Teenagers

How to survive a coursebook. Part #2 Grammar

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This is the second post in the series that is a diary of a teacher trying to teach not the most exciting unit from the coursebook and sighing all the way. The first post can be found here. Today another one, this time devoted to two lessons on the passive voice. The post includes references to Gateway to English, B2 by David Spencer published by Macmillan. This is the coursebook that I am using with my group and the page numbers refer to the second edition of the coursebook.

Vocabulary practice and revision

This unit has a rather challenging content as regards vocabulary. There are the names of the natural disasters as well as a big set of nouns, adjectives and verbs used to talk about disasters, not a small thing. Hence more practice.

  • A quick test – Here I had a good time pretend play a school teacher and calling out my teens to answer a series of random questions. The teens took turns to give us a definition and an example for all of the key words from the previous lesson.
  • Visuals: I shared with my students a set of six visuals related to disasters (here) that I found on google, illustrating different aspects of a variety of natural disasters, including the damage and the beauty, too. Students were asked to work in pairs and to choose a pair of pictures for their partner to talk about and to compare them (‘Are they similar or different?’), partially inspired by the visuals tasks from the higher levels of the Cambridge exams. There was also a round-up question, ‘Which photograph was the most interesting for you?’ which is also the question that we used for the whole class feedback.

Grammar presentation and practice

From the very first moment I knew that I would try to minimise the presence of the main topic of the unit, in order to give us all a break and to be able to include some more exciting and some less dramatic topics. Because, really, how much can you take. Overall, I decided to keep all the practise exercises from the book (all of them but one using the context of the natural disasters) and to supplement them with something more fun.

  • The context I chose was My International Life. The first part was the presentation about the products that I use, the clothes I wear, the books I read and the devices I use and where they were made. I presented a series of visuals and the group were trying to guess where they were made, my computer, my socks, my coffee and my trinkets. The model sentence we were using at this point was: It was made in…They were made in…
  • Later on we dealt with the form, pronunciation and use, including the difference between the active and the passive voice.
  • The first practice activity was the students talking about themselves. The students were sent out into the breakout rooms to talk about their international life. They were instructed to talk about ten things (minimum).
  • The other practice activities in that lesson focused on the exercises in the coursebook (page 98 in the coursebook).
  • We finished the lesson with an online game, found on bamboozle.com.

Grammar presentation and practice. Part 2

I decided to divide the grammar input into two lessons because I teach a mixed ability group and, although, theoretically, the passive voice structures, in all the tenses, should be only a revision for them, it is not quite true in case of some of my students. For that reason, in lesson 1 we worked on the form in all the tenses and in lesson 2 we focused on the passive voice with two objects.

  • Practice and production: Photographs in our book: I decided to start with a freer practice activity based on the materials from the coursebook. I found different illustrations in the coursebook, namely: set 1: pages 98 and 99 depicting the aftermath of the hurricane Katrina and the typhoon damage in the Phillipines and set 2: pages 87 (a Foo Fighters concert) and page 70 (health). The students were asked to choose one of the sets and to describe the photographs using only the passive voice. We did this activity in the breakout rooms.
  • Grammar presentation #2: we used the coursebook materials to present the passive voice sentences with two objects (page 98).
  • Controlled practice was built around the exercises in the coursebook (page 98 and 99).
  • Freer practice #1 was the activity from the coursebook, too, Find someone who. I had to change the format of the activity as moving students in-between the breakout rooms would be too much hassle and I wanted them to produce a lot of language, rather than talk to different partners which they do anyway. For that reason there were asked to use the prompts from the coursebook and to find out as much as possible from the same partner.
  • Freer practice #2 and the final activity of this lesson was inspired by something that I read on Sandy Millin’s blog once. I decided to call it ‘A story of an object’. In the orignal version of the activity it was the object itself that would be retelling the story of its life and, I suppose, other structures would be the format. We changed it to the 3rd singular as it was the format more consistent with the passive voice that I was hoping that my students would be using. We started with a model and I used my (amazing) Malevich tote bag, probably The Present of the Year 2022. I presented the structure (A story of an object, 3 questions from the audience) and a set of verbs to use (created, bought, brought, seen, loved, kept, washed, worn etc). Afterwards, the students went into the breakout rooms and worked in pairs. Back in the common room, each student gave us a summary of what they found out about from their friends.
  • We finished with another bamboozle game.

Reflection

  • Well, in one line: I was a happy teacher last week.
  • The context of the international life worked very well. We managed to get away for a moment from the gloom of the natural disasters and immediately after the presentation the students got to use the structure to talk about themselves. It was very beneficial even though in the beginning the students were mostly using ‘was / were made’. This gave us a very good basis for the more extensive use and it was a great opportunity to personalise it straight away.
  • The lessons included a good ratio of the individual practice, disaster-focused and the pair-work, disaster-less and more productive. The bamboozle games were another way of balancing the weight of the lesson.
  • I love working with visuals and I was really very happy with how they worked in this lesson. The students were discussing the disasters and using the vocabulary but they were also able to interact with the beautiful photographs and notice the discrepancy between the beauty of the natural disasters in the photographs and the danger and suffering that this beauty is synonymous with in some cases.
  • In the same vein, I was very happy with the way we recycled the photograhps in the coursebooks. It was also interesting for the students to notice when it is and it is not natural to use the passive voice in different situations.
  • A story of an object was probably my favourite activity of these two lessons. I could share with the students the story of my Malevich tote bag but I also loved listening to the stories that my students chose to tell. Some of them decided to share their treasures with the class, such as the favourite book, the phone or the parrot (a bit of far-fetched but she managed!). Some went for the sarcastic approach as they talked about their favourite cookies, the hoover or a bottle of water, sparkling. It’s been a while since the last time I laughed so much in class.

Happy teaching!

How to survive a coursebook. B2 Case study

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Part 1 (skippable) A teacher complaining

This story started last Wednesday evening. I was getting ready for my Thursday classes, including my teens’ group. I knew that we were about to start a new unit but I hadn’t bothered to look at it, I had no idea what it was supposed to be. It was only on Wednesday that I opened the coursebook and I sighed but this feeling quickly turned to anger. Because what we have in store for the next three weeks, the next twelve academic hours and the next fourteen pages are natural disasters, casualties, destruction and damage. Even if we had lived in some more peaceful and optimistic times, that would be a lot to take. For my students and for me, the teacher, too. Especially that the whole unit is some weird collection of depressive topics and debates. Literally, asteroids, tsunamis and epidemics are destroying the planet’s population on every single page of the unit, in the vocabulary lesson, in the grammar lesson and in the every skills lesson. In one word: I hate it and I personally think that this is a rubbish unit. I don’t like it. It needs to be highlighted here that despite the fact that I do believe that the perfect coursebooks don’t exist, I like our coursebook, Gateway B2 from Macmillan and we have had a good year so far. But this unit is simply a disaster.

There are two things that I could do. Naturally, I could just skip the entire unit because I do not really feel like using my and my students’ time doing something we are all going to hate and suffer through. 12 academic hours is 540 minutes or one full working day. I was really considering that and I am sure that if I explained it all to my parents, I could just get away with it.

However, that would mean that I would have to find, create and put together enough material to fill in those 6 lessons and at this point in my life I simply do not have time for that. Then, there is of course the fact that the environment and the natural disasters are a part of the B2 curriculum (why they are there is another question) and I wouldn’t want to deprive my kids of the material that they should be covering. With a heavy heart I decided to go for the option two: try to surive the Survive unit by heavy adaptation.

