the

j o u r n a l
Issue No 13 5.00
of education and development
October 2002
Editorial
Language Issues
Recognising Language and Creativity by Ron Carter
Developments in Syllabus Design by Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman
Doubling the Trouble by Yuliya Skaleva
Teacher Training
360 Degrees - Feeding back on Feedback by Julia Bannister
Have You Got a Session on Teaching? by Nick Hamilton
Art For Arts sake by Thomas Fritz
Classroom Practice
The RP Approach to Lesson Planning by Mike Cattlin
Getting Feedback The TA Way by Mario Rinvolucri
Ah-ha and Hmmm- Those Magic moments by Judith Baker and Simon Marshall
Affiliate News
Whats going on in the IHWO - Michael Carrier
Whats going on in the IHWO Office - Susanna Dammann
Who are The Most Important People in ELT? Rod Fricker
Using News and the Guardian Weekly in Class Max de Lotbiniere
Reviews
Working In English Language Teaching (Kogan Page)
The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, The Oxford Collocations
Dictionary For Students of English, The Oxford Students Dictionary of English,
The Oxford Wordpower Dictionary For Learners of English (OUP)
Chit Chat 1 (OUP)
Intercultural Activities (OUP)
Intercultural Business Communication ( OUP)
Business Grammar Builder (Macmillan)
www.oup.com/elt/global/teachersclub
Join the great
on-line debate!
Voice opinions. Share ideas.
Talk to teachers around the world about:
Hosted by Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman.
Articles and discussions
on-line now!
Syllabus design
Vocabulary development
Teaching listening
CELTA training
Teachers Books
Motivation
Recycling and revision
Pronunciation
Correction
English as a changing language

Log on to the Oxford Teachers Club website and join the debate today!
3 ihj October 2002
Contents
Editorial page 4
Language Issues
Recognising Language and Creativity by Ron Carter page 5
Continuing the Language as Fun discussion, Ron looks at how
nursery rhymes and word play inform our language-learning.
Developments in Syllabus Design by Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman page 9
Two of the most experienced coursebook writers in ELT discuss
their approach to their new book - language as people actually USE it.
Doubling the Trouble by Yuliya Skaleva page 11
An IH teacher looks at the rationale (and lack of it) behind one of those
niggling little spelling rules.
Teacher Training
360 Degrees - Feeding back on Feedback by Julia Bannister page 13
How do your trainees actually want to receive their feedback?
Have You Got a Session on Teaching? by Nick Hamilton page 15
How to get your CELTA trainees to teach to their strengths not their
weaknesses.
Art For Arts sake by Thomas Fritz page 18
The relevance of research in linguistics to trainees practice.
Classroom Practice
The RP Approach to Lesson Planning by Mike Cattlin page 21
Redressing the balance between Reactive and Proactive teacher
behaviour in the classroom
Getting Feedback The TA Way by Mario Rinvolucri page25
A typically original approach to discovering what students or trainees
really thought of their time in your classroom.
Ah-ha and Hmmm- Those Magic moments by Judith Baker and
Simon Marshall page 28
The IH conference session on how raising awareness raises learning power.
Affiliate News
Whats going on in the IHWO - Michael Carrier page 30
Whats going on in the IHWO Office - Susanna Dammann page 31
Who are The Most Important People in ELT? Rod Fricker page 32
Using News and the Guardian Weekly in Class Max de Lotbiniere page 33
Reviews
Working In English Language Teaching Francesca Target (Kogan Page Publishing) page 34
The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary, The Oxford Collocations page 35
Dictionary For Students of English, The Oxford Students Dictionary of English,
The Oxford Wordpower Dictionary For Learners of English (OUP)
Chit Chat 1 Paul Shipton (OUP) page 36
Intercultural Activities Simon Gill & Michaela Cakov, (OUP) page 37
Intercultural Business Communication Robert Gibson, (Oxford Handbooks for
Language Teachers OUP)
Business Grammar Builder Paul Emmerson (Macmillan) page 38
Editors: Rachel Clark
Susanna Dammann
Subscriptions Manager: Emma Bailey
Editorial Board: Nigel Beanland
Steve Brent
Pippa Bumstead
Michael Carrier
Roger Hunt
Jeremy Page
Scott Thornbury
journal of education and development
4 ihj October 2002
Editorial
Welcome to Issue 13. Unlucky for some but clearly not for us.
This issue is stuffed with good things both from our regular
contributors and from newcomers and we are sure you will find
something to while away a coffee-break, inspire your next class,
or give you food for thought in your TT. In particular, compare
Nick Hamiltons and Mike Cattlins ideas - the next Big Idea
seems to be emerging.
The Review section is fuller than usual this time: in fact pressure
of space meant we had to leave out a very important addition to
the IH course-book corpus - the Language to Go series, all by
people who are or have worked in IH London (Carina Lewis,
Simon le Maistre, Minty Crace, JJ Wilson, Robin Wileman and
Antonia Clare). What wed like is for any of you out there in the
IHWO who are using this series to get in touch and tell us how
you have found it in use. Email your thoughts to us here please:
IHJournal@ihlondon.co.uk and we will make sure that we include
them in our Reviews section in the next issue.
The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed that one of your
editors is now occupying Antonia and Robins chair (hard acts to
follow) in the Affiliate Network department. One result of this in
this issue is the profile of the Affiliate Network office - since
nobody had time to send us a profile of their school, we thought
you might like to read about what goes on here.
One other change is that we would like to start new section in the
Affiliate Network News in which you can have the chance to
unload your frustrations and problems and share your triumphs
and satisfactions in the world of ELT. We know youre busy, but
just write us a message - 50 words will do - and your name might
be in print (You can also remain anonymous too if you want!). On
the technical side, the only plea we make is that you send your
message as an attachment rather than the main text of the email
as it takes hours to unscramble otherwise.
In May this year, Susan Barduhn organised the IH Educators
Conference here at IH London. The theme this year was
Recognition (as in recognising that something is true either
gradually or in a breakthrough moment; also, recognising that
something works). The conference opened with an excellent
keynote speech from Ron Carter (see the article in this issue on
page 5) and continued throughout the weekend with a series of
extremely stimulating talks interpreting the theme in a variety of
interesting ways. One such talk was Ah-ha! by Simon Marshall
and Judith Baker in which we have on page .....
Next year International House will be celebrating 50 years of
existence as one of the most pioneering, innovative and influential
organisations in ELT. For many years IH was ELT. We would like to
mark this occasion with a Special Anniversary Issue which will
represent the best of IH in the past, the present and the future.
All suggestions as to material we mustnt leave out gratefully
received, especially from those who have been with the
organisation a long time.
The nature of ELT, with most of its practitioners working in far-
flung corners of the world, far from the centres of education
where most of us began, means that conferences are even more
important than in most businesses. They are often the ONLY
opportunity a DOS or a teacher gets to mix and compare notes
and moans with other people in the same boat. The thing about
boats is how they are the same but also different, and
comparisons, far from being odious can be the most motivating
and inspirational experience of the year. In these straitened times,
with an awful lot of ELT boats paddling hard to stay afloat (and
some going under alas - spare a tear for IH Shanghai) when air-
fares can be hard to find, the next best thing to a conference can
be the Journal. But, like a conference, it is only as good as its
contributors make it: so get onto the computer and start
contributing!
Rachel Clark and Susanna Dammann.
e-mail: ihjournal@ihlondon.co.uk Tel: +44 (0) 20 7518 6900
Emma Bailey
The Subscriptions Manager
IH Journal of Education and Development
International House
106 Piccadilly
London W1J 7NL
U.K.
5
Starting points for applied linguistic studies can often be
accidental. It was several years ago now when the starting point
for this lecture was found, somewhat unpropitiously, one dark
and slightly misty autumnal morning as I was making my way
towards the check-in of, where else, Birmingham airport. My eye
was caught by a single line of red and blue letters spread out
across a large glass-fronted placard. The letters were the letters
of the alphabet. I looked more closely, not at first noticing that
one of the letters was missing and that its absence was
accentuated by a gap between the letter p and the letter r, more
or less as follows:
Abcdefghijklmnop rstuvwxyz
Closer inspection revealed, of course, that the placard was an
advertisement for an airline which counted among the
proclaimed benefits of travelling business class the fact that there
were no queues to be had at its check-in desk and that check-
in for passengers with hand luggage only could be undertaken
automatically by a machine.
Several minutes later and sitting in the departures lounge my
thoughts were interrupted by the person next to me, a young
Irish man who was holding a child (a little girl about eighteen
months of age) in his arms and who was moving the child
rhythmically back and forth while gazing intently into the childs
eyes and occasionally rubbing his nose against hers. He was
softly singing nursery rhymes which I had long forgotten having
sung to my own children but which were soon recalled almost
verbatim with a surprising immediacy.
Hickory, dickory dock
The mouse ran up the clock
The clock struck one
The mouse ran down
Hickory dickory dock
Diddle, diddle dumpling my son John
Went to bed with his trousers on
One shoe off and one shoe on
Diddle, diddle dumpling my son John.
Later that same day I found myself in a seminar discussing with
a group of teachers some differences between spoken and
written English and during the course of the discussion I put the
following short conversational exchange (extracted from a
computer-based corpus which I had been compiling) onto a
projector in order for us to examine some of the ways in which
spoken discourses utilise lexical vagueness (a bob or two,
things, and stuff, and things). Almost involuntarily I became
distracted by the repetition of the word bob/Bob, a feature of
this text to which I had not previously paid any particular
attention:
(Three students in Bristol (1995) are talking about the landlord of
a mutual friend:)
A: Yes, he must have a bob or two
B: Whatever he does he makes money out of it just like that
C: Bobs your uncle
B: Hes quite a lot of money erm tied up in property and things.
Hes got a finger in all kinds of pies and houses and stuff. A
couple in Bristol, one in Cleveland I think.
I began to consider why the word bob was repeated, why there
appeared to be no straightforward semantic connection between
the two bobs, what kinds of attitudes and feelings may have
been aroused for the speakers by the particular choice of this
particular echo and just how conscious or otherwise such a
choice might be.
These three seemingly unconnected instances are provoking
and I have since then begun increasingly to puzzle over them and
to explore parallels and points of connection. The first example,
the no queue advertisement, is relatively easily recognisable as
an instance of wordplay and textual semiosis designed to
capture a reader/viewers attention. Very often too, in such cases
the message is inexplicit and some interpretative work is
required. There is a deliberate focus on the message which
draws attention to itself in such a way that it holds the attention
by breaking with expectation. In this example, there is an
established order that is broken by a missing letter, the
interpretative work thus centring on creative deviation from a
norm.
The alphabetic sequence breaks and reforms but only after the
reader/viewer, who has of course to be predisposed to do such
things, has come to interpret a new and original slant on the
meaning of the text. The text of no queue is a widespread and
culturally pervasive example of creativity in everyday
communication.
ihj October 2002
Recognising Language and Creativity
Ronald Carter
The paper is based on the keynote paper given at the IH Educators Conference in May 2002 which was devoted to the theme
of RECOGNITION. Ron Carter is Professor of Modern English Language in the School of English Studies, University of
Nottingham. He has written and edited over forty books in the field of language and literary studies, applied linguistics and
ELT. Recent publications include: Exploring Grammar in Context (co-authored with Rebecca Hughes and Michael McCarthy),
(CUP, 2000) and The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (ed with David Nunan) (CUP,
2001).
