My Talk At RSCON4

My co-presenters during RSCON4

I had the great pleasure of presenting at the RSCON4 conference on the 13th of October. It was an online global event highlighting “wow” moments in teaching and learning, and the entire conference was held online. I'd like to thank all of the organisers for putting together such an amazing event, everyone who came, and my moderator Malu Sciamarelli.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to attend many sessions as I was travelling, but I will always remember giving my presentation. I had to do my talk from a hotel room in the rainforest of Costa Rica, and five minutes before the start I was warned that there was a group of howler monkeys sitting outside the room! Twice during the talk I had to apologise to everyone for the noise, and make sure that they knew it wasn't me screaming away at the top of my voice.

So if you'd like to watch my talk Making The Most of Reading including my monkey friends, you can find it here.

Presenting, jungle style!

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Learner Diaries: Reading Woe & Writing Joy Part 2

I wrote here about how I battled with a story given to me by my Portuguese teacher. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you read that first, or this post won’t make much sense.

Feedback, or Should I Say Correction?

So having expressed my displeasure at the difficulty of the story to my teacher, I was interested to see how he would react. I wasn’t too concerned about his response as while he may have flaws as a teacher, but he doesn’t seem to have too many as a human being, so I felt that he would deal with it in a positive way. Fortunately, I was correct in my assumption.

His first reaction was to reply to my email. He said he was grateful for the feedback which was very important to him (which begs the question “why doesn’t he ask for it then?!”) and that he was surprised, not just to receive an email from me, but by the length and by the quality of my writing, which I was pretty happy about as you can imagine.

Later before the lesson, he gave me a print out with my errors corrected, which I hadn't asked for but was more than happy to receive. We then discussed, as best I could within my linguistic limits, the content of my email, and how we both recognised how difficult it was to teach multi-level classes. He was completely open to my suggestions and actually seemed pretty pleased to have someone to talk about these things with. As I know, the freelance teacher’s life can be lonely... (but I have my PLN to save me!)

Outed

At the beginning of the class, he brought up the subject of my email and my suggestion. I didn’t mind this too much, but it was a little bit embarrassing. Firstly, even though most of the other students agreed that it was very difficult, I was the only student who hadn’t actually finished the story (of course, reading the story all the way through is one thing, but understanding it and then appreciating it are others). This did make me feel a bit like the least able student, which may be the truth but luckily being a teacher makes me able to deal with that fairly comfortably. However, it’s still not the most pleasant situation to be in.

In general the reaction to the idea could best be described as.... well, lukewarm. No one was offended by it, but they weren’t that thrilled by it either. I had to remember that this is a pretty unusual idea for most students, so I presume that what they see is a lot of unnecessary work when they could just be given a text by the teacher. That’s why the teacher has to really sell an idea like this to the students by being enthusiastic after having thoroughly thought the idea through. As this seemed to be a new idea for my teacher too, I don’t think he put enough into it to convince the other students.

The Long and Winding Speech

We then discussed my idea, or we at least tried to, until one of the chattier learners decided to take this opportunity to tell us all about her favourite website and why it’s so great. Unfortunately the teacher didn’t step in and curtail this particular diatribe which went on for far too long, and somewhat sidetracked the conversation. Being a teacher makes you acutely aware of how distracting these kinds of ‘speeches’ can be. Sometimes the students can be too student centred, unfortunately.

The teacher came back to the theme at the end of the lesson, and he came to a compromise. For homework, he asked us to go to that particular website (so I’ll find out just how wonderful it is for myself...), choose an article and write a paragraph explaining why we chose it. What we’ll do with those paragraphs, I’m not sure, but I’ll email mine to him in advance. It’s a pretty good activity, much better than before, and a huge step in the right direction.

Lessons Learned

So what have I learned from this experience? Quite a lot, I think...