Welcome to a new short series of posts. My main aim is to record the adaptation process in detail and on the go as well as to motivate myself to reflect on each of the lessons taught, hoping that someone might find it useful.

Lesson 1: Main aim: Vocabulary

  • We started the lesson with the weather vocabulary revision and upgrade. The students were divided into pairs, each student in a pair was given a link to the weather wordwall cards (set 1 and set 2), with the visuals and the key words and definitions. The students were working in pairs in the breakout rooms, calling out one of the words and discussing if they are similar or different, for example: ‘Scorching and boiling? Are they similar or different?’ or ‘Fog and rainbow? Are they similar or different?’ They were both sharing their ideas and discussing.
  • A small set of questions for the students to talk about their favourite and least favourite weather and the extreme weather conditions that they have experienced or read about.
  • The key vocabulary from the coursebook on page 96. We used exercise 1 and exercise 4 but I have also prepared an additional quiz for the kids to practise the words related to natural disasters. It can be found here.
  • As a follow-up I decided to include a debate, modelled on the B2 speaking exam task. For that used the list of the key words (ex 1a page 96) and a question that was added, namely: How damaging are these disasters? Talk about the impact on the people, the environment and the economy. Choose the most damagine one.
  • I decided to skip the text on page 97. I didn’t like it and I decided to replace it with the text on page 108 and change the direction of the lesson towards people for whom natural disasters can be an adventure.
  • We started with a discussion on whether students would like to go to a location of a natural disaster (inspired by ex 1 on page 108). Before we started the discussion, the students were shown two videos of people who research volcanic eruptions and people who like to visit the sites. I used the short clips from the following ones: Cooking pizza on a volcano, Cooking sausages on a volcano, Drone above the volcano. We talked about the reasons that make the people go there and our views.
  • As the final task we read the text to find out more about the expedition to a volcano, as featured in the coursebook, together with the comprehension task (page 108). The final summarising question was: Has this text helped you make your mind about such adventures? Has it made you change your mind?

Reflection

  • Overall, I am quite happy with how the lesson went.
  • I like to start a new unit / topic with a visual-based task but this time I decided to leave it for later. I already have an idea for a task for lesson 2 or 3 of the unit. This time round we started with the weather vocabulary speaking task and it was a good decision. First of all, the topic is related and most of the natural disasters are somehow connected to the weather conditions. Second of all, we could revise and extend our weather vocabulary – some of the words were familiar, some were new but the cards include enough information for the kids to be able to handle it and to participate. Last but definitely not least, the game we played was a great balance to the rest of the lesson, a lighter beginning, not so dramatic and / or desctructive as the rest of the input. And even though it started slowly (‘Anka, but these words are completely different’ aka ‘We can produce one sentence’), it quickly took off and the students were getting more and more creative as regards the potential similarities between pairs of words chosen randomly.
  • We will definitely need to revision and opportunities for practice not for the key vocabulary (the natural disasters) but for all the accompanying words. There were just too many verbs and nouns.
  • Quite unexpectedly, the debate on the impact of different natural disasters was a success. The students are familiar with the format (FCE speaking part 3) and I knew that this would not be a problem. I was worried, however, that they might have enough ideas or inspiration to compare the impact of a pandemic with that of an avalanche. I was wrong. All of the natural disaters are destructive but because of the angle (impact on the people, the environment and the economy), the students got involved and they were almost amused arriving at a conclusion that avalanches, in fact, are not so damaging for the economy and they are not often dangerous for people or the nature because they just happen whereas, in many ways, an epidemic such as coronovirus was even beneficial for the environment as people stayed at home and were not using their cars or flying as much…
  • Using the videos was also a good idea because it help the students understand the eruptions a bit better and it gave them some food for thought and it activated the schemata for the reading task. I have already started looking for a follow-up video, an interview with the volcano tourists that I could use in a listening task.

See you soon in part two of this series!

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #45 Five ways of personalising content

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In this post I would like to share a few activities that I came up with for my students that turned to be very effective as regards students’ involvement, the amount of language generated and the opportunities for the target language practice.

All of these are only samples, activities and materials to serve a very specific purpose with a very specific group of students. However, I do believe that they can serve as five case studies that help to create the framework for creation and adaptation of such materials.

#1 You today and you in 2017

This is the activity that we used with my teens, in a freer practice activity focused on comparatives on the B2 level, including simple comparatives, less, as…as and the comparatives quantifiers. The kids were working in pairs, they were answering the question: ‘You today and you in 2017. How different is your life?‘ and they used the wordwall cards to guide them in their discussions.

When I was planning this activity, I prepared 15 cue cards but we barely got through half of them in each pair because the students really wanted to share their experiences and, surprisingly, they did not need any follow-up questions, they were simply talking and talking and talking.

#2 The future us

This activity and the materials were intially created for a group of teens but later I adapted it to the needs of my junior group and to a group of ‘advanced’ primary kids, too in the lessons whose aim was to introduce and to practise ‘will’ and ‘might’ to talk about the future.

Intially, many years ago, when we were still in the classroom I created a handout with all the situations, one per each student in the group because I wanted to do it in the format of a gallery walk. The kids had to move around the room, read the situations and decide who will achieve what. In the end, the students picked up the cards with their names and told of us which of the predictions are most likely to happen in the real life.

Later on this activity had to be adapted to the format of the online classes and I decided to turn it into a simpler speaking activity, again with a set of wordwall cards. The students worked in groups three and they took turns to uncover the cards and to discuss who in the group is most likely to get a new haircut, start wearing glasses, write a book or win an Oscar. They had to justify their answers. During the feedback, we brought back some of their ideas and the students whose names were called out were to comment on these predictions.

Although this is one of the flexible activities (no specific ending, can be stopped at any given point), I abandoned the initially planned timing because the students got really involved into it and I allowed them to go through all the cards. We had a laugh and we produced a lot of language. It is worth mentioning, though, that this activity was done in group that had studied together for a few years and that knew each other very well. This meant that they had enough data in order to be able to make their prediction and, also, there was very little risk that someone will be offended with anyone else’s ideas. Perhaps this kind of an activity would not be a good choice for newly formed groups.

#3 Quiz: How well do we know each other?

I prepared this kind of an activity to practise the target langauge in a personalised way with my primary A1 students and the structure used in this particular game was the combination of ‘How often do you / does X do it?’ and the basic adverbs of frequency (always, often, sometimes, never).

The students were given a set of questions for homework about all the random habits of everyone in the group, such as ‘How often does Sasha play computer games?’. They were supposed to think about them and make their decisions. In class, I was asking the questions and everyone, apart from the student in question was sharing their answers. Afterwards, the student would tell us how often they do it (Sasha: I never play computer games) and sometimes provided some additional information.

#4 Personalised reading

This is a trick (or an activity:-) that I learnt in one of the training sessions about a million years ago (and I do not remember whose it was!) that a text (or a listening task) should be treated in a way that more resembles the real life reading (or listening). That means that we approach the text not to be able to answer all the comprehension questions in the coursebook but to take it very personally. The task is to go through the text, labeling the text with the marks: (+) for all the things that we agree with, (-) for all the things that we do not agree with, (!) for all the things that we find surprising or (?) for all the things that we would like to find out more about and so on and so forth. In the feedback session, students simply compare where they put all the specific marks and discuss why such were their choices. Simple and effective.