6
Id like to suggest that the example exemplifies the feature of
pattern-reforming.
The second example is different in so far as the semantic
content is less transparent. For example, what are the meanings
in this context of diddle and dumpling? They have established
dictionary definitions but their normal referential meanings seem
to be suspended in this instance, particularly since the
remainder of the text asks us to forego any formal logical
understanding of why John might go to bed dressed in trousers
while alternately dispensing with single shoes and socks. And
about the mouse which runs up and down a clock seemingly in
order to coincide with the striking of the hour, the less said the
better, particularly when it does so to the beat of the barely
intelligible hickory dickory dock
about the mouse, the
less said the better
The communicative purpose of the nursery rhymes is of course
not so straightforward or conventional as the no queue
advertisement. The context of the young Irish father singing
when in close physical proximity to his daughter is crucial. The
content of the message matters less than its communicability. It
is performed rather than read. The sounds and movement of
the rhyme, especially its repetitions, powerfully override the
referential meaning. Both nursery rhymes are representational
before they are referential, their primary purpose being to
represent and, by representing, to help to create a relationship
(reinforced by the very physical act of rubbing noses while
singing). The patterns of sound, lexis and grammatical structure
are familiar and they are repeated, reinforcing rather than re-
forming a way of seeing and doing. In its way each nursery rhyme
is as creative as the no queue text, though, because repetition
is conventionally seen not to invent, in many Western societies
the advertisement would probably be more highly valued for its
creative use of language. I hope, however, to challenge this kind
of assumption.
Id like to suggest that the example exemplifies the feature of
pattern-forming
The third example is more intriguing still. This spoken exchange
deviates from familiar existing patterns in particular ways. Take,
for example, the ways in which idioms are used. Idioms are
regularly fixed in their form (for example, you can take a short
sleep by having forty winks though not normally fifty or thirty
nine winks) but in this exchange the idiomatic patterns are re-
formed and extended so that the established idiom to have a
finger in every pie is creatively transmuted into:
Hes got a finger in all kinds of pies and houses and stuff.
On the other hand, other idioms such as Bobs your uncle serve,
as I have already suggested, a more echoing function, repeating
a previous form, at least in terms of the word bob. The speaker
appears to choose to repeat or at least to echo the pattern in
order to concur with the previous speaker. There is a clear
ideational content to the exchange here, for the speakers are
talking about the relative wealth of a local landlord, but, as in the
example of nursery rhymes, some of the language choices
create a convergent relationship, in particular by negotiating and
reinforcing a certain way of seeing things.
Also noticeable is the rhetorical figure of understatement.
(another figure of speech by the way, normally only analysed in
writing!!). When speaker A states that the landlord must have
bob or two he is implying that he is wealthy. The phrase is close
to idiom of course. It invites the other speakers not to take what
is said only at its most literal but also to evaluate what is said.
Indeed, across this whole conversational extract, short though it
is, there is not only a pervasively creative word play but the word
play is doing more than merely displaying or achieving a focus
on content. It is introducing a more affective element into the
discourse by creating attitudes and by creating and reinforcing
relationships. And as I have deliberated on this extract, a further
intriguing feature is the precise nature of the echo of the word
bob/Bob which originally and almost involuntarily attracted my
attention. There is no clear semantic parallel between a coin
(bob) and a name (Bob) even in idiomatic form and so the
parallel is either established accidentally or by means of an
altogether more subliminal configuration - a possibility which
requires cognitive as well as social or cultural explanation and
which, like the nursery rhyme examples, forces us to consider
language use for expressive, affective and emotive purposes.
Anyway, what we do have in this third extract is an example of
pattern-forming and pattern-reforming working together. I am
interested in particular in those examples where we find both
features, as it is those cases which are particularly challenging to
describe.
Some of the questions raised by the examples we have looked
at are:
why, particularly within literature and language study,
creativity is conventionally seen largely as a written
phenomenon;
how spoken and written creativity differ and what their
respective purposes are;
whether speakers are conscious or unconscious of what
they do on a daily basis;
how and why creativity in common speech is often
connected with the construction of a relationship and with
interpersonal convergence;
whether spoken creativity is confined to particular socio-
cultural contexts and to particular kinds of relationship;
ihj October 2002
7
what the implications are for our understanding of creativity
when something is planned and worked over several times
(text 1), when folk memory and multiple rehearsals affect the
spoken performance (text 2) and when the discourse is
largely spontaneous and unplanned and only in part
(possibly) rehearsed (text 3).
what implications there are in all of this for ELT.
there are cultural
conventions which do
not assign positive
value to emotions
As Ive already hinted, these explorations of the language of
spoken creativity have been limited by the particular
preoccupations and research paradigms of linguistics in the
twentieth century. Chief among these is the modelling of
descriptive frameworks on the basis of written rather than
spoken examples as well as a preoccupation with invented
sentences rather than naturally-occurring discourse which goes
beyond the level of the individual sentence and which contains
many of the features of spoken performance such as slips of the
tongue, false starts, hesitations, pauses, interruptions and the
like which are inevitably not to be found when tidied up and
anaesthetised examples are the basis for analysis and when the
referential and ideational are privileged over the representational,
affective and interpersonal. In a related way there are cultural
conventions in contemporary western societies which do not
assign positive value to emotions. The interpersonal and emotive
features which are most marked in spoken data are therefore not
normally subjected to analysis. There are complex issues to
unravel and there have been and will be times when I wish I had
not encountered or been encountered by that provocative
cluster of examples of common language on that misty autumnal
day at Birmingham airport.
Interlingual creativity and crossings
So far an impression has probably been created that that there
is a kind of linguistic purity to these practices, that creativity and
language play reside within a single language or that creativity is
only triggered in monolingual contexts. That is not the case.
Bilingual and multilingual communities have been especially rich
in the production of creative artefacts and there is some
evidence to suggest that conditions of multilingualism may
favour creative production.
Recent research by Rampton (1995) describes a phenomenon
which he terms crossings, a feature of cross-lingual play and of
creativity with language codes which is distinctively oral rather
than written in mode. The specific focus of language crossing in
Ramptons studies is centred on multi-racial urban adolescents
in the South Midlands of Britain. It concerns the use of Creole
by adolescents of Asian and Anglo descent, the use of Panjabi
by Anglos and Afro-Caribbeans and the use of stylised Indian
English by all three (Rampton, 1995). Ramptons data goes a
long way to illustrate the degree to which members of the
groups studied engaged in crossing from one language to
another as part of day-to-day exchanges. Other typical samples
of data include contexts in which a fifteen-year-old Afro-
Caribbean boy teases a classmate, a fifteen year old Asian girl,
about her having an older boyfriend by using a stylised Asian
English with marked Panjabi intonation in order to tease and
encourage her to engage in playful banter.
Most instances found by Rampton involve the use of Creole and
of Creole crossing. In Ramptons data Creole is much more
extensively integrated by all speakers, indicating the extent to
which it is symbolic of all that is valued in the culture shared by
the adolescents in the study. In the following example, two boys,
one Anglo (Alan) and one Asian (Asif), both aged fifteen are being
held in detention. The extract shows them speaking with an
Anglo female teacher, (Ms J) aged in her mid-twenties. She says
why she is a little late for the supervision of the detention,
explaining that she had to contact the headteacher and then
why she now needs to go to fetch her lunch before the detention
proper begins. The boys attempt to undermine and criticise her
position by locking her into a sequence of question and answer.
When she departs and the boys are left on their own, they mock
her statements using a markedly Creole intonation, most
markedly on the word lunch.
Creative Crossings
Ms J: I had to go and see the headmaster
Asif: Why?
Ms J: None of your business
Alan: A-about us?
Ms J: No, Ill be back
Asif: Hey how can you see the headmaster when he was in
dinner?
Ms J: Thats precisely why I didnt see him
Asif: What?
Ms J: Ill be back in a second with my lunch
Asif: NO, dats sad man Ill be... I had to miss my play right Ive
gotta go
Alan: With mine
Asif: LLunch.. You dont need no...
Alan: Llunch....
Asif: Have you eat your lunch Alan?
These creative mixes indicate an underlying artistry in the
appropriate handling of two voices. However, the resulting hybrid
discourse is not simply creative for its own sake. In many of
Ramptons examples this double-voicing is put to social use
either for the purpose of criticism, for banter and verbal duelling
ihj October 2002
8
which reinforces group values and affiliations or simply to
express identities and values which are separate from the
dominant discourses and which could not be altogether
articulated within the domain of single voice. In many cases the
choices are creative choices and the speakers learn to make the
choices; but the choices are not merely aesthetic but are socially
and culturally motivated. A key argument here is that these
creative combinations are not merely ornamental but encode
purposeful functions in the expression of identity and the
construction of shared (and fictional or fictionalised) ) worlds,
including worlds which seek to exclude others or to adopt an
adversarial stance to others.
choices are not merely
aesthetic but socially
and culturally motivated
Creativity is mainly convergent but it is not simply convergent.
Pattern-forming can be hostile. If you dont believe me, try
repeating word for word what someone says to you and watch
their reaction.
The significance of the relationship between creative
communication, language crossing and more intimate speech
genres is further evidenced in a sub-corpus of emails and IRC
[Internet Relay Chat] data collected in Nottingham as a
supplement to the CANCODE corpus (see Carter and McCarthy,
1997). Several thousand emails and several hours of IRC data
on a variety of topics are being collected in order to examine the
continua between planned and unplanned discourse, the
interpenetration of spoken discourse features into written text as
well as the creativity manifest in these more informal, mixed-
mode forms of communication. The data collected illustrate the
extent to which different languages can be creatively combined.
The result is of course written rather than spoken but, as in the
manner of much email discourse, is sufficiently informal,
pervasive and everyday to count as demotic. In the following
IRC example transliterated Cantonese, text-messaging
shorthand and English are used to mark out an interpersonal
territory in which emotion and affect are expressed in a private
discourse in which form and the meaning of form are overtly
played with. The two writer/speakers (W/S0) are girls and are
both undergraduate students at the University of Nottingham,
England.
Viki: its snowing quite strong outside....be careful
Sue: I will, thx
Viki: wei wei...lei dim ar?
Sue: ok, la, juz got bk from Amsterdam loh, how r u?
Viki: ok la.. I have 9 tmrw
Sue: haha, I have 2-4 ........sooooooooooo happy
Viki: che...anyway...have your rash gone?
Sue: yes, but I have scar oh...ho ugly ar!
Viki: icic...ng gan yiu la...still a pretty girl, haha!!
