add it to the to do list.
But actually it felt better that they did things in that session, even if the outcomes were not so clear.
And when I get a chance to do it again, I could make a work a fair bit more smoothly and can work at making the outcomes clearer.

Going back to something that you haven’t done for a while makes you see it with new eyes. I hadn’t done a session on classroom management for a couple of years but I had notes from the last time. (The new version used below is here). When I read them over the week before I was due to do it, two things struck me

1. It was trainer centred in that activities fed information to the CPs about or led them through a couple of areas I wanted them to know about, but didn’t ask for much from them.
2. Where learners can use language a lot in lessons, you can’t always get teachers to teach in sessions (‘teaching’ each other a language you all already know is rarely helpful, ‘teaching’ each other what you know about teaching works for some things in some ways, but is limited). But one thing you can get them to do is the classroom management.

Module Three and draft marking

I need more people draft marking on Module Three. But how do I keep track of what is happening and how do we make sure those who haven’t been doing it for so long can do it well ? What does knowing how to do it entail ?
How did I learn to do it ?

1. Reading the guidelines and reports.
2. Reading (and draft marking) lots of assignments.
3. Seeing what passed and what didn’t.
4. Being standardized.

So if I learnt that way, isn’t that enough ?
But then if I can make the process more efficient / faster, why not do so ? It could preempt me needing to answer lots of queries and might avoid other learning curve problems.