There are a few variations of this approach. Students can write their own questions to the text / the listening text and then deal with the text with the focus on these questions. In the feedback session, they share their answers and why they have chosen these particular questions or what their answers would be if the text does not include them, which, actually, is something that happens frequently.

Another way was letting the students decide for themselves which items / parts they want to read and talk about. While we were reading a text on ten different factors to take into consideration while choosing a job (based on Gateway B2, Macmillan). First, the students got only a list and they were asked to choose the five that are most important for them and compare their lists with their friends. Afterwards, they were asked to approach the text, comprising of ten short paragraphs, one per factor, and discuss these. They were instructed to go through all of the items, one by one but they could make decisions as regards the order so that the most important ones were dealt with in the beginning when everyone was at the peak of their focus and involvement. Interestingly enough, some students were choosing to read about the factors that were their priority whereas the others wanted to read more about the factors that they would never take into consideration because they were curious about the other people’s rationale.

#5 The Messy Choir for controlled grammar practice

This is a lovely activity that we are using, with my younger and older kids and sometimes with adults, too. I have already written about it and you can find the original post here.

Today, I would like to share the version of the activity with my B2 teens while we were learning / revising the narrative tenses and the Past Perfect among them. I wanted the students to start using the structure straightaway and in a familiar context. Since the class starts at 18:45, there are plenty of things that everyone would have already done and could talk about.

The boxes with the past participle were appearing one by one and everyone was invited to contribute their sentences, the teacher and the students. Some of the verbs generated more answers, some fewer but, overall, all the students participated and practised the new structured.

We used the same activity in the beginning of a few lessons later on, as a warmer / hello / revision activity.

I hope that you have found something useful here to use with your students or to inspire you to create. I also hope that this post will have its part two. And sooner rather than later!

Happy teaching!

I am easy to prepare and very necessary in the classroom. What am I? A riddle!

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Dedicated to Monsieur Alexander (6 y.o.) and Mademoiselle Victoria (3 y.o.) with big thanks for reminding me how important riddles are even if you speak the language very well.

Why? Because you simply must!

  • Riddles are an opportunity to develop focus and listening skills: you are required to listen until the very end as all the elements of the riddle are important and they can help you figure out what the answer is.
  • Riddles help to develop cognitive skills while you are guessing as you are required to put together different pieces of information, to understand, to synthesise and to analyse.
  • Riddles help to develop cognitive skills even more when you are creating your own riddle as you are required to apply and to evaluate the information you providing to make the riddle challenging and achievable at the same time.
  • Riddles are something that we use and enjoy in our L1, from the early childhood and it is only natural that we will try to bring them into our EFL lessons, with kids and with adults.
  • Riddles help develop creativity.
  • Riddles are fun and they create plenty of opportunities for bonding, in a pair or a group.
  • Riddles, in L1, help the kids develop the awareness about how the language works, how the hidden meanings, the homophones, the collocations and this can also be transferred, at least partially, into the EFL or the ESL
  • It is obvious that the context of the EFL and the ESL does not always allow for the riddles and their benefits to be used fully and completely even if only due to the limitations of the language level which, in case of some of the young learners, might be as low as A1. This does not mean that they cannot be used. On the contrary, they can be introduced from early on.
  • Riddles, regardless of the context, are an opportunity for the students to speak and to produce a mini-discourse.
  • In the EFL/ESL classes, it is relatively easy to choose the vocabulary range and the structures for the students, depending on the level and the topic. This range can be easily extended.

How to? Riddles in the EFL classroom

  • The simplest version of the game can be played with preschoolers and we usually start simply with guessing ‘the secret word’ which is the card that the teacher and then the students choose and hold close to their chest and the class are guessing. This version is used to introduce the very idea of the riddles. When the kids have become more familiar with the format, the level of challange can be raised and the production maximised by asking the kids to describe the card they are holding in the simplest of way i.e. with the colour, operating within the colours of the objects on the flashcards used (‘It is green‘ or ‘It is green and red‘). With time, more adjectives can be added (‘It is big’, ‘It is small’), the categories (‘It is a toy’, ‘It is a pet’) or even opinions (‘I like it’, ‘I don’t like it’). There is a post devoted to one of the ways of dealing with riddles with the youngest learners. You can find it here.
  • The primary (or the more advanced pre-primary) students can start adding simple categories in their discourse (‘It’s a toy’, ‘It’s an animal’, ‘It’s in the schoolbag’) and start describing the word using the relevant structures. For example, with food, we use the following four: ‘It is cold’, ‘It is hot’, ‘You eat it’, ‘You drink it’) and these are the structures that the students know and will need anyway and these particular four can be supported by a relevant gesture. The same goes for the animal riddles set: ‘It is big’, ‘It is small’, ‘It can run’, ‘It can fly’, ‘It can swim’. I also like to add ‘I like it’ and ‘I don’t like it’ even though it does not quite provide enough information for the children to guess the object as the class may simply not know what one of us thinks about it, it gives the student making a riddle an opportunity to express opinion and to make it all more personalised. With the youngest students the teacher can assist production in the beginning by asking questions such as ‘Is it hot or cold?’ or ‘Can it swim, fly or run?’. This set of structures can be developed and extended depending on the students’ age and level.
  • As regards the more advanced and older students, the riddles can be made more extensive and more resembling the riddles that the adults and kids play in English as their L1 or the riddles they play with their L1 with the use of simple homonimes or homophones, a wider range of vocabulary or structures or complexity for example by making a list of words not to use when to describe a certain word, describing it with associations (i.e. kids, fun, outside to describe the word ‘playground’), with metaphors (i.e. ‘It is the brain of the computer’ for ‘hard drive’ or ‘It is the opposite of a mountain’ for ‘a cave’) or, even, by a mixture of these (‘Tell me what it is and tell me what it’s not’)
  • As regards the material and the support for the teacher one of the following can be used: flashcards, mini-flashcards, a page from the book with words and words and images, a poster, a set of wordwall cards, a list of words.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #39 A lazy role-play

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Ingredients

  • Any role-play or a dialogue i.e. a transcript of any listening task which is a dialogue (i.e. Movers listening part 2, part 3), any written dialogue (i.e. Movers reading and writing part 3), any functional langauge introduced in a dialogue or a role-play
  • A pencil or a highlighter for each child

Procedures

  • Start with the main aim of the task is, ie listening in case of task 3 of Movers or reading in case of Movers, introduction of the functional language, etc. Go through all of the stages outlined in the teacher’s book or whichever ones you see fit in your teaching context.
  • Give out highlighters or pencils, ask the kids to open the books and look at the text again.
  • Introduce the concept of a banana (or whichever random word you want to use). Explain (and demonstrate!!!) that you will read the text slowly with some bananas in it and that if the students hear the word ‘banana’ they have to highlight or underline one word that comes immediately afterwards. Model with a few words.
  • Read the text with the bananas as the kids listen, follow and underline or highlight. The words chosen to be highlighted are the key words for each specific dialogue and their number depends on the dialogue and on the age and level of the students. With the older students and the more complex texts and language, the students can highlight two or more words that constitute a phrase or a collocation. This can be signalled with a repeated number of bananas ie banana banana for a two-piece phrase or banana banana banana for a three-piece phrase.
  • Ask the students to work in pairs and read the dialogue again and to use their own words and phrases instead of every banana.
  • Afterwards the kids can change roles and read it again or change the partners.
  • If the kids are ready, in the final (and optional) stage of the activity, they can close the book and role play and recreate the dialogue and the converation based on what they remember.