[Cantonese translations: wei wei...lei dim ar - hi, how are you?;
ng gan yiu la - it doesnt matter; ar and la are discourse markers
in Cantonese]
Some may argue that such a discourse underlines the
irreversible decline of standard English into a series of mutually
unintelligible sub-languages; another way of seeing such
exchanges is, however, to observe the richness and invention of
which everyday users of English are capable and to praise the
creative invention which results from the mixing. An even
stronger interpretation would be to recognise the clear need the
two girls have to appropriate a language which not simply
English but their own English and, for them, to develop a
repertoire of mixed codes which enable them to give expression
to their feelings of friendship, intimacy and involvement with each
others feelings and attitudes a discourse which would not be
to the same degree available to them through the medium of
standard English. Here there is no overt expression of social
critique as in the crossings into Creole made by many of the
adolescent speakers captured by Rampton. But there is
nonetheless an implicit recognition that standard English has no
clear value for them for the purposes of daily intimate email
exchange and accordingly new modes of speaking/writing are
invented and creatively developed. Note, however, that creativity
is again manifest in more informal, mixed-mode forms of
communication.
Applications to the ELT classroom
Discussions of creativity in relation to language teaching and
learning have tended to focus on issues of learners own
creativity in relation to language learning processes. For
example, the teaching of literature in a variety of cultural contexts
may be better informed by understandings of the pervasively
creative character of everyday language and can support
attempts by some practitioners (see Carter and McRae, 1996;
Cook, 2000, part 3) to establish continuities between literary and
everyday language and establish stronger bridges between
language and literature teaching. Appreciation of literary and
broader cultural variation can also be supported by reference to
what learners already understand and can do rather than by
means of more deficit-related pedagogic paradigms. The idea
that creativity exists in a remote and difficult-of-access world of
literary genius can be de-motivating to the apprentice student of
literature, especially in contexts where an L2 (second language)
literature is taught, but where the primary goal is mastery of the
foreign language.
But it is not only in the teaching of literature where the value of
exposure to the more open-ended and creative aspects of
language may be exploited. One criticism of notional-functional
ihj October 2002
9
and task-based approaches to language teaching and learning
is their tendency towards focusing on the transactional and the
transfer of information, with the danger that language use comes
to be seen as utilitarian and mechanistic. While learners
undoubtedly have survival needs, and while a language such as
English has indeed become a utilitarian object for many of its
world-wide users, learners in many contexts around the world
relatively quickly pass from purely utilitarian motivations towards
goals associated with expressing their social and cultural selves
and seek that kind of liberation of expression which they enjoy in
their first language. In such contexts, exposure to creativity need
not be confined to the rarerified world of literary genius but can
be enjoyed and understood in the most common of everyday
settings. In these respects methodologies need to be developed
which help learners better to internalise and appreciate
relationships between creative patterns of language, purposes
and contexts which can foster both literary appreciation and
greater language understanding. Aston (1988) nicely refers to
learning comity (the books title) as a desirable response to the
transactional bias of contemporary language pedagogy, and
much of his argumentation centres round bridging interactional
gaps, as opposed to the transactional information gaps so
beloved of communicative pedagogy.
So there is a long way to go in understanding creativity in the
spoken language and in exploring the applications to the
classroom of such understanding but the first steps have been
taken in recognising in a very basically political and ideological
sense that creativity is an everyday, demotic phenomenon. It is
not simply a capacity of special people but a special capacity of
all people.
exposure to creativity
need not be confined to
the rarerified world of
literary genius
Bibliography
Aston, G. 1988. Learning Comity. Bologna: Editrice CLUEB.
Carter, R.A. and McCarthy, M. (1997) Exploring Spoken
English Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carter, R.A. and McRae, J (eds) Literature, Language and the
Classroom: Creative Classroom Practice Harlow: Pearson
Longman
Cook, G. 2000. Language Play, Language Learning. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Rampton, B.1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among
Adolescents. Harlow: Pearson Longman.
ihj October 2002
Developments in Syllabus Design
Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman
Ruth Gairns and Stuart Redman have been involved in teaching and teacher training since the mid 1970s. They have a
particular interest in vocabulary development and materials design, and have published a number of books in these areas.
Their most recent publication is Natural English (OUP), a general English course for upper secondary and adult learners
No two course books are the same. The spoken and written
texts are all different, and consequently the vocabulary
presented in the books will also be different. Admittedly, many of
the topics will be familiar, but they are not the same topics, and
they are not treated in the same way. There is, however, one
constant: grammar. Across the levels, in different books, there is
considerable uniformity, not only in what is taught, but even in
the sequencing of the language items in the syllabus. In short, it
is grammar which forms the core of most course books, and
everything else (lexis, texts, skills etc) has to fit around it.
Primarily, this is also the grammar of written English, handed
down to us by previous generations of course books. But is this
what learners need? In our experience, most learners want to
communicate in English by speaking the language, which
prompts a further question: will a written grammar of English
provide the most suitable syllabus for learners who want to
speak it?
it is grammar which
forms the core of most
course books
Our research
In response to that question we decided to look at syllabus
design in a different way. We started not with a prescribed
grammar syllabus, but with a wide-ranging set of communicative
activities and certain criteria:
10
They would have to be achievable, engaging and purposeful.
They would need to be language rich in that they pushed
learners into extensive and varied language use.
They had to range across different time frames and topics.
They should cover a range of activity types.
They should vary in tone: fun, business-like, factual, etc.
We piloted these activities with a cross-section of intermediate
learners (over two hundred, from twenty different countries). We
recorded the learners, and we transcribed and analysed the
data. Originally, we had planned to record native speakers of
English doing the same activities, and compare the results.
However, it soon became obvious that native speaker models
would not necessarily help us to deliver a satisfactory syllabus:
they were too colloquial and idiomatic; they contained too many
irrelevant cultural references; and in any case, such a model was
unattainable for intermediate learners.
each activity created a
need for a wide range
of language
Instead, we turned to students themselves. We realised that a
more realistic goal for intermediate learners could be provided by
those who had already broken through the intermediate barrier:
upper intermediate and low advanced learners of English. Our
research therefore changed at an early stage, and we and the
teachers involved in the project piloted and recorded the
activities with separate groups of intermediate and higher level
learners. We examined the way intermediate learners coped with
the activities and compared it with the performance of higher
level learners doing the same tasks. From this, we were able to
define more closely what intermediate students needed to learn
(and would be able to achieve) in terms of language and
performance strategies.
What did we learn?
It was reassuring to discover that some familiar areas of
intermediate grammar were there for good reason. In a range of
spoken English activities, students needed the present perfect,
the past simple, conditional structures, ways of talking about the
future, and comparatives and superlatives, for instance. They
also clearly needed a range of modal verbs, but perhaps need to
study them more extensively than is currently the case. On the
debit side, some traditional areas of grammar were less
conspicuous and necessary. Tense shift in reported speech, for
example, seemed largely superfluous when both native-
speakers and higher level learners of English were able to report
speech in spoken English in a number of acceptable ways:
He said hell see her later;
He says hell see her later;
He said, Ill see her later;
He was saying hed see her later.
The various activities also created a need for familiar areas of
topic vocabulary: relationships, work, education, travel, and so
on. In some cases, we could see how linguistic categories would
be a convenient way to group items together for teaching
purposes: phrasal verbs, prefixes and suffixes, uncountable
nouns, and so on.
Natural English
The most interesting finding was that each activity created a
need for a wide range of language which may or may not find its
way into a traditional grammar or vocabulary syllabus, and in
quite a few cases, would not find its way into the syllabus at all.
Predominantly made up of short or longer phrases, these
chunks included all sorts of things - functions, sentence heads,
modifiers, adverbs and adverbial phrases, collocations, lexical
phrases and idioms, vague language, spoken linkers - which are
crucial in making speakers of any language sound natural. We
decided, therefore, to bring this language together in a new
syllabus strand, and give it the label natural English. Here are
some examples at intermediate level
Could you do me a favour / give me a hand? (asking for help)
Thats very kind of you. / No problem. (thanking and responding)
The most important thing is to.... (sentence head)
It depends who / what / why / if, etc. (sentence head)
for a while / for ages (lexical phrases)
Thats a pity. / Never mind. (idioms)
It was great fun. / I heard a funny noise. (collocation)
have a good / great / terrible time (collocation)
fortunately / hopefully / surprisingly (adverbs showing feelings
and opinions)
extremely / incredibly / unbelievably (intensifying adverbs)
I like jazz, rock, and that sort of thing. (vague language)
I know quite a lot about ... / I dont know very much about
...(modifiers)
One day / a bit later / in the end (spoken linker)
Anyway / so anyway (spoken linker)
Conversation strategies
We found from the research that intermediate learners were
significantly weaker than higher level learners in certain
performance strategies. To address these problems, we
developed activities which included planning and rehearsal time,
guidelines for structuring discourse, and confidence-building
practice.
At syllabus level, we introduced a range of natural English
phrases which would facilitate and enhance their conversation
ihj October 2002
11
strategies. For example:
- initial phone greetings, e.g. Is that ......(Bruno)?
- introducing a request, e.g. I wanted to ask you - could I ...?
- inviting someone to speak, e.g. How about you, Tomoko?
- moving the conversation on in a class activity, e.g. Shall we
go on to the next question?
a syllabus driven by
learner data
Intermediate learners also appeared more concerned with what
they have to say themselves than listening and responding to
others as they would do in their first language. They needed to
learn ways of responding when they are listening, for example:
Follow-up questions:
A Where are you from?
B Japan.
A Really? Whereabouts?
A Have you been to Madrid?
B Yes, I have.
A Oh? Whats it like?
Responding with interest or sympathy:
A Im going to spend a week in the desert.
B Oh, really? How interesting / exciting!
Oh, that sounds great!
Asking for repetition, clarification, etc.
Pardon? / Sorry, I missed that.
Could you explain the bit about ... again?
Our research did not always provide us with clear cut or even
satisfactory answers to some of the questions we raised. In the
end, we used the data to inform syllabus and materials, but did
not follow it slavishly. However, we feel more positive about a
syllabus driven by learner data rather than an uncritical
acceptance of a handed-down convention.
Gairns, R and Redman, S Natural English Intermediate Oxford
University Press 2002 (Upper Intermediate level early 2003)
http://www.oup.com/elt/global/teachersclub/teaching/articles/
development/
[This article was first published in English Teaching Professional
October 2002]
ihj October 2002
Doubling the Trouble? Rules and Reasons
for Consonant Doubling.
Yuliya Skaleva
Yuliya comes from the Ukraine and trained at IH London. She has taught for a year at IHShanghai and is now at IH Qingdao.
Staff room. 10 minutes to go before morning class. I hear the
frustrated voice of one of the colleagues, I cant believe it! Ive
taught this lesson twice and still dont remember that rule. The
rule she was talking about is when we double consonants in
adjectives and verbs. Dont worry, said another colleague, I
always forget it too. Its impossible to remember it with all those
stresses and letter patterns....
what about making
teachers lives easier?
Then I thought, Why is it that we dont remember a rule that we
understand and can use? The answer is that its difficult to
remember something mechanically, almost like trying to
remember a foreign word without knowing its meaning. Its much
easier to remember a rule if you know the reason for it: the
meaning, so to speak. Although a lot of things in a language are
very confusing and contradictory, its sometimes possible and
always useful to find a logical explanation foor them.
Making life easier for learners has always been a number one
item on the list of methodologists, linguists and teacher trainers.