• Students shouldn’t be reticent about telling their teachers what they think, but also teachers should be bold enough to combine an acceptance of these ideas with a confidence in their own ability.
• If the teacher doesn’t entirely believe in an activity, then either he/she has to work at understanding it more, or they should get rid of it completely.
• Sometimes someone can have the potential to be a great teacher, but without the right guidance, training, mentoring and reflection, the students are only going to see glimpses of it.
• The wrong text to the wrong student can have a catastrophic effect, one that really can’t be underestimated and I think often is.
• Don’t let students prattle on. That’s not student centred, it’s quite the opposite because the other students are the ones who are suffering.
• If you’re going to make changes to the class at a student’s behest, don’t ‘out’ them. Talk about it in general terms, and allow them to tell the class if they wish.

And for my own learning...

• Speak to my teacher more about teaching. I think he’ll enjoy it, it’ll make my classes a bit better, and I’ll get to talk about my favourite subject in Portuguese.
• Make suggestions slowly. I’m not going to overwhelm him with the last twenty years of language teaching approaches (I wish I could!), but I can hopefully make small incremental changes that will help everyone. First thing I’m going to do is ask him to give feedback on my writing by only underlining my mistakes and not correcting it for me.
• Write more!

And finally, I hope you can see how much I get from studying a foreign language. Aside from actually acquiring an another language, I also get an immensely satisfying and fulfilling training course, which encourages self reflection and personal development. As a language teacher, I can’t understate how valuable I think it is.

Part one of Learner diaries: reading woe & writing joy

Learner diaries: Reading, stories & vocabulary.

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Learner Diaries: Reading Woe & Writing Joy

I wrote here about the importance of finding the right level of difficulty in a reading text for your students, and after trying and failing with my current Portuguese reading homework, I'm returning to the theme.

The Wall

I realised that this text was was going to be a struggle too far when, in just the third sentence I found nine words that I didn't know. That's right, nine out of twenty.  If that's not a barrier to student engagement I don't know what is. In fact, it's not just a barrier, but a mile high wall that I had no intention of climbing.

Firstly, I reacted to this sentence by typing it into Google translate and this is what I got:

"Already hardened tissue were small crusts of bread glued to it by the dribble resurfaced now in remembrance of the cradle."

As you can see, it didn't help much. Sure, I can get the general idea but that's no way to read a story, especially by one of Brazil's leading writers.

My next reaction was to throw the story to one side and forget about it. Seriously, I don't mind a bit of a challenge, in fact I expect it (as alas not enough teachers are aware of the idea of extensive reading and the level of input being -1, not +15) but this was a joke. I'm not going to wade through a text that deep and difficult in the knowledge that at the end I'm very unlikely to understand the story, and I might have picked up a couple of words of vocabulary. There are better, much less time consuming ways of achieving the same thing, and many better ways for me to spend my time.

The offending text, with all due to respect to Ms Lispector.

Clarice Lispector, ai ai ai...

My third reaction was to write an email to my teacher. I had often thought of doing this before, but this was the straw that broke the student's back. In my email, entitled "Clarice Lispector, ai ai ai..." (Clarice Lispector is the name of the author), I explained to my teacher that I really wanted to read the story but it was too difficult. I showed him the example of the sentence that put me off, and said that while I'm ready for a challenge, this was too much.

I acknowledged that maybe for the other the learners in the class the story may have been fine, but for me it was too difficult. I went on to explain, one teacher to another, an idea for how I have taught multi-level reading classes (simply, ask the students to find one text each, give them all to the students in the next class and ask them to choose one that interests them). I have avoided doing this so far because I didn't want to appear to be telling him what to do. As another language teacher I had to be sensitive, I think.

From Woe to Joy

It took me 45 minutes to write the email, and when I finished I realised something unexpectedly positive had just happened. I had sat there and written out a complete email, expressing some fairly complex ideas, without stopping, in Portuguese. I knew that it was unlikely to be perfect, but I also knew that it wasn't that bad either. I was fairly confident that I had expressed myself clearly and made the teacher understand what I was thinking. Seems like a very worthwhile homework activity to me.

And secondly, and most importantly of all (and I really can't downplay the importance of this), I had enjoyed it. I can honestly say that it is the first time I had enjoyed doing any kind of 'work' in Portuguese. There's been homework that I've tolerated, and some that I've loathed (hello grammar exercises), but I don't remember actually enjoying it before. And I can't tell you how much satisfaction I get from that because my learning of the language that I would dearly love to be fluent in has been frustrating and annoying and trying and all the things that I don't believe language learning should be. I finally enjoyed it, and I have to exploit that in the future.