Why we like it

  • It requires no preparation, unless by preparation you mean opening the coursebook and finding the role-play or finding the teacher’s book and making copies of the transcript of any listening activity
  • It offers a great opportunity for the students to practise their speaking skills in an activity that is both controlled (as we have a framework) and free (as there are quite a few options to choose from)
  • It also offers a chance to work on the grammar accuracy and the transformation skills
  • It can be done online or offline
  • It can be done with a variety of levels. The highest level I have used it with was B1 (teens), the lowest level, so far, was A2 (primary).
  • So far, I have only tried it with dialogues but now, writing that post, I started to wonder about the potential of that activity for discourse building and creation. The original text could serve as a potential framework and support for the students to use. I am yet to experiment with that option.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #38 A – Z Game

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Ingredients

  • A piece of paper and something to write with
  • All the letters of the alphabet written in one or two columns, with some space to write, next to each letter

Procedures

  • The teacher divides the students into pairs or teams and gives out the paper with the letters of the alphabet or asks the kids to write these down.
  • Step 1: The teacher announces the topic i.e. Clothes and asks the kids write one word (or phrase) for each letter of the alphabet or, more realistically, for as many letters as they can. The teacher gives an example. Ideally, the teacher creates her/his own list in order to have a set of words to model the other stages of the activity.
  • The teacher sets the time limit (i.e. 5 minutes for the younger kids and 3 minutes for the older kids). It might be a good idea to use a song instead and after the song finishes, the activity does, too.
  • The kids work in teams and make a list of the words within the vocabulary set. After the time is up, the teacher stops the game.
  • Step 2: The kids exchange the lists and count the words or phrases which their friends have managed to write within the set time limit. The teacher writes the results for each team on the board.
  • Step 3: The teams read the words on the lists and choose: the most interesting word, the most unusual word, the funniest word, three words you also have, three words you don’t have, any word you don’t understand or remember etc. The teams work in pairs and find out why their partners put these words on the list. If possible, the kids exchange the lists with another team and repeat the procedure once or twice.

Why we like it

  • For the students it is a great opportunity to revise and recycle vocabulary. All the beginner levels aside, even when the main lesson aim is to introduce and to practise new vocabulary, chances are the kids have already learnt, heard, used or seen some of the words. After all, the vocabulary sets are repeated and extended from level to level, not to mention that most kids have more than one source of English in their lives: the state school, the language school, a private teacher, brothers, sisters, parents, videos on youtube, cartoons, stories, computer games online…This game is one of the easy ways of revising all this vocabulary to prepare for ‘something new’
  • For all the reasons mentioned above, it is an absolute necessity for the teacher to find out how much the kids already know as regards a certain area in order to do a very focused (if a very contained) needs’ analysis and to adjust the volume, the level and the intensity of the new material presentation later in the lesson
  • It is very easy and requires no preparation whatsoever.
  • It helps to improve the students’ self-confidence because it gives them an opportunity to see how much they know already.
  • It can be used with any set of vocabulary, either thematic (i.e. clothes, food, animals) or content-related (i.e. the words necessary to describe a picture, the words used in a certain text or a listening task, a video)
  • The final task can be easily adapted i.e. choose 5 words to describe yourself, choose 5 words to use in a story or in a dialogue, choose 5 and describe them for your partners to guess, use a dictionary to find the words or structures for the missing letters, compare the lists with your friends to find the words or the structures for the missing letters, use the words to describe a photograph, use the words to talk about your day today etc.

Happy teaching!

The one phrase to teach your students. From the series: We Want More!

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Since we are going through the quieter period of the year, there is more time for looking back and for reflection and this is how the idea for this mini-series of post came from. Just because we started to use those and each of these phrases or words was like a key that opened many, many doors in our communication and not only.

The one thing to teach your kids is ‘because‘…

…and the whole thing can* start in primary, and maybe even in pre-school. It is a powerful world that invites the kids to build a simple discourse and to go beyond one sentence or simple sentence production, even in the most everyday situations.

We start with extentending the answer to ‘How do you feel today?‘ which is a part of our class routine and the question which I ask and which the kids ask in every single lesson. As soon as they have a good number of adjectives to use in response (you can read about it here), I try to encourage them to elaborate on their answers, both modeling (I’m happy because it is sunny) and by inviting them to continue. ‘I’m happy.‘ ‘Because...’

Of course, the sentences the kids produce are quite simple, very simple, in fact, and sometimes partially in their L1 but with time, they are becoming more familiar with it and they are improving and, as a result, are able to say more and more and more. In English. Not to mention that as we go through the course, there are more and more situations in which we need because, for example to explain why we like Friday and not Monday, why we didn’t do the homework, why the kids in the pictures look happy or sad or why they did something in the story.

The same can be done with pre-schoolers, with certain adjustments to their age and the number of years that they have been studying. Thinking about my groups in the previous academic year, with the level 1 and the level 2 groups I was more focused on the full sentence production and it was too early to introduce any linkers. The level 3 children, however, were ready the unit ‘I’m scared’ (Playway to English, CUP) was a perfect opportunity to talk about the things we are scared of and to explain why. Or, more frequently, the things we are not scared of. ‘I am not scared of spiders. I like spiders because they are beautiful.’ and so on.

I often tell my students (especially those new ones, and yes, also the adult ones recently) that I will always want to know ‘Why?’ and that even if I forget to ask, they should always imagine this word written all across my forehead and answer it anyway. To help the kids in the everyday lesson and to make it easier on myself, I used the idea I got from Herbert Puchta, only mine was not any error correction technique and it stayed displayed proudly on the wall for a good few years. In the beginning, I really had to do a lot of pointing and waving at the word, later, the habit was developed and the kids (yes, as early as in year 1 of primary!) started to use the word without any reminders whatsoever. They were producing the language and lots of it!

My two favourite because-related moments from the classroom have been those:

  • when we talk about things, someone is telling us how they are and I, somehow, forget to ask ‘Why?‘ or I am just too slow with it, there is always a voice (or two or three) taking over and kindly suggesting ‘Because…‘, with this perfect rise in the intonation, the voice trailing off in an invitation to continue. I wonder where they got that from!
  • when we talk about pictures or we retell the story or we describe something that happened at school on the day and, by accident, I want to take over and move on and, in response, I get my own because back, in an interjection, and again, with the intonation perfectly matching the purpose (‘I have NOT finished yet‘) and I am thinking to myself: ‘Oh dear, I cannot shut them up!’ which is, by far, my favourite teacher’s complaint.

*) ‘Can’ or ‘must’?:-))

The one thing to teach your kids is…’I think’.

Initially, I wanted to have a pretty post, ‘one phrase per age group’ but I realised that I simply cannot NOT mention ‘I think’ and the impact it had on my primary school students.

Unlike the previous item, here I cannot even remember how it came about and how I first introduced it. It has always been in the air. I know that I use it a lot to slow the kids down and to signal to them not to rush through tasks (i.e. ‘Think and write’) or to encourage them when they are struggling (i.e. ‘Think about it’ when I know that they do know it and it is only necessary to rack through their brains). We had used it a lot in different stories (‘Elmer was thinking and thinking and then he had an idea!’) and a while ago we also introduced ‘Thinking time’ as an official preparation stage for projects and role-plays. Thinking has been with us, only it is not quite clear for how long.