But what about making teachers lives easier? It would really help
us a lot to reduce the amount of time spent on preparation,
including memorizing rules and their exceptions, if we could
understand the reasons behind them. The following is my
humble attempt to help teachers with something very simple but
sometimes very annoying. First of all lets recap on the rule itself:
A consonant at the end of a word is doubled in the following
cases:
Adjectives and verbs with ONE syllable
When the word ends with one vowel followed by one
consonant (C + V+ C), you double the consonant before
-er -est -ing -ed
12
Adjectives:
big - bigger - biggest
Verbs:
stop -stopping -stopped
The exceptions to this rule are:
1. Words ending in x, y, or w.
slow - slower
play - playing -played
2. Verbs with MORE than ONE syllable
When the word ends with one vowel followed by one consonant
(V + C), you double the consonant if the last part of the word is
stressed.
Consonant is doubled
begin - beginning
Consonant is NOT doubled
open - opening - opened
But notice the following exceptions, esp. in British English
cancel - cancelling - cancelled
worship - worshipping - worshipped
The reason why the last consonant in the one- and two-syllable
word patterns is doubled is because of one of the many
pronunciation rules.
There are two kinds of syllables in the English language - so
called closed and open. For example, a syllable is closed
when it ends with one or more consonants. In the word stop the
syllable is closed because the last consonant is not followed by
a vowel. A syllable is open when it ends with a consonant
followed by a vowel. In the word name it is open, because m is
followed by e. In an open syllable the vowel before the last
consonant is very often pronounced as in the alphabet (which
means it is a long sound like / i: / for e or a diphthong like / e /
for a) or differently from the alphabet, but it appears to be
stressed. Otherwise it is pronounced differently, like / e /, / /, /
/, or schwa. In the word visit the syllable vi is open because
s is followed by i. Therefore, its stressed.
Now lets look at the word stop again. If the last consonant in
stop was not doubled, according to the above mentioned rule
stoping would be pronounced as / /, and stoped as
/ / instead of / / and / / respectively.
Therefore, the last consonant needs to be doubled to keep the
word phonetically and semantically consistent.
Exceptions
The reason why the consonants w or y are not doubled is as
follows.
These consonants, which are very often called semi-vowels, are
phonologically like consonants, but phonetically like vowels.
Therefore, at the end of a word they are usually preceded by a
vowel sound and they become a part of a diphthong as in
/ / or / /.
As for x, it actually consists of two consonant sounds, /k/ and
/s/. And there is no need to double it, because phonetically it is a
closed syllable -
/ / and adding -ing, or -ed will not cause a change in
stress or pronunciation of the word.
Consonant is NOT Doubled
The reason why the last consonant is not doubled in unstressed
syllables, is because the vowels tend to be pronounced as in the
alphabet most of the time if they are stressed. If they are not, they
tend to become reduced sounds, like the schwa. Therefore, you
naturally would not think of pronouncing opening as
/ /, because it would be difficult to keep the sound
o stressed and it would also cause the shift of the stress onto
the e and therefore make the word phonetically and
semantically different.
Exceptions
Finally lets look at the exceptions, especially the British versions
of the words like cancel. Their present and past participles are
doubled for a very simple reason: their origin, which tells us that
they have always been doubled. To prove it I would like to look at
the following etymology. The verb to cancel comes from Latin
cancellare and the last consonant was always doubled following
its original form.
To worship which comes from Scandinavian worchippe, goes
back as early as the beginning of the 14th century and appears
with the final consonant both doubled and singled until English
spelling settled down in the 19th century. After that, it was
doubled, probably following the Latin pattern admired by the
scholars of the time.
To conclude
I have presented these ideas to help you, the teachers, to
understand the rule of the doubling of the consonants.
Although you might not use them while teaching the rule to lower
level students, these ideas could be referred to at higher levels in
order to add certain depth to the students understanding of the
relationship between spelling, pronunciation and word origin in
the English language.
References
Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The Oxford English Dictionary (1989). Second Edition. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Roach, P. (1983) English Phonetics and Phonology. A Practical
Course. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gimson, A.C. (1980). An Introduction to the Pronunciation of
English. Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd.
a
ihj October 2002
13
You write too much. Like many teacher trainers in training, this
was the feedback I got from my supervisor on the feedback I
gave trainee teachers. With experience my comments became
more succinct, but I still wrote quite a lot. I worried that it was
too much for the trainees. Did they even read what I wrote? Did
they find my comments useful in helping them improve their
teaching? To what extent was I giving them the written feedback
they wanted?
Did they even read
what I wrote?
To attempt to answer these and other questions I had about
teaching practice feedback on CELTA and IHC (International
House Certificate) courses, I decided to investigate trainees
feedback preferences, in the belief that trainees are likely to
benefit most from feedback on their teaching which accords
with their preferences.
My research subjects were the five participants on an IHC
course at International House Moscow. Oksana, Tamara, Yulia,
Marina and Nastya
1
had all trained as English teachers in Russia,
and all but Oksana had had substantial previous teaching
experience. Among other feedback-related issues, I was
interested in their views on the relative usefulness of the
feedback they received from different sources (e.g. written and
spoken feedback from the tutor, their own reflections, and
feedback from peers and students) and on the characteristics of
the tutors written feedback (e.g. content and amount of detail).
Sources of feedback
Perhaps not surprisingly on a course where they were being
continually assessed by the tutor, the group as a whole
considered the tutors feedback, whether written or spoken,
more useful than feedback from other sources. I was surprised,
however, in view of the emphasis often placed on spoken
feedback by writers
2
and teacher educators themselves, that
these trainees were unanimous in finding the tutors written
comments on their lessons the most useful source of feedback.
The tutors written feedback on their written reflections was
considered the second most useful source of feedback overall,
followed by the tutors spoken feedback to the TP group
3
.
The tutors written comments on lessons
The main reason given for the usefulness of the tutors written
comments on lessons was that they provided a record which
could be referred to later.
The most useful is written feedback on the lessons from the
tutor because I can read and reread it as many times as I want.
I used to mark the most important things and it helped to
remember them during the following lesson. (Oksana).
How much to write
Contrary to my training supervisors opinion that written
feedback should be limited
4
, all these trainees wanted the
written comments on their lessons to cover as many of the
lessons strengths and weaknesses as possible. They preferred
specific comments on details of the lesson as it progressed, to
general comments on the lesson as a whole, although the
choice wasnt always clear-cut.
Balancing comments on strengths and weaknesses
The trainees comments on the content of the tutors written
feedback underline the importance of there being an appropriate
balance between positive and negative points.
If I know not only weak, but strong points of my teaching, I can
balance them somehow... If there are only strengths you can be
very proud of yourself; if there are only the weaknesses it can be
very discouraging and you feel like a total fool, that you cant do
anything. (Nastya)
ihj October 2002
1 The course participants names have been changed to preserve anonymity. Their
comments are taken from questionnaire responses, interviews and journals, and are
quoted as written or spoken, without corrections.
2 For example, the approaches to observation and feedback described by Donald
Freeman (Intervening in Practice Teaching) and Jerry G. Gebhard (Models of
Supervision: choices) - both in Richards and Nunans Second Language Teacher
Education CUP (1990) - relate mostly to spoken feedback.
3 Marina, however, found her own reflections and the students reactions in lessons
more useful than the tutors comments on her reflections and spoken feedback.
4 This is also suggested by writers such as Gower and Walters in Teaching Practice
Handbook Heinemann (1983)
360 Degrees - Feeding Back on Feedback
Julia Bannister
Julia has been a teacher, Director of Studies and/or teacher trainer in IH affiliated schools in Turkey, Russia and a number of
other central and eastern Europe countries. She now works freelance, most recently as a CELTA tutor in Lebanon, Poland and
her native Australia.
14
Reactions to my written comments followed a possibly
predictable pattern as the course progressed. In the first week,
Tamara thought that [the] notes were very encouraging and ...
criticism very constructive. In the second week, however, when
I was expecting more from the trainees, Yulia found the feedback
less pleasant than she had expected, and Nastya felt confused
when she received critical comments on a lesson in which she
felt that she had used teaching ideas from the course. Later,
however, reactions were more balanced, and critical comments
accepted with more equanimity. Now Ive started to see things
in perspective and I think I can appreciate [the tutors] comments
more (Tamara).
Written feedback on trainees written reflections
As with the tutors written comments on their lessons, the
participants in this study found the written comments on their
written reflections useful because they were detailed and
provided a record they could refer to later.
In my reflections book I liked [the tutors] comments. They were
very thorough and helpful. (Nastya)
Again, I studied them thoroughly bit by bit, trying to incorporate
[the] suggestions into my lesson plans, and they were very useful
and I appreciate very much that [the tutor] took so much trouble
to write everything in so minor detail ... For me it was very
helpful. (Tamara)
Oksana appreciated the opportunity for private communication
with the tutor.
When I write [my reflections], I put down my thought about the
lesson and [the tutor] just reflect[s] what I mean and its very
useful for me to get feedback on my own thoughts, and it [is]
better in private, you see, just for me. Sometimes its very difficult
for me to speak about all these things in the group, theyre so
personal. (Oksana)
It is interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that all the course
participants except Marina considered the tutors comments on
their reflections more useful than the reflections themselves.
Again, because of the tutors role as assessor on IHC courses, it
may be inevitable that many trainees will value the tutors opinion
of their teaching more highly than their own, despite the best
efforts of trainers to help them develop their self-evaluation skills.
Conclusions
From such a small sample it is clearly impossible to draw
conclusions which will be valid for all IHC courses, let alone other
teacher training contexts. However, the trainees on this course
were typical of the participants I have worked with on other IHC
courses in Central and Eastern Europe, so I believe that my
findings are relevant to similar courses there.
For myself, what I learned from these trainees has influenced my
approach to feedback on IHC and CELTA courses. In particular,
now that I am aware of the importance to trainees of my written
feedback on their teaching, I give this a higher priority.
I still include an overall summary of the lessons strengths and
areas needing work, but take more care that the comments on
details of the lesson are as clear and useful as possible, since for
my research subjects these were so important.
I comment on as many of a lessons strengths and weaknesses
as possible, since this is what all my research subjects wanted.
However, the aspects of teaching commented on depend on the
stage of the course, and the individual trainees level of
awareness.
I am even more aware of the need to balance negative with
positive comments, and to ensure, if possible, that the latter
predominate, particularly early in a course.
When writing at speed during an observed lesson, I find it difficult
to give sufficient thought to my comments. Delayed feedback,
among its other advantages, allows me time to edit my written
feedback before it is given to the trainees.
I used to give a lower priority to my comments on trainees
written reflections, in journals or post-lesson self-evaluation
sheets, than to other written and spoken feedback. But since
discovering that the participants in my study found these
comments the second most useful source of feedback, I have
written them with as much care as my feedback on the lessons
themselves.
I believe I learn a lot
from written comments
but I also need the
discussion.
Other sources of feedback
Although I have limited my discussion so far to written feedback,
since that was what I was initially interested in, and this was the
feedback that my research subjects found most useful, this does
not mean that I, or they, do not consider other sources of
feedback useful also. For example, I believe I learn a lot from
[the tutors] written comments but I also need the discussion.
(Marina).
Spoken feedback
These trainees said that they appreciated the feedback
discussion because it provided them with the opportunity to
evaluate their own lessons, gain practical teaching ideas, and
learn from their colleagues mistakes.