So the question that remains is how my teacher reacted to my email. Watch this space...

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Learner Diaries: Reading, Stories & Vocabulary.

This is a picture of my Portuguese homework, which I'm showing to you as a cautionary tale. If you give a text to your students and it has as much highlighted text in it as mine does, the chances are that they are not really reading the story. They are more likely to have their heads in the dictionary than they will be getting involved in the narrative, questioning the characters motivation or attempting to understand the author's point of view, all things that fiction is supposed to provoke.

When reading becomes solely about vocabulary acquisition, so many opportunities for debate, discussion, engagement and real intellectual stimulation are missed. So do your students a favour and give them texts they will actually enjoy reading. Trust me, I'm telling you this from a student's point of view.

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Ideas from the Guardian: Experiences

Generally I’m not in favour of promoting products or companies in my teaching activities, unless I’m trying to engage my students in critically analysing a subject, for example advertisings effect on children. I’m going to make an exception here though because the Guardian is a news organisation that I think deserves any publicity it gets. I believe it through it’s pursuit of quality investigative journalism, it is actively trying to make the world a better place. In this series, I’m going to share some of the ideas that I get from its online content.

I was lucky enough to see Ken Wilson’s talk Ten Things I Think I Know About Teaching and Learning at IATEFL Brighton 2011. One of his ten things was about integrating material into lessons that is more thought provoking and stimulating for your students than what you find in your average coursebook. He used the following fascinating article as an example:

“I've Eaten Only Crisps for the Past 10 Years.”

Here’s an idea for how I would use the article in class.

1) Begin by asking the students to discuss their eating habits with the following questions as prompts:

a) Do you consider yourself to be a healthy eater? Do you think you need to make any improvements in your diet?
b) Do you have any food ‘guilty pleasures’? (Explain if necessary)
c) Is there one food, healthy or unhealthy, that you eat more than any other?

Note: Try to keep the mood light, food can be a serious subject especially if you have students who have or have had difficulties with food in their lives. This can be true of many subjects though, so I wouldn’t hesitate to introduce it.

2) After they’ve finished their discussion, get class feedback by asking students to share some of their perspectives.

3) Tell them they are going to read an article with the headline “I've eaten only crisps for the past 10 years.” After making sure they know what crisps are, ask them to predict, with a partner, what kind of person they think this article is about and write down 5 brief facts about them.

4) After 3 or 4 minute discussion, ask one person from each pair to simultaneously write their five predictions on the board. Hopefully you should have a board covered in weird and wonderful descriptive ideas. Ask the students to read each other ideas and call out any similarities between them.

5) Now it’s reading time. This can be done in a number of ways, such as reading the whole article through once or breaking it down by paragraph and discussing it as you go along. You may want to create skimming and scanning activities. You will presumably also want to deal with vocabulary at some point. The most appropriate way depends on the nature of your class, so that’s up to you.

Note: You may want to edit the text to suit your students. The language may need some adjustment for their level or you may want to edit out some of the more challenging content if you think it’s inappropriate. Personally, I would like to keep it as intact as possible in order to make their experience as authentic as possible, but there may be quite understandable reasons why you want to make some changes.

6) After the main reading activities are complete, refer the students back to the board. Ask them to reflect on what they predicted about the subject of the article now they’ve read it. Were they close, or completely wrong? This should be quite fun as they are probably more likely to be wrong then right.

7) It would be interesting to encourage a more serious discussion after. The students could discuss if they think the woman needs medical or psychological help. They could talk about what they would say to her if she was a friend or family member. The tone of this discussion may need to be carefully managed based on the dynamic and sensitivity of your class.


Hopefully the students will have found this unusual story engaging and thought provoking. The woman’s unorthodox story offers them a chance to read an authentic text, encounter a fascinating life and engage critically with some moral and social issues. Much more valuable than what you usually find in a text book, I’m sure you agree.


You can find other similar articles in the Guardian’s Experiences section, from the fun “I Own a Back To The Future Car” to the probably too challenging “My Husband Died On Our Honeymoon”:

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