For the reason, when we got to practise expressing the opinion in winter last year (around the middle of A1 / Movers), I did not even bother to check the meaning of it and the question ‘What do you think about it?’ and the answer ‘I think it is interesting / boring / exciting etc’, the adjectives were the main aim and the focus. For me, at least.

What my students took out of this lesson for the rest of the course (and life!) was the little ‘I think’, which is essentially only an introduction and which is slightly unnecessary even. An opinion can surely be expressed without it. ‘Maths is easy‘ expresses the same view as ‘I think Maths is easy.’ Or so one would think.

I noticed, in the lesson in which we used it consciously for the first time and in the lessons afterwards, last year and this year, that my students began to start adding ‘I think‘ everywhere. ‘I think it is beautiful’, ‘I think it is easy‘, ‘I think he is sad‘, ‘I think it is a cat’ ‘And I think it is a dog‘ and so on. ‘I think’ gave them an opportunity to personalise the message, to signal the autonomy of that message (since by making it subjective you kind of accept that other people will have or may have a different view) and, I suppose, by doing so, it made the message more adult and more serious. And they simply and visibly adored it. Maybe because they were only 7 or 8 or 9 at the time.

As I said, I don’t quite remember the start of that adventure and I am not quite sure when the good time to introduce really is. What I know, though, is that the next time I am starting the group, ‘I think’ will be on the list of things to think about.

The one thing to teach your teens is…’What do you think about it?’

There are many phrases that were shortlisted for this paragraph because of the difference they made to the way my teens interacted with the world in the English lesson, ‘I agree‘ and ‘I don’t agree‘ or ‘On the one hand…on the other hand‘ among them but the real deal-breaker was ‘What do you think about?‘

This phrase, especially with a special stress on ‘you’ (‘What do you think about it?’) has become the wonderful phrase that helped my teens really get engaged and communicate in a really interactive way, not only expressing their opinion, agreeing and disagreeing but also to boomerang the conversation properly by involving the other participant or participants. I mean, truth be told, I know that they did it mostly to avoid making too much effort and producing extensively and this line has become a fantastic and polite tool which they used to dodge the ball. Of course, they produced, too but I just had a lot of fun observing how by trying to be super clever they were involved in a conversation that would give them some high marks during the speaking part of the FCE exam.

The one thing to teach your adults is…’it depends‘.

Especially if your adults are shy, not naturally very talkative and a messy A2 level. Especially if they have already experienced some failures and disappoinment while learning Engllish and when they current progress is closely related to the promotion at work. Or the lack of. Especially if, due to all the factors mentioned above, they reply with single words (the teacher sighs) or when they just say, in their L1: ‘I don’t know what to say’ (the teacher sighs again).

‘It depends’ came to us by accident. It was not a part of any text, a listening task or a functional language phrases lesson. It was a part of the emergent lesson but because I take notes of that and send these back to the students, it stayed with us. And what joy!

I can say with all the confidence that my students, in this one (1) group have wholeheartedly adopted the phrase and made it theirs. First of all, it is this gold key that opens the discourse. You cannot just answer with ‘It depends’ and stop there. You have to continue and explain at least the two different ways at looking at the issue. Especially if your teacher is raising her eyebrows and nodding encouragingly. What’s more, I have noticed that they like using it consciously as a natural time-bying tool that gives them the benefit of a few precious seconds to come up with an idea and a way of formulating it in English. Oh, what a find, this phrase!

The one thing to teach your teachers to use and to remember about is…’but’

This one is here as a joke only. I don’t need to teach my teachers any English, of course, but, as a trainer, this is the one word that I would like them to remember to use whenever they consider the theory of child development and the methodology of working with young learners. Or even while going through the teacher’s book and adapting the activities. This little but powerful word is everything you need to be equipped with to ensure that they always keep thinking of all the exceptions to all the rules and that the most important point of reference are the people in the classroom, not some non-existent ideal students or typical five-year-olds and all the other YL cliches.

Happy teaching!

What an old dog learnt… A YL teacher goes back into the adult classroom

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Me and one of my best friends, Roman B. No old dogs in this photo. Only the amazing ones (The photo: courtesy of Yulia. The doggo: courtesy of Jill)

Back to the future

It just happened: a dedicated YL teacher (and a teacher who spent the last ten years doing her best to stay away from teaching adults (minus the trainees!) all of a sudden found herself in the classroom with some serious corportate clinets and their Business English, General English, English for Finance and Banking, A2 – C1. Full time.

It has to be said out loud: that was not a direction that this teacher dreamed of or the developement that the teacher planned or solicited but, at the same time, there is absolutely no need to wring hands or shed tears over such a giggle of the Fate. After all, the teacher is an experienced one, with an oh-dear number of years in the classroom (and different types of classrooms, everywhere) so the teacher will be just fine. After all, teaching is teachings, the students are great, the fun is being had. All the details are here just to set the context.

The old dog aka the adult classroom through a YL teacher

This particular started with a most random thing. I don’t even remember what we were doing and with whom, but, suddenly, I caught myself thinking ‘Blin, even my kids can do THAT‘. There was no anger in it or desperation, only curiosity and bemusement. I started to analyse the details and bits and pieces of this THAT and the reasons for that. It started with a sigh but it got interesting very quickly.

Here is a new post and an attempt at looking at the adult EFL learners through the eyes spoilt by her young students.

One. Inhibitions

This is something that is almost non-existant in the YL classroom. Minus all these cases in which the kid have had a negative first experience with English, at school, with the tutors or parents or when they are naturally introvert and shy and they simply need more time to settle in the group and to feel comfortable enough to talk. Most commonly, the kids enter the room, eyes wide-open, ready to discover and to enjoy the world of the English language.

Then, there are adults, a completely different picture. Naturally, there are quite a few factors that can contribute such as a lower level, a long break in learning or using the language, some negative previous learning experience or studying in one group with colleagues from the same company or being a low-level speaker of English when you are already a top manager.

The result? Silence in the classroom.

I guess that is the silence that is the time they need to think about their answer, to choose the words, to gather the courage to let them out and, naturally, they get it. They do have the right to the freedom of silence. For me, the teacher, it is also an interesting exercise in patience. I realised that I have been spoilt with hands shooting up into the air and the opinions voiced almost instantly. Here, I am getting used to breathing more and waiting for the students to be ready.

I am beginning to think that building up the students’ confidence suddenly gets the priority among the lesson and the course aims as regards the adult learners of English. Everything else, the vocabulary, the structures and the skills development will follow. Hopefully.

Two. Teacher-oriented communication

On the one hand, the YL classes are definitely more teacher-centred than the adult classes. That is, to some extent, fully justified. Students, especially the younger ones, are in need of the teacher and the adult as the lesson leader. But only to some extent. I strongly believe that this should be one of the main aims of the course to create the conditions in which the students will be learning to interact with the teacher BUT also giving them a chance to learn to interact with each other. After all, whatever happens in the classroom is only a warm-up, only the preparation, only the training before the real life interaction. In which, most likely, the teacher is not going to take part. For that reason, the students should be given the tools and opportunities to talk to each other, to lead the activities, to take part in pair-work. There is no need to wait with it until they turn ten or fifteen. Some elements of that can be introduced even much earlier and pair-work is feasible in pre-school.