All our feedbacks were very practical - I came away with new
ideas about what I could do to solve my teaching problems
ihj October 2002
15
(before the course I didnt know I had any teaching problems - I
was quite satisfied with myself). (Nastya)
I need the discussion, for two main reasons
1. I have an opportunity to talk about my weak and strong
points - my colleagues have a chance to learn from my
mistakes.
2. I learn from my colleagues mistakes which is also a part of
my learning (when they talk). (Marina)
Peer feedback
Some of the trainees greatly appreciated the opportunity to
discuss their lessons with a colleague:
However, it was not one of the groups top five sources of
useful feedback, possibly because they felt they were soft on
each other.
Trainees own reflections
They ranked their own reflections on their lessons as the fifth
most useful feedback source.
I never thought about how important it was, its really important,
and how Im thinking about my lesson ... then I compare it with
[the tutors] comments. These are two main things that we need,
I think [tutors written comments and own written reflections].
(Marina)
Feedback from students
There was no structured opportunity on this course for the
trainees to obtain feedback on their teaching from their TP
students, but they all would have liked to have had this
feedback. They did, however, find that the students reactions
during the lessons provided useful feedback.
I never thought [about students reactions, before the course]
... If I have a student-centred lesson and they react and ... they
learn from my lesson, its very important, of course. They dont
need to write anything but I can see in their eyes ... and then Im
satisfied. (Marina)
Multiple sources of feedback
Jerry Gebhard
5
has suggested that multiple activities, rather than
any single activity, promote change in student teachers teaching
behaviour. It appears that my trainees found multiple sources of
feedback, rather than one single source, useful in helping them
to improve their teaching. Therefore, while I believe that it is
important to provide student teachers with the sort of feedback
that they find most useful, in the way(s) that they prefer, I also feel
that receiving feedback on their teaching from different sources,
and discussing their own and others teaching with different
people, benefited the participants in my study, and benefits
student teachers in general.
ihj October 2002
5 See Interaction in a teaching practicum in Second Language Teacher Education.
Have You Got a Session on Teaching? -
Questioning Approaches to CELTA Training.
Nick Hamilton
Nick has been a teacher-trainer and teacher in the Executive Centre at IH London for fourteen years. His interests include the
Turkish language and culture and haiku
Over the past few years I have felt a growing sense of unease
with the approaches to CELTA training that are often reflected in
Teaching Practice. In particular, I have often observed the
following:
Trainee teachers attempting to teach grammar to classes of
Intermediate students and above who clearly know the
grammar better than the teacher
Inappropriate use of procedures and techniques such as
drilling, stress marking, and concept questions
The predominance of Receptive Skills lessons where no new
language at all is taught; as a trainee once said to me before
a 60 minute lesson in Week 3: Im not teaching them
anything today; were just doing a reading.
It can seem sometimes
as if the students really
dont need to be there.
Along with these can go an obsession with the lesson plan to
the exclusion of anything else that might be happening in the
lesson. It can seem sometimes as if the students really dont
need to be there.
Of all these points, the one about nothing new being taught
16
seems to me to be the main problem. Hugh Cory in his article
on Motivation in the last issue of the IH Journal gives a very
practical list of advice on how to completely demotivate your
students; top of the list is: Make sure that by the end of a
lesson, Ss have never really learnt anything new. I couldnt
agree more. This seems to me to be a fundamental point for
CELTA trainees to grasp, as their credibility as teachers will
later depend on it.
Some Changes
My response to the above has been to experiment with a
number of changes to shift the balance more towards the
language and the learning process. Ironically, these actually
seem to play more to the trainees advantage. Here are the
main points:
Lessons are built around Topics, Texts and Tasks, not
discrete grammatical structures. This allows for a
much broader focus on language form, both lexical
and grammatical. And the language emerges from
the engagement of students with meaning, rather
than meaning having to be constructed around a
piece of language.
Talking with and responding to students is given high
priority, i.e. there is a genuine response to the
message of what is being said, and not just the form
of the language being used to say it. Its striking how
often trainees approach Teaching Practice with the
exact opposite agenda; and how surprised they can
be when you point this out to them. The point I
stress here is that everything that happens in the
lesson is part of the lesson. With low-level students,
guidance needs to be given on how, and how not, to
talk to students at this level, and how to make
language comprehensible.
everything that happens
in the lesson is part of
the lesson
The starting point for language analysis and focus is
lexis. Where the focus is on a topic, this will be
largely collocation. Where it is more task or situation
based, it will also include phrase, and semi-fixed and
fixed expression. The advantage for trainees is that
this is the one thing they do know better than the
students. The grammar then emerges from this lexis,
as it does for students of English. So models for
Language Analysis need to immediately look at both
lexical and grammatical descriptions of language, and
trainees need to be shown the full range of Lexical
Tasks (Matching, Categorising, Sequencing,
Completing, Unjumbling, and Deleting) to use
together with the standard models of Language
Focus. If these are presented as ways of adapting
and supplementing coursebook material, there is no
problem for trainees in holding the different
approaches together.
Reformulation of student output is seen as a major skill to
acquire, with trainees in Teaching Practice listening for the
lexical gaps in students language, and not just tidying up
their use of tenses, articles and prepositions. Again, this
needs to come early in the course and not wait for an Error
Correction session in Weeks 2 or 3. So this is the main
observation task during Teaching Practice when trainees are
not teaching. At the end of the lesson they compare their
notes on language with the tutor, who can then demonstrate
how to reformulate it. Ideally, the tutor might use a spare 10
or 15 minutes at the end of a lesson and do this directly with
the Teaching Practice students.
Personalisation activities are seen as the main type of
practice of new language, rather than published material
based on predetermined grammatical structures and people
who dont exist. The opportunity for students to say or write
something meaningful for themselves allows for language
needs to emerge in the lesson in a way they cannot possibly
do with a lot of so-called Communicative Practice activities
and exercises.
In terms of approach to the training sessions, the main change I
have made has been to demonstrate whole lessons to the
trainees so they can see all the different strands that go to make
up a lesson in the context of the whole. This is done with 6-8
trainees taking the part of the students, with the others
observing what is going on and taking notes. This usually takes
about an hour. Following the lesson, the students get together
with the observers to compare notes before a group feedback
session where there is the opportunity to mention any points or
questions that have arisen.
Interestingly, the focus on topic and emphasis on lexical
language gives a naturalness to the lesson that is difficult to
achieve if trainees are simply being asked to sit through a 50
minute presentation of used to. These lessons constitute
the main part of input in Weeks 1 and 2.
Awareness of Options
Having said all of this, I should make it clear that these ideas
are very much a personal response to the way in which my
teaching has developed over the years that I have been
involved in Teacher Training, and how this development has
been prompted by my own experience as a language learner.
ihj October 2002
17
Right at the beginning of a course I get trainees to explore their
beliefs about what language learning is all about, so that they
can use this to inform their teaching style, and see how the
choice can be made for or against a particular approach.
Typical questions that I put to trainees are:
When you learn a language, what exactly do you learn?
How have you learnt to speak another language?
What sort of teacher do you want to be?
We then look at how we might view the bits of language to be
learnt, and the basic options of working from a whole use of
language to a focus on the parts, or putting together the parts
to create a whole. This is important in establishing that there is,
of course, no one way of going about it, and in making the point
that although the coursebooks still largely take a synthetic
approach, there is always the option of taking the topics, texts
and tasks as the starting points rather than the grammatical
syllabus.
A Working Framework
The following is the framework I give trainees for analysing a
lesson. It is not, youll be relieved to see, reducible to an
acronym, but it is able to describe any type of lesson, or at least
the ones I tend to teach.
Topic
Text
Task
Language Focus
Practice
(Language Feedback)
Although Topic would usually be the logical starting point of any
lesson, the other parts can come in any order. The placing of
Text and Task side by side is to show that a lesson may include
both or a choice of one of them, and the bracketing of Language
Feedback is to indicate that this can come at different stages,
and is often going on throughout the lesson.
The key to understanding the framework is to see where the
focus is on Meaning (i.e. the message of what is being said), as
with Topic, Text and Task, and where it is on Form, (as with
Language Focus and Language Feedback) and how Meaning
and Form can combine in practice. So this allows for both TBL
and PPP approaches and everything in between; and I leave it
up to the trainees how they decide to do it.
Who does the lesson
belong to, you or the
students?
Possible Outcomes
The advantage of working in the way I have outlined above, is
that trainees immediately have a perspective of the whole,
rather than getting lost in the details of stages, procedures and
techniques. This also deals with the problem of a trainee
having to teach something which will be looked at in the input
session the following day.
In Teaching Practice, trainees focus on the priorities of
responding to students, and developing the skills of exploring
lexis (and the relevant grammatical aspects of it) and
reformulating student output. In doing this, I hope to give
trainees the confidence to be able to immediately establish
credibility as a teacher when they start teaching. As any
Director of Studies will tell you, a major complaint from
students is that they are not learning anything new.
A question I often put to trainees in feedback is: Who does the
lesson belong to, you or the students? By focusing on the
language and the students engagement with it, I like to think
that CELTA trainees can more easily get to grips with what
teaching is all about.
nick.hamilton@ihlondon.co.uk
ihj October 2002
18 ihj October 2002
Art for Arts Sake? - Or..... Has methodology
got anything to do with learning?
Thomas Fritz
Thomas Fritz is co-ordinator for foreign language teacher training for adult education in Vienna, teaches part time at the
University of Vienna, and is currently studying for his PhD at Manchester University.
We have always wondered how learning actually takes place,
what makes learning successful and how we as teachers or as
learners can influence learning processes in order to achieve
better results in a shorter time - and without any hard work. This
is why we find not only a long tradition of papers and research in
these fields, but also an abundance of best methods, all trying
to finally solve the riddle of language learning and to provide the
ultimate recipe for success.
Looking back
Some years ago a friend gave me an old English for German-
speakers book that had a very promising title: The Mertner
Method: psycho-technic language acquisition on a mechanic
suggestive basis, published in 1920. Some of the words in the
title rang a bell: psycho- reminded me of learning methods that
re-programme your mind to make it more receptive to new
information; language acquisition the more serious hype of
some years ago (and clearly still a very relevant field of research
and point of reference for language teachers); and finally
suggestive, the buzz word of the eighties following Dr.
Lozanows model of language learning for Bulgarian workers
who wanted to learn languages after having worked long shifts,
a model which was then yuppified in the States and turned into
something called Superlearning.
But what does the Mertner method actually do? What is it based
on and why is it better than grammar/translation, the dominant
paradigm of the 1920s? Mr Mertner explains:
According to the results of experimental psychology, which are
available in a strict, scientific form, the English language is
planted into the heads of the reader without him realising that
this automatic transmission is taking place. Such a procedure is
called mechanic suggestion [...] because the German language
is the riverbed, through which the English language is being
transferred into the brains of the German. (Mertner 1920: 8)
When I looked at the learning material I was quite surprised
because I found some ideas that sounded very familiar, as we
can see from the following example:
A suggestion
1
has
2
been
3
made
4
that
5
president
6
Wilson
7
should
8
visit
9
Geneva
10
to
11
see
12
the
13
seat
14
of
15
the
16
League
17
of
18
Nations
19
before
20
returning
21
to
22
America
23
.