Somehow, it is not a given with the older students. Adults, either because they are more inhibited or because they see it as a sign of respect towards the teacher, they hold back, they wait, for the teacher to call their name out or for the teacher to at least signal that it is their turn to speak. I have realised that sometimes I have to specifically highlight that I am stepping out of the conversation, that the students, in pairs or as a whole group, have to take responsiblity for the interaction and that I will not be encouraging, keeping it up and, of course, leading it. We have been studying together for about three months now and I can already see some improvement in that area. Hooray to that!

Three. Communication strategies

Communication strategies is one of my true professional passions and that is why it was chosen for my first research within the MA programme. Inspired by Haenni Hoti, Heinzman and Mueller (2003) (or, rather ‘taken aback by the comments of’) that claimed that young learners use a very limited range of communication strategies, basically limiting those to translation and code-switching (aka using a combination of L1 and L2), based on the gut feeling from the classroom, I decided to check it out. And, to prove them wrong. Hopefully.

Although my research was a very small scale and low-key and by a beginner researcher, I found out enough evidence to get me even more interested in the topic. My little students proved to be already effective communicators who work hard and who have a good range of different techniques to get the message across such as all-purpose words, approximation, direct appeal for help, indirect appeal for help, self-repair, other-repair and mime. The range was much wider. Translation and code-switching were used, too, and they were the most frequent ones, however, they were not the only ones.

Then, there are the adults and guess what, these adults, ‘Come as you are’, before I get to work on them, they know only one communication strategy and that is ‘translation’. falling back into their L1, straightaway, whenever something is unclear, unknown and uncertain. I am not even sure why it is assumed that the learners (let alone the young ones) will use these strategies of their accord. I haven’t researched that properly, yet, but perhaps it has got nothing to do with the age of the student or, rather, not only with the age of the student, and more with the learning experience and the opportunities to be acquainted with and to develop these strategies.

The adult students (my adult students) struggled in that area and if they didn’t know, they would immediately switch to L1 and they would expect an answer. Working around that by delaying the translation, encouraging them to try something else or, also, providing both, the L2 only and the translation was quite a challenge and I know that some of them were surprised that I don’t just provide the required service aka translation, that I am trying something else. They had it written all over the face. I can’t say my job is done here, far from it but we are working on it. And it is a bit better now.

Four. Sharing ideas

Teacher beliefs are a slippery topic and most of the time we don’t even think about them. It was only last year (and somewhere by the end of it) when I realised why I am a teacher and what I want from my lessons.

Everything happened thanks to one Sasha who joined our group and who, despite the eight months spent with the rest of the team, in a very welcoming and friendly environment, despite the fact that she got on with everyone, Sasha still would keep quiet in class unless I asked her a question and unless I called out her name. I had never even thought about it and only then did I understand that I want to create such an atmosphere in the lesson in which my students feel free to talk because they have something to share with the rest of the group, not because they have to, not because the teacher made them, not because the teacher asked the question or because the teacher is testing them. They talk because they have something to say. And I want them to feel that they can. This is something that we have been working on from the very beginning.

It was one more thing that was ‘not so obvious’ for my adult students. They stalled. They do, still, sometimes. Again, it might be due to a whole range of factors, the natural shyness, the lack of confidence, the level of English, the relations in the workplace, if they come from the same company, or even the natural politeness. It is not a given that everyone will be speaking during the lesson time because speaking and developing the communicative skills is the reason why we come to class.

Five. All ideas are good ideas.

That is a sad fact: adulthood and reality kills creativity and imagination. Long gone are the days of fairy tales and fantasy travels with Frodo or magical battles with Harry. Well, in most cases. For that reason, if the question is about playing football and the student does not play football, the rest, dramatically, is silence…With kids silence never ever happens, and that is especially amazing, because, more often than not, we do things that have nothing or very little to do with the real life. All these menus for the monster cafe, all these school trips around the world, or to the moon or, our life as pirates…Silence is a rare event. Thank heavens.

This post is not to be read as a huge, one thousand word, complaint about my adult students. It is certainly not. I am doing a good job, I like them and we are making progress. I am just positively amazed that with my young learners, we have done SO MUCH (and to be honest, so much we have done by accident, unwillingly, joyfully, just for laughs) to enable the kids and to ensure that they are effective communicators.

I would like to think that my kids are not in danger of being scared to scared, inhibited, with a strong affective factor. This ship has sailed.

This line, so frequently used in my kids classes, started to appear in my adult classes.

See this is basically what happens when you send a YL teacher into the adult classroom. There is a lot of dedication, professionalism and lots of good lessons are happening. But the teacher has a one track mind and everything is somehow YL-related:-)

Bibliography

A. Haenni Hoti, S. Heinzmann and S. Mueller (2003), I can help you? Assessing speaking skills and interaction strategies of young learners, In: M. Nikolov (ed), The Age Factor and and Early Language Learning, De Grutyer.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #36 Andy Warhol anyone?

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(944) Pinterest

This is a lesson I taught with the older YL which started in unit 1 of the National Geographic coursebook, Life that we are using with the summer courses for teens. If you are interested in the original lesson, you can find it in the coursebook, in the second edition.

My brain tends to walk its own ways so pretty quickly it became aparent that much as it is inspiring, we have our own plans (btw, I am really looking forward to teaching the rest of the unit). Since I have already put together bits and pieces that were inspired and dedicated to Andy, this lesson was a step further, to take Andy into the classroom with the older students, too.

So, Andy.

Two pretty girls in puffs posing for the camera in the studio. Blonde and brunette in stockings look confident in front of the camera, hugging each other

Colour. Two pictures aka introduction

  • Two illustrations (see below). Students work in pairs or small teams and discuss the questions below. Afterwards, they compare the ideas as a class.
  • Talk about these pictures.
  • Are they similar or different? What is similar? What is different?
  • Do you like them? Why?
  • How do they make you feel? Would you hang them in your bedroom or in your house?
  • How do the artists use the colours in both pictures? Which one do you prefer?
  • Would these pictures still be interesting in black and white? Why?

Colours. New idioms aka new language

  • Students work in small teams. They match the the idiom in the sentence with the meaning.
  • Check the answers as a class, additional clarification.
  • Students go back to work in pairs. They come up with the examples to illustrate each idiom and tell mini-stories.
  • The handout we used can be found here.

Colour. Associations aka production

  • A mini-lecture on Andy Warhol and the way he used to work (Marylin Monroe and the Cambpell Soup)
  • The whole class works on eliciting the associations with one of the colours, in our case it was grey. The teacher shows some of her associations with the colour. The students try to guess the rationale behind each of the ideas.
  • The students prepare for the main speaking task: they write the numbers 1 – 10 and they notes about at least three associations for each of the colours
  • The students work in pairs or small groups. Each of the students presents their associations for the partner to guess the colours and afterwards they explain their choices.
  • During the feedback session, the students share the most interesting or the most unexpected associations.
  • The handout we used can be found here.

Colour. Quiz

  • The students work as a team or a whole class.
  • They look at the photographs representing different cultures and countries. They analyse the colours and try to guess which countries they represent.
  • They check the answers.
  • The handout we used can be found here.

Colour. Comments

  • Any photograph can be used to accompany Andy’s Marylin. I have used the one that we had in the coursebook, one of a scene from a traditional Indian wedding. Today, if I taught this lesson again (or when I teach this lesson again), I would like to use even a wider range of colour such as a painting by Kandinsky, a a painting by Rothko, a storybook illustration, a child’s drawing etc.
  • The lesson was taught online so the craft / creation component had to be limited to a speaking task. I was tempted to use a variation of the craft activity we used with my younger students but it was simply impossible.