(Morning post 12.5.1919. In Mertner 1920: 57)
The footnotes contain information about pronunciation,
especially made for Germans. For example number 7 provides
the pronunciation for Wilson. Other footnotes contain
explanations or translations of words. The book also provides a
word-for-word translation into German:
Ein Vorschlag ist worden gemacht da Prsident Wilson solle
besuchen Genf, um zu sehen den Sitz des Vlkerbundes vor
seiner Rckkehr nach Amerika.
In this way the syntactic structure of English becomes visible for
German learners and they can see how English sentences are
constructed. There is actually a fringe method, the Birkenbihl
method, originating in Germany, that uses the same kind of
translations with the same reasoning.
what exactly is
language learning?
At the same time, Mertner also used authentic texts taken from
newspapers of that time. So, does the fact that Mr Merton was
using ideas still popular today mean that there is nothing really
new in the field of language learning? Not even in the field of the
creative and artfully produced, so-called alternative methods?
The search for new, more exciting and efficient ways of language
teaching produced a number of alternative methods and
approaches. Rods and masks were used. Baroque music took
centre stage in language learning and cushions and comfortable
chairs became important tools for language teaching.
In order to remember more clearly what these methods
included let us take a look at Earl Stevicks description of
Suggestopedia and the skills and competence teachers need,
according to this model. He describes language learning and the
basic assumptions on learning and teaching in the following
paragraph taken from his book: A Way and Ways:
To begin with, I see Suggestopedia as being based on three
assumptions:
1) that learning involves the unconscious functions of the
learner, as well as the conscious functions; and
2) that people can learn much faster than they usually do, but
19
3) that learning is held back by
a. the norms and limitations which society has taught us,
and by
b. lack of a harmonious, relaxed working together of all
parts of the learner, and by
c. consequent failure to make use of powers which lie idle
in most people most of the time
(Stevick, 1980: 230)
From these ideas on language learning he identifies the areas in
which language teachers need to be qualified and competent.
He observes that the teacher needs tools of three kinds:
1. psychological
2. artistic
3. pedagogical
It is interesting in our context to see that there is no mention of
linguistic knowledge or knowledge of how languages are learned
in this. The general critique of traditional values in learning and
teaching, combined with a fascination with new and interesting
ideas in learning such as the discovery of unknown brain
power, brought about a situation where, at least to my mind,
the real issue of language learning was neglected. This is an
understandable counteraction to the strong tradition of language
teaching that did - at least in some cases - not take the learners
needs and potential into consideration.
Where are we now?
The last couple of years have seen a variety of developments in
the field of methodology.
Methods as such have generally been discarded as a mere
exercise in labelling, not really analysing what is behind these
ideas of learning and teaching.
Most developments these days concentrate on:
the teachers: their thinking and their development
the learners (psychological) situation
their ability to concentrate
taking in the person as a whole, supporting and helping them
in their learning
the analysis of learning strategies and learning styles
But one question has hardly made it to centre stage: what
exactly is language learning?
Is it the same as learning some other subject matter, like biology,
or is it different? Do we still see the learners as people with black
boxes inside their heads that somehow get filled with input?
How do they intake what is put in, and how do learners
produce what they can without solely referring to the models
they have been presented with?
Language learning seems to be special because of
a) the role language plays in our lives;
b) the special nature of language as a complete and complex
system that we, as native speakers, can use without
limitations;
c) the way language grows in us when we first acquire our
first language(s).
Language learning revisited:
No matter which linguistic theory we might want to use, we will
be confronted with some very interesting and puzzling
phenomena that we wont be able to understand just by taking
a quick look.
Let me take you on a short excursion into the field of phonology
and look at some specific issues: German learners have
problems with some elements of the English sound system.
They seem to take German phonology and use it when speaking
English, thus producing some sort of Kissinger English,
infamous for combining English words and syntax with German
phonology. For example:
/irritable/ German speakers say irritable
because their German stress rule tells them to put the stress on
the a. The English stress rule says the suffix able is never
stressed.
(Kenworthy, 1987: 136)
In this case we can say that there is a clear case of L1 transfer.
But look at the next example:
/hotel/ Austrian learners tend to say /h tl/
Is this just another case of L1 transfer? No, because in Austrian
German there is a difference in the /o/ and the /l/ sound and not
in the actual word stress.
Turning away from Germans and Austrians, we take a look at the
infamous problem of Chinese learners: they all have problems
with their [r] sounds, it is said. This is why they all say flied lice,
dont they? But, actually, they do not. Cynthia Brown (Brown
2000) shows in her research that Chinese learners of English can
transfer one phonetic feature (coronar) from the /s/ sound and
attach it to the l/r distinction and so manage to say /r/:
The three above-mentioned examples show three ways of
looking at the linguistic development of learners:
1. The educated guess, based on some knowledge of the L1
of the learners.
1
2. A simple expression of bewilderment lacking intuition and
knowledge: (The answer might be trying to be hyper-correct)
3. A nice example of profound linguistic research. Yet the
question remains - what do we as language teachers do with
this kind of information?
First of all, I perceive a need to involve language teachers in
research that looks at language acquisition processes and helps
ihj October 2002
1 This is already much better than the following exchange heard on a CELTA course somewhere in Western Europe:
Question (asked by the trainer): What is the difference between English and German?
Answer (provided by the trainer herself): German does not have any intonation.
20
them to make sound educated guesses at what happens inside
the learners heads when they learn/acquire a language in our
classrooms and outside.
As a basis for such research work teachers need to become
curious and interested.
In many contexts linguistics has acquired a bad reputation (quite
rightly so in many cases):
it is too complex and too abstract:
there is no one-to-one conclusion to be drawn from any
findings, let alone the theories developed by, for example,
generative linguists;
and just where do we start? Just look at the size of some of
the books...
involve language
teachers in research
Teacher Training models
In Vienna we have been running teacher education courses for
10 years now in which we have integrated a sizeable portion of
linguistic theory. When we first introduced these components,
we were confronted with all of the above mentioned questions.
40 out of 300 hours on linguistics seemed rather a lot, especially
as these hours were all spent looking at psycholinguistics,
syntax theory and language acquisition - all presented by
experts in the field, i.e. linguists working at universities
specialising in theory development and research. And, for this
reason, it remained art for arts sake in that we did not succeed
in really bridging the gap between theory and the practical
experience and expectations of the trainees.
That is until we changed the concept . Our main aim became
one of getting the teachers interested in the area and so we
selected specific fields which could connect up with the existing
linguistic knowledge or interests of the participants; topics which
overlap, in various ways, with their own experience and/or
knowledge of the world. This should provide the key to
accessing the more theoretical world of linguistics.
So, the linguistics module now includes:
linguistics and politics (very relevant in the current political
climate in Austria)
language acquisition theories (relevant to anyone teaching
language or watching their own children learning to speak)
language and gender (including questions of gender in
learning environments)
levels of linguistic description
and analysis of learner language at different levels of
development.
Hence, no more art for arts sake, but hands-on work and
generating interest by means of combining classroom
observations with information about language. For example:
after analysing some categories of linguistic description such as
phonology/phonetics, syntax, lexis, morphology and lexis we
analysed texts produced by learners of German as a Second
Language and tried to find out in which categories errors were
made, how this changed from beginner to intermediate levels
and what consequences this might have, for example, for
correction. This activity showed the trainees that there is a
sequential order in making mistakes (going from lexical and
syntactic as well as phonological errors to more pragmatic ones)
on the one hand, and that errors tend to be part of the learning
process, on the other.
At a recent conference in Leeds (November 2000) Donald
Freeman said that thinking is to students what photosynthesis is
to plants:
Thinking is to a students knowledge as photosynthesis is to a
plants food. Plants do not get food from the soil: they make it
through photosynthesis, using water and nutrients from the soil
and energy from sunlight. No photosynthesis, no food. Students
do not get knowledge from teachers, or books, or experience
with hand-on materials. They make it by thinking, using
information, and experience. No thinking, no learning...
I believe we can develop this idea a little further. Students
produce knowledge by absorbing information (INPUT) and
processing it using inbuilt mechanisms and structures so that
they can reconstruct their knowledge of language and produce
OUTPUT.
If we look at teachers qualifications using the same metaphor
we can say that teachers can be looked upon as gardeners.
They should know everything about gardening: they should
know about soil, weather sunshine, watering, fertilisers, etc. But
teacher-gardeners should be interested in biology as well as
gardening, in order to understand what they are doing as
gardeners. They should know about photosynthesis and how it
works and how it is affected by influences from outside and
inside.
Bibliography:
Archibald, J (ed.) (2000) Second Language Acquisitions and
Linguistic Theory Oxford: Blackwell
Brown C (2000)The Interrelation between Speech Perception
and Phonological Acquisition from Infant to Adult. In: Archibald J
(ed.) (2000) Second Language Acquisitions and Linguistic
Theory Oxford: Blackwell pp 4 - 63
Kenworthy, J (1987)Teaching English Pronunciation Harlow:
Longman
Mertner (1920) Psychotechnischer Spracherwerb auf
mechanisch-suggestiver Grundlage, Mnchen: Verlag fr
zeitgeme Sprachmethodik
Stevick, E (1980) A Way and Ways. Teaching Languages.
Rowley Massachusetts: Newbury House
ihj October 2002
21
Im hoping to suggest here an integrated approach to lesson
planning for both trainees on initial training courses and
experienced teachers, which tries to reconcile the demands of
the coursebook syllabus with the needs of the students internal
syllabus, and with the needs of teachers to provide interesting,
relevant and focused lessons.
whichever approach to
lesson planning is
offered first, remains
dominant in trainees
minds
Having worked on several CELTA courses in recent months, Ive
been constantly faced with the dilemma of what to forefront in
the timetable; should it be lesson planning, language awareness,
classroom management, etc.? More specifically, with
approaches to lesson shapes and lesson planning, what should
come first? For example, some courses have begun with PPP
demonstrations, others have gone straight in with either task-
based or text-based lesson frameworks. What has been
relatively consistent, however, is that whichever approach to
lesson planning is offered first, that is the one which remains
dominant in trainees minds. Never has this been more evident
than on one course at the end of last year, when I received a
group of trainees in week three of a four week CELTA course who
were convinced that there was only one way to plan and stage a
lesson, even though they had been explicitly exposed to at least
three different alternatives by that time.
There are, of course, justifiable arguments in favour of many
different frameworks (and for the sake of variety, this is just as
well) - some of these have so many similarities, they are scarcely
in need of reconciling. What I hope to do here, however, is to
integrate the best features of some of them into yet another, but
perhaps more flexible, outline for lesson design. The result is a
framework which I have been using myself with increasing
regularity in recent months, and also one which has proved
accessible to trainees on an initial training course. In the latter
case, because they are receiving an initial framework which
incorporates many features of other approaches, these, when
introduced later, will then have something on which to hang, so
to speak.
To give you a quick overview of the framework first - sadly, there
are no nice mnemonics to go with this - its split into what the
teacher does before the lesson proactively, and what the
students do during the lesson where the teachers role is mainly
reactive.
The teacher - before the lesson - proactively:
Chooses a language point;
Thinks of a context;
Thinks of a task;
Finds / produces a text;
Analyses the language - the target or what might be
expected.