My adorable monsters. About the long-term work with a group

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This post, like many others, starts in the classroom…

The thought falls on my head out of nowhere.

We are playing the game with the first conditional. There are only four of them, on the day, in-between the holidays, so we don’t even bother to go into the breakout rooms, we are playing together. It is not even a real game, either. Someone starts a sentence, someone else, called out, thinks of an ending, action – reaction, a situation – consequences. And they are just producing. Coming up with great ideas, some of the sentences just down to earth and realistic, some of them, as we call them, ‘creative’, just for laughs. And so we laugh out loud. A trainer in me suddenly realises that the lesson plan (if there had been a formal lesson plan) should include not only the traditional elements, like the staging and ‘the teacher will’ and ‘the students will’. The trainer in me realised that it might be worth considering to include a laughing fit and the necessary calming down part in the timing, in the assumptions and the potential problems and solutions…We laugh a lot with my kids.

Unavoidably, I realise, I get those constant flashbacks, those mini-trips into the past and I am looking at my students, today already 10 and 9 (or 8 and 7, still, some of them) and I remember how we walked into the classroom together, for the first time, me on my toes, all eyes, all ears, and them cautiously taking every step and every action. I do remember how we learned to say ‘Hello’ for the first time with some of them and how we first said that we don’t like broccoli ice-cream (except for Nadia, my little rebel). How I used to need lots of miming and scaffolding and modelling, with every single activity and how they’d start with single words, then move to phrases and to sentences.

And I, who was present, 99% of the time, over those seven years, I cannot believe my own eyes and my own ears now, how they throw the language at me, storytelling, or using the Present Perfect in free speech. Or the first conditional.

What does it mean for a teacher to continue for an extended period of time? What does it mean for the business? How does the methodology change? Does it change at all? What do the parents think? And, last but not least, perhaps it would be better to change the teacher once in a while?

This post will be very personal. This post will be very emotional. But I would like to look at it from the other points of view, too, thinking like a trainer, thinking like a methodology expert and, also, inevitably, thinking like a teacher and like a human, too.

In order to make it a bit more objective and more like a research, I asked my teacher friends for help. This post was written with the help, support and contributions from my amazing colleagues: Ekaterina Balaganskaya, Nadezhda Bukina, Marina Borisova and Tatiana Kistanova. Thank you!!!

Are you still up for such an adventure? Follow me.

Over to…a teacher trainer

  • You know your students very well, in every aspect, including the interests, their motivation, the family situation, the strengths, the areas that need improvement, the interaction patterns that they favour, their best friends in and outside of the group, their favourite activities and games, their role in the group. This helps a lot with lesson planning, shaping up and choosing the activities and, later on, in class, with managing the activities, the lesson time and the interaction patterns.
  • Giving instructions is much easier, after a while. The students know you very well, too, that they are almost able to read your mind and to react to any, even those less formal hints and clues. Quite likely before you give them.
  • You need to be creative because after a while, your students might get bored with the activities you usually use. This might not sound like something positive because it means that you are at risk of running out of anything that you normally keep up your sleeve in terms of games, classroom management techniques or ways of checking homework, for example, but I would like to see it a more positive light. Working with a long-term group can be a wonderful catalyst for your creativity and, as a result, there are more new games, classroom management techniques and ways of checking homework!!!
  • It is perfectly natural that with any new group, a teacher strives to build up the comfort zone in order to ensure the conditions for the effective teaching and learning. However, once that comfort zone is created (and after a few years with a group it is likely to be a very stable comfort zone, a very cozy and safe ZPD, hello Leo Vygotsky), the teacher can start dreaming of venturing out and trying out new things on a much more advanced level. Not only a new game to practise vocabulary but a new approach that you may have heard about such as introducing a new approach to storytelling after you have found out about PEPELT, setting up journals with your students, just because you read that one research article or just taking your lifelong passion for teaching English through another level. Or, actually, you might even want to start a blog at one point. An experimenter is, I believe, one of the most important teacher roles!
  • Teaching long-term, you are moving on, together with your students and that means changing and adapting the approaches and techqniues to match them to needs of the kids who are growing up. With time, kids are becoming more mature and more capable of producing the language and dealing with more and more complex tasks. They say that a rolling stone gathers no moss and the same can be said about teachers who are growing and developing with their students. Sure, some of that can be achieved within one year, but there is definitely a lot more potential for the changes and the evolutions if the learning process takes a bit longer than just one season.
  • My colleagues also mentioned the impact on the learning process and the very shaping of the curriculum as it was adapted to the particular needs of the students. Instead of just following the book (or the curriculum whichever form it came in), as might be the case with a less involved teacher (although, of course, I am not implying that working with a group for a season only equals lower quality service), with a longer term group a teacher is able to introduce a circular / spiral curriculum, introduced to the world by Bruner and to me be Ekaterina, with the teacher returning and revising the crucial elements of the language, regardless of what the coursebook or the pacing schedule says. For example, working on the past simple (served in manageable chunks) from the beginning of the year instead of waiting until April when that topic appears in the book. This was Ekaterina’s example and I realised that we have been doing the same with my kids, simply because I wanted us to have the language (or some bites of it) for us to be able to talk about the weekend and the holidays and the day at school. Tatiana also mentioned it as one of the key benefits as knowing the group helps the teacher set the pace that will be most appropriate for this particular bunch of children.
  • Over to… a manager
  • Students staying for a few years are basically your returning customers, your loyal customers and your dream come true. As they would be in any other area. They come back, month after month and year after year and they make the world go round, basically.
  • What’s more, these students are also likely to bring in other students, their friends, brothers, sisters, cousins or even parents, to join your groups or the other groups at the school. Since there has been a positive experience in the family, so to speak, these are also likely to stay.
  • The fact that you have worked out the patterns and the procedures of managing the finances, the group, the assessment or the festivities, will mean that these will be easier to implement.
  • This will be a huge advantage, should there be any changes to adapt to, even those unexpected and unplanned, as in case of the pandemic. Perhaps that was not the case in all the countries and with all the groups and students but, in my experience, many of those that went online, smoothly, were the long-term students and groups and they basically trusted their teacher to transfer online or, later on, to study in the hybrid classroom.
  • That also means that a strong bond and trust will be built and the parents will be more likely to accept any changes or even any complications such as the need to move online, the need to change the timetable, the need to make up for the class or to run the lesson online, or even, to have a cover class.
  • Staying with ‘the old’ teacher might also be easier for the parents which was a very important point made by Ekaterina. Parents are busy, they might not be able to devote a huge amount of time to looking for a new teacher, a new school or a new group and they might also worry that their child would not fit in the new set-up. Some parents fear that due to the previous negative experience, either with the school, the group or even the teacher’s professional competence. Staying is easier.