The students - during the lesson - teacher mainly reactive:
See / hear a model text;
Visualise (brainstorm);
Fluency writing;
Work on the text;
Language work;
Prepare task;
Performtask;
Reach an outcome;
Closure.
The teacher - after the lesson:
Makes notes.
To elaborate:
Before the lesson the teacher should proactively:-
1) Decide on the language point for the lesson. This can, and
probably should in many cases (school requirements,student
expectations, ready-made syllabus, etc.) be taken from the
coursebook.
ihj October 2002
The RP (Reactive - Proactive) Approach to
Lesson Planning
Mike Cattlin
After seven years in Poland as teacher, Director of Studies and Teacher Trainer, Mike has spent the last twelve months
working as a Freelance Teacher Trainer in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England and Poland, and also spent three
months as a Consultant Director of Studies and Teacher Trainer at a prospective new IH school in Indonesia. Hes now about
to start working as a Teacher Trainer at IH Budapest.
22
2) Think of a context where that language point occurs
naturally. If you cant think of a context where a piece of
language is used, the temptation is to ask, why teach it?
3) Think what you want the students to produce at the end of
the lesson - a task which is likely to produce natural use of a
chosen item, preferably something about themselves or of
relevance to themselves or their country or a current news
item, for example. Ideas for this can often be found by
looking at the end of a coursebook lesson.
the John OGroats
part of the lesson
This is what I call the John OGroats part of the lesson.
When planning proactively, I think of the students being at
Lands End at the beginning of the lesson and John OGroats
as the final destination. (For the uninitiated, these are
respectively the most southerly and northerly parts of the UK
mainland.) The place names dont matter, so long as you
have the idea of a journey with a beginning and an end and
with route points in between. What the students need to be
able to successfully achieve (John OGroats) are the
necessary items of language and skills - a route or, in other
words, the lesson stages. To what extent you follow this line
of thought is determined by how proactive you want to be.
An inexperienced trainee has the option of being more
proactive at this stage than an experienced teacher might
want to be.
4) Find a text or produce a text (oral or written) which shows the
language in use in a realistic context and which reflects what
you want the students to produce at the end - if you want
them to write an article about a popular place in their country,
show them one you have written or found. The text should
be rich in language, including loads of recycling and loads of
language the students may be ready to intake (as in
Krashens Comprehensible Input (i+1) Hypothesis), as well as
examples of what you have chosen as the target language in
natural use. A suitable, well-graded text may already be in
the coursebook or workbook; if not, there are other sources,
such as the Internet, but ultimately the teacher him/herself
would seem best able to frame a text of an appropriate level
and relevance to the group of learners, and if listening is the
chosen skill, a live listening from the teacher (alone or with a
colleague) is much more interactive and motivating. On a
recent CELTA course, I saw a trainee doing this, without
reference to a script in this case, and student interest and
involvement was really high from the outset, and they were
able to produce similar anecdotes themselves by the end of
the lesson.
Self-written texts can be of two types:
a. topic-driven - think of a topic and talk about it:
this usually contains loads of natural language use, and the
target language is whatever is thrown up naturally out of the
chosen text-type; also it is very easy to produce;
b. language-driven - think of the language point and write a
text specifically to suit it: this is often less natural; as
experiments with groups of trainees have demonstrated, it is
a lot harder and therefore takes a lot more time.
4) Analyse the language. If you have chosen a target area,
this is the time to prepare your Meaning-Pronunciation -
Form- (Appropriacy) (MPF(A)) presentation or clarification
(from Jim Scriveners ARC description); and to analyse
potential student problems with the task and the language in
the text, and prepare solutions for them.
During the lesson the teachers role is mainly reactive:
5) The model text can be introduced right at the beginning of
the lesson, particularly if it is oral rather than written. For
example, hearing the teacher talk about his/her favourite
holiday place will start the students thinking before they
visualise their own place. As with any listening exercise, a
focus question (a gist task) will increase motivation for
listening; some visuals shown in advance will help to
establish the context and generate interest; prediction from
the visuals or from some key words can also be useful before
listening to check. If there are any potentially problematic
words in the text which are not the focus for its use, it may be
as well to get them out of the way first. Dictating the words
for students to write in Know / Not sure / Dont know
columns, then giving them time to peer teach before filling in
any remaining gaps yourself, often works well and prevents
laborious pre-teaching of words they may already know.
Seeing the words in the real-life context provided by the
text will then help to consolidate meaning.
6) Students now visualise aspects of the final task according
to the teachers instructions. For example, with the favourite
holiday place task referred to above, the teacher would ask
the students to close their eyes, think of their favourite
holiday location, think about where it is, what the weather is
like there, when they went, why they like it, and other
questions which mirror the content of the model text. Some
of the questions should demand a need for, or natural usage
of, the target language. This is the first stage of preparing
for the final activity, so it has to be relevant to it. If the model
hasnt been presented already, this stage serves to generate
interest in, and to activate the students top-down
knowledge of the topic.
ihj October 2002
23
I have found visualisation particularly effective here, but
essentially, this stage is for brainstorming ideas, and other
methods can be used instead. My upper intermediate class
in Auckland got very used to visualising - if I said, OK in the
early part of the lesson, one Korean teenager would look at
me quizzically and say, Eyes closed?!
7) Students then open their eyes (hopefully, none will have fallen
asleep!) and with guidance from a repetition of the
visualisation questions (either orally or on the board), they
quickly make notes based on what they visualised - with a
time limit, this is fluency writing. The teacher can monitor
this and see how the students are using the target
language (target in inverted commas because there doesnt
have to be one!).
8) Now is the time to use the model text more fully, if it was
introduced in stage 6, or to introduce it for the first time, if not.
The text, be it a reading or a listening, should be used first as
a Vehicle of Information (TAVI), focusing on the message (gist
questions and possibly more detailed tasks), before being
used as a Linguistic Object (TALO), focusing on the language
used to convey the message. (TAVI/TALO - Johns and
Davies quoted in Ray Williams).
9) If deemed appropriate and necessary after monitoring the
fluency writing, the text can now be the focus of language
work (TALO), looking at the chosen area of lexis or grammar
or discourse. Alternatively, perhaps something else more
interesting and relevant has come up as a result of the
fluency writing or from the TAVI work - remember, there is a
lot more in the text than just the coursebooks target
language - focus on the natural style and other language of
the text as well! Try to incorporate guided discovery, using
examples from the text, or noticing tasks, or by highlighting
patterns (of words, grammar or organisation/discourse)
which students can then use in their own texts. Scott
Thornbury has suggested that tasks should allow students to
interpret the new language receptively and notice the gap,
notice how the use of a specific language form changes the
meaning.
This stage could represent the presentation of MPF(A) and
controlled practice components of a PPP lesson. I would
suggest the presentation part is more to meet learners
expectations, rather than effective teaching or learning, but
sometimes it will help. If the target language has been
focused on, however, some controlled practice will be
necessary - this is often well covered by the coursebook or
workbook.
In summary, this stage should cover the essential route
points of Lands End to John OGroats - the plan can include
flexibility, but the students have to cover the areas they need
to be able to do John OGroats successfully (which doesnt
necessarily mean exactly as the teacher / coursebook
wanted!), and the teacher has to react accordingly.
10) The students now have a model, they have their ideas noted
down, and they have some language which they can use if
they wish; now, its their turn to prepare their output, which
should mirror or at least resemble the input, i.e. the model
text. This can be individual work based on their notes in the
fluency writing, but some tasks will permit students to work in
pairs or groups to share ideas and prepare together; for
example, if there are students of the same nationality, they
could choose one holiday destination in their country to write
about. It is important at this stage that students know who is
going to listen to or read their output - the audience.
The teachers role now is to shape and stretch learner output,
focusing on the new language, yes, but also dealing with
many other points reactively; Merrill Swain has referred to
Output +1 - stretching learners language to make it more
sophisticated; Scott Thornbury talks about scaffolding
(scaffolding on what learners already know was a concept
put forward by Bruner), the joint construction of meaning
between parent and child or between teacher and learner.
This includes the use of real questions to clarify and expand
on what is being said; making student output better, but also
removing any ambiguities, challenging them to improve. Its
dealing with the language the students produce and the
language they need.
The aim is for the
students to say what
they want to say within
the given context
The aim is for the students to say what they want to say
within the given context (shades of Community Language
Learning here, but with the translation being from English into
better English) - if what they produce does not contain the
lessons target language, then does this really matter?
Language in the real world does not always work as one
expects; on one occasion when writing my own text about
my future with a supposed focus on future forms, I found I
had used more examples of past simple and present perfect
than anything else.
The task is meaning-driven, not form-driven, but we want the
learners to notice language, to notice the difference
ihj October 2002
24
between what forms they were going to use to express their
meanings and those forms which would express it better /
more clearly. If learners dont go through this process, there
is an increased danger they will fossilise at a basic level. As a
result of this stage, the students get a written record of new
language (or language which means something to them) in a
context which is not only real, but relevant to them. Because
the topic is now so familiar to them, they will have more time
to devote to accuracy. The time taken putting it in writing will
also benefit their accuracy; now its time to work on
improving their fluency - if oral production is in fact the way
the text would be used in reality.
11) Finally, we come to the task performance. Jane Willis has
described a task as a challenge to do something in order to
achieve an outcome. So, here, there needs to be an
outcome (for example, find a holiday destination you would
like to go to), and also an audience; in other words, who is
reading or listening and why? There should be a good
chance of success, because success will give a sense of
achievement and provide further motivation. There is high
student involvement in this stage with a lot of personalised
exchanges.
The problem I have faced is, if the performance is oral, is it
fluency? Or just reading aloud? Jeanette Barsdells
suggestion is to slowly remove the props, i.e. take their
papers away! But does this just make it a memory task?
Even if the answer is yes, does this really matter, so long as
they are conveying their meaning successfully? Feedback
can look at where their real-time production caused errors in
their accuracy. Or perhaps a very similar parallel task could
follow? Focus on the variables in the text and change them
to make for a more spontaneous exercise, or have a report
back stage where they tell a new partner what theyve found
out.
There has to be a task for the reader/listener (the audience)
here too, otherwise there is little desire to communicate - in
this way, if they cant understand what the speaker has
written/said, they can either
a) ask questions to clarify and negotiate the meaning,
showing the speaker that they havent been clear and
making them think how they could have expressed it
better - notice a gap, in other words;
or,
b) if the lack of understanding is caused by new language
which the teacher has fed in, there is an opportunity for
peer teaching of the new language.
Its a good idea for the spoken task to be repeated, the
rationale being that the more times a task is done, the less
attention students will devote to meaning (because this is
now increasingly fixed) and the more to how they express it.
If the task was a written one, then a similar one should follow
for the same reasons.
The hope, and expectation, is that, by now, the students can
produce some new language with reasonable degrees of
accuracy and fluency and so are better able to cope with
real-life communication in the topic areas, both intelligibly
and with reasonable speed.
12) Feedback with an initial focus on the task outcome - so
which holiday destination would most people like to go to
and why? Language feedback can follow, both positive and
negative, and with a chance to look at all aspects of the
language produced, not just the target area - language is
much more than a succession of these. Noticing what was
different in their output compared to that of others or the task
model is one valuable form of linguistic feedback.