Over to… a teacher

  • The first one to mention here will be the enormous sense of achievement that a teacher can get from working with a group for an extended period of time and the opportunity to observe and to assess the same students, not only from September to May, from the beginning to the end of the level but over the years, from pre-A to A2 or even further.
  • Teaching a group over any longer period of time provides the teacher with plenty of opporunities and a lot of data for formative assessment, as pointed out by Ekaterina. It will apply to all the language skills as well as vocabulary and grammar, accuracy and fluency. Let’s take the past simple as an example. There will be the series of lessons devoted to the topic, a series of lessons per level or coursebook even, and the students might do well in these lessons. However, it will be up to the teacher to track whether and how accurately the students use it to describe the past events in free speech, recalling the events of the day at school or retelling a story. The aims of these two activities are not the freer grammar practice per se but, for example, settling in and checking understanding after a reading skills development stage. It might (and it will!) take a considerable period of time for the students to finally assimilate the structure and to start using it freely and correctly. I have also noticed in my teaching that with time I tend to prioritise formative assessment over summative assessment but this is a new discovery and I need some time to think about it before I write about. A new post? Who knows)
  • Creating a positive atmosphe in the classroom, creating the environment that will be beneficial for learning, learning about your students and their needs is something that we, as teachers, do regardless, but there is something special in the connection that you build with a group over the years. You accompany them in their lives outside of the classroom, all the good marks and bad marks, all the competitions, holidays and birthdays. You get to meet their parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters and all the pets. You take part in the important family events, such as the births of baby brothers and sisters or even those more traumatic events like an illness or a death of a family member and, whether you want it or not, you bond. To an outsider it might sound strange but there must be a reason why so many teachers refer to their students as ‘my children‘ or, sometimes, when in a non-teaching environment, ‘my educational children’.
  • Then, there is the pride in all their achievements and progress that they are making. Going back and reminiscing about all the milestones, all the firsts is a truly wonderful journey for a teacher to take: the first lesson ever, the first time we made full sentences, the first time we started to create in English, the first letters scribbled, the first story we did and the first time they asked to be allowed to take over the story reading, the first test, the first real grammar lesson, the first ‘OMG, I cannot stop them from chattering away‘ day or every time they took an exam, Starters, Movers, Flyers, KET, PET, FCE or, finally, also, CAE.

Over to…a human

‘If you meet with the same people twice a week for 8 – 10 years, you can’t help loving them‘ (Marina)

‘It’s a joy to see them grow, to see the progress and the results. Develop relationships and see them enter a new age group‘ (Nadezhda)

‘The best thing about it was that I knew them and they knew me, the rapport was strong‘ (Tatiana)

‘When I was moving a country, they were devastated. Luckily, we could continue our lessons online‘ (Ekaterina)

  • The group is a community. Ekaterina mentioned that the kids in the group she has been teaching for seven years became friends outside the group and that they all meet offline when that is possible, even go out for pizza or to a museum. Even when those outside events are not possible, the group can celebrate together either because they get a Christmas-themed lesson or because they all bring snack and have a little party at the end of the lesson. Even if it is an online lesson.
  • It is interesting that the personal preferences work both ways and that the resistance to change the teacher might come from the students, too, as you will see in the stories for teachers that I share in the paragraph below and that, as Marina highlighted, the fact that some students stay with you (and, of course, not all of them will) is based also on their personal preferences and attachement to the teacher. Staying for longer may be seen as a result not some intertia, the inability or laziness to find a new teacher, but, simply, a conscious decision on the part of the parents and the students.
  • Or on the part of the teacher, too. As pointed out by Tatiana, it might be related to the teacher’s own personality, if the long-term connections are important for them, as humans. Or, it might be the impact of the context in which they are working as the changes, imposed or not, are more likely to take place in different educational institutions whereas the teachers who work freelance would probably be in favour of keeping the students, unless, of course, it is impossible due to any external circumstances.
  • As for me, personally, well, I love what I do. Yes, there are sometimes duties, tasks or even groups that I am not entirely wildly excited about but, overall, I enter the classroom, online or offline, with joy and looking forward to the lesson. And one of the reasons for that are my students and, especially, my educational children aka my adorable monsters. It is thanks to them that I have blossomed as a creator, as a teacher and as a trainer. It is thanks to them that I was able to cope with the strains of the lockdown and it is thanks to them that ‘I am still standing‘, as Elton John might put it, when the world is what it is right now.
  • At the beginning of the pandemic, when we were about to transition online and change our EFL lives forever, I remember how I felt about the big unknown and how, pretty quickly, it became apparent, that no matter what (really, no matter what) we are what we are, a small (and a bit loud) community and that we had had enough experience of each other worked out and accumulated and that we can take it elsewhere. I remember one morning, just before the lessons were about to start (the first real lesson, not the free online trial and getting to know each other with zoom) how I felt the panic creep over. But I also remember the thought: ‘Hold on, they are my kids. That’s is. We will just do it, under slightly different circumstances‘. And, guess what? We did.

A change would do you good? The other side of the coin

Because, of course, there is one! Changing the teacher might be beneficial! On the one hand, as Nadezhda mentioned, the teachers themselves might feel the impact of the long-term interaction, some form of material fatigue, and in such a case a change is more than welcome. In such cases a change of a teacher might be the solution. A new teacher means new methods, new approaches, a different sense of humour…

Sometimes this ‘tiredness’ and the call for a change may come from the fact that students are growing and transitioning into another age group and the students might welcome a more official confirmation or recognition of that process. Perhaps, the change of a teacher might do the job here. If, for example, it is Mr Alexander is the teenage groups’ teacher then him taking over the group from taught so far by Miss Carolina is going to be some form of a rite of passage.

However, it needs to be mentioned, it is not as straightforward as it might seem. First and foremost, the students may not want to change the teacher at all and, in such cases, it is enough to tweak the format or the routine a bit. Then it might be that the outside circumstances change and they sort the problem out. Ekaterina shared her story of one of her groups with whom she started to consider the possible change of a teacher as the kids’ growing up and changing into teenagers resulted in some discipline issues and, as a result, the lessons not being as effective as they previously had been. However, here, the problem sorted itself out – due to the pandemic the class was transferred online and it turned out that the physical separatation (or the space and the own territory that the students gained) was the only thing that the group needed. They still continue with Ekaterina as their teacher.

This brought my own group to mind. The kids were still in pre-school, year 3, when we were asked to give our cosy kiddies classroom to a younger group. We moved and the most surprising thing was that it turned out to be an important stepping stone for the students. ‘We are real students now!’, they kept repeating and back then I was just listening to them and giggling inside that the big desks and big chairs can make anyone so excited. Today, when I look back at it, it seems to be this perfect moment in the life of a group when a change was needed. And it did take place, although, yes, without changing the teacher.

The most important thing to consider here is how the students can benefit from the new circumstances. Marina brought it up, too and, Ekaterina gave a perfect example from the British schools. In the schools her children attend, there is an obligatory change of a teacher every year, with Miss Elena only teaching the 4th-grades, Mr Peter only working with the 6th graders and so on. The system was introduced in the school to ensure fairness. This way, all the children get a change to work with all the teachers throughout their school life and the is no chance that, due to some ‘preferences’, class 4A only gets ‘the best teachers’. Not to mention that this must contribute a lot to bonding and building of the community as little Pasha will know all the teachers personally and all the teachers, after a while, will have had Pasha in their classrooms.

The end is the beginning is the end…

The most interesting thing is that, from among the teachers who waved back at me and wanted to chat about the long-term teaching of a group, there was nobody who would be a strong proponent of the Change the Teacher Every Year approach. Can it be considered a sign? I have no idea but, if, by any chance, there is anyone among my readers who has had an experience with it, please, pretty please, get in touch, I would love to talk to you!

Happy teaching!