13) Closure - this can be simply a well done, or a review of
what has been covered (a retrospective syllabus for the
students), or a quick game to consolidate some of the lexis
from the text perhaps, or the setting of homework from the
coursebook or workbook, this time to consolidate the
target language (and to show them their books are not
being ignored!).
The reactive stages of
the lesson are done
initially through a
demonstration lesson
At the end / after the lesson:
14) Make notes for the following lessons. If youve maintained a
vocab box on the board, store the words, phrases, chunks,
etc. in whatever way you prefer for recycling in the next or
subsequent lessons.
This may all look fairly complex, and I have perhaps
elaborated on some areas a little more than I would on an
initial training course. However, it was a pleasure to see the
penny drop for many trainees on the last course I did when
many aspects of this approach were presented to them.
Some trainees may have concerns about writing their own
material, although I think a bigger worry is the need to be
reactive - this can be quite intimidating. However, things
which come up in lessons that are too complex can easily be
deferred to another time - trainees are often happy to say
ihj October 2002
25
what is right, without necessarily being able to say on the
spot why it is right, and something else is wrong.
In terms of presenting the model to trainees on a course or to
in-service teachers, I take them through the pre-lesson
proactive stages one by one:
look in the coursebook youre going to use - choose any
language point from it;
brainstorm when you would use that language yourself -
feedback and choose one for the group;
how could that be turned into a task for students?;
in pairs, perform the task yourself - that becomes your model
text;
analyse the language and predict possible problems with
some solutions to them.
The reactive stages of the lesson are done initially through a
demonstration lesson, with a focus on receptive skills task-
types and possible activities for controlled practice becoming
topics for subsequent input sessions.
The framework may appear fairly rigid at first sight, but in
reality, there is flexibility. I used this framework largely, but not
exclusively, whilst teaching in Auckland recently, and the
results I thought were good; more importantly, the students
seemed happy and involved.
As with all things ELT, this is very much an evolving process.
If you experiment with it, or have any comments, please email
me at mcattlin@yahoo.co.uk
Bibliography:
Thornbury, Scott, 2001, Uncovering Grammar, Macmillan
Heinemann.
Barsdell, Jeanette, 2002, The Perfect Lesson?, workshop
notes.
Johns T. and Davies F. 1983, Text as a vehicle of information:
the classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign
language. Reading in a Foreign Language 1/1:1-19, quoted in
Williams, Ray, 1986, Top ten principles for teaching reading.
ELT Journal Volume 40/1. (OUP)
Thanks to:
Jeanette Barsdell (ALC, Auckland, NZ) for hours of discussions
and loads of ideas (to say nothing of the wine!);
Derrin Kent (IH Barcelona) for shaking me up!;
Scott Thornbury (IH Barcelona) whose writing and talks are
constant sources of mental provocation.
ihj October 2002
Getting Feedback a T.A. Way.
Mario Rinvolucri
Mario works for Pilgrims and edits Humanising Language Teaching, Pilgrims webzine for language teachers which you can
find at www.hltmag.co.uk His next book, Humanising Your Coursebook, comes out with ETpDelta in 2002. His first CDRom
was Mindgame, which you can see at www.clarity.com.hk.
In my work as a language teacher and teacher trainer I love
collecting thinking frames or filters or lenses within which or
through which I can look at my practice. An example of a frame/
filter or lens would be the NLP maxim that the map is not the
territory. This frame I find very useful in coping with the bizarre
ways (bizarre from within my map) other people sometimes react
to things I tell them. For example, this morning I told a friend that
I had come across a fascinating Chinese proverb: experience is
the comb nature gives the bald. I paused, and then asked Jean
what came up for her when she heard the words. She said: Oh
I immediately thought of my son and how worried he used to be
about going bald!
the map is not the
territory
My first reaction was a tinge of annoyance that she had picked
on the last word and not on the meaning of the whole
proposition. Then I thought Annoyance is no fun; Ill have more
fun if I encourage her to go down the son track - Ill have more
fun exploring the Jean mapping of the words than
trying to force her to go where I hoped she would go.
My self-management inner monologue and communicationally
effective conversation strategy came directly from using the NLP
maxim as an angle from which to view my friends thinking.
Entering the world of the other is much more interesting than
being stuck in your own.
A filter I have recently started using is one taken from Eric Bernes
Transactional Analysis and I have found it very useful for
analysing a range of situations as well as for collecting feedback
26
from my classes. The filter consists of examining any situation,
system or community in terms of these three variables:
Structure
Stimulation
Recognition
May I try an experiment with you?
Please choose a community you belong to like a chess club, a
tennis club, the school where you work or your family.
1. What kind of structure, explicit and implicit, does this
community provide you with? What internal structures
have you created within the organisational frame offered by
the community?
2. What levels of stimulation does this community provide you
with, at an emotional, technical, intellectual or spiritual level?
In the presence of the stimuli offered, how much is your own
creativity aroused? How much do you stimulate yourself in
this context?
3. Coming now to recognition, how much recognition do you
receive from superiors in the system, how much from peers
and what internal recognition do you offer yourself? (One of
the hallmarks of many depressions is the sick persons
inability to understand there can be anything good about
him/herself.)
It is sad that I am unlikely to ever hear the silent answers you
have given to these questions!
If I think of my own marriage (38 years) and apply the above filter
to it, this is roughly what comes up:
Structure: There is a vast web of routinised structures or
gestalten some of which I know about but many that I guess are
below my consciousness threshold. There are structures in time,
through the day, routines, sequences, there are mutual
aggression patterns,
there are discourse patterns, there are set patterns for dealing
with the outside world and so on.
I suspect that there are plenty of gestalten that were functional
and useful twenty years ago and which are no longer so today,
yet we both carry on within them, not properly noticing them.
Stimulation: Perhaps because my wife is a hugely inward
person with hectares of her thought out of range of speech, she
continues to surprise and amaze me. This onion has more layers
than I guessed might be there. Nearly 40 years has been too
short of get to the bottom of what she really thinks and feels, the
inner scapes she lives in, the melody of her being.
Recognition: On the surface we can often say pretty bad things
to and about each other, but at a deeper level, I respect and love
many things about her. I recognise that there is a strong overlap
in our belief systems, despite her overt Catholicism and my
declarative atheism.
the lighting system
offered illuminates the
territory in new and
unexpected ways
Re-reading the above analysis, it is clear that the area which is
most like an attic that needs unloading into a skip is the area of
structure. This is the bit that needs more thought, discussion
and then action. The usefulness of this type of filter is that it helps
you sort what you perceive into manageable categories and
then, maybe, do something practically beneficial about what you
find.
There are a large number of ways in which you can use this filter
in language teaching. I have suggested the frame to business
English students and asked them to analyse their department in
the light of it. They sometimes find themselves thinking new
thoughts because the lighting system offered illuminates the
territory in new and unexpected ways. The fact that sometimes
the thinking is new impels them to explore to the limit their ability
to self-express in English.
I have also introduced the frame halfway through a language or
teacher training course and then used it again on the last day of
the course, to help the students/trainees give a stimulating
shape to their feedback on the course.
I give an instruction of this sort:
Can you write a few sentences about how this course has been
for you in terms of the structure, stimulation and recognition that
I and the group have offered you?
Can you also think about your own structuring, self-stimulation
and self-recognition, please? Will 15 to 20 minutes be enough
time?
The rest of this article brings you some of the things mature, in-
set teachers have written at the end of short training courses:
School Owner: In my school Im afraid there is not enough
structure because I always thought that the teacher should have
some sort of freedom but I am not very happy with it. About
today, I think that stimulation was the strongest part of the
workshop, and I feel that I have experienced so many new ideas
today that it makes me feel happier with the new school year and
ihj October 2002
27
ready to tell the other teachers a lot of new things and share
ideas with them.
Teacher: Thank you very much for all your support, and for
making me feel more relaxed, although it has been a very long
day (8 clock hours).
My work in school has been based mostly on structure and
acknowledgement, and less on stimulation. Today I have learnt
that stimulation has its share and that is what I have to pay
attention to.
Teacher: Regarding stimulation I feel there has been plenty.
Continuous, interesting, effective and motivating activities made
me live the essence of this seminar.
There was a lack of structure, as if a topic sentence was never
heard when issues were initiated. This made me relate various
elements together, thus getting confused because not
everything was related and to be put under the same umbrella.
So, if the change of subject had been clearer from the beginning
I wouldnt have lost time and focus trying to understand the
relations and connections, thus getting the most out of the
speakers words.
Teacher: My participation in the various practices proposed in
the seminar helped me a lot, especially when I was feeling that
the trainer was really interested in my contribution, which he
showed clearly with his words and his behaviours (gestures and
voice).
Your interest and gentle encouragement help people be
themselves, expose their thoughts, share.
Teacher: A lightly structured two days in that there was a
timetable but that each section of the day was changeable,
although it was obviously structured in the trainers head as he
clearly led the proceedings.
Recognition from peers and the trainer was slight, except on a
few occasions, but this was a great opportunity for self-
recognition.
Stimulation on a high level throughout the two days both from
the trainer and peers.
School owner: the seminar was well structured and I was able
to follow and take notes through the different steps. I was also
given a chance to get up, to communicate and to share ideas.
Stimulation: The trainer was able to make me think through
different activities and during this process I was continually
thinking of how I can deal with each of my teachers. So their
faces were popping up in my mind.
Acknowledgement: I felt happy with myself that some of these
activities and discussion show me that I do some things round
the school in a right way. I also told some of the people around
that I liked their ideas, if I did.
My own feedback as trainer: Structure has been there in my
mind but I have no idea as to how each person has received that
attempt at structure and then been able to re-structure it in their
own terms.
I have been aware of warm recognition and found myself both
consciously and spontaneously feeling and voicing appreciation
for others in the group.
I do, on occasion, get
over-stimulated
The stimulation I have received has been strong but not
overwhelming. (I do, on occasion, get over-stimulated)
And so, to conclude, I am aware:
that I am a novice in dealing with Eric Berne T.A. thinking
that I am just beginning to explore the STR/STI/REC frame
that this is more complex structure than I first imagined
that I cannot yet satisfactorily break down any of the three
variables into their sub-parts. To do this would pin down and
concretise each area.
If you can help me in any of the above, please e-mail me on
mario@pilgrims.co.uk, or weave your thoughts into an article you
might wish to contribute to this magazine or to Humanising
Language Teaching, to be found at www.hltmag.co.uk, which I
edit.
ihj October 2002
28
This is an account of a workshop held during the Recognition
conference. The theme of the conference was Recognition and
our workshop was about moments in learning which provoked
either an ah-ha or hmmm kind of response. We approached
the topic from our backgrounds in The Silent Way and Neuro-
Linguistic Programming.
Our aims for the workshop were to:
1 Discover how people went about a couple of short word
based problem solving activities.
2 Consider how much of the process seemed to happen in the
conscious mind and how much happened outside our
consciousness.
3 Look at one way of mapping the structure of these
processes.
4 Emphasise the importance of allowing students time for
moments of recognition.
5 Discuss how we can encourage awareness to play a key role
in our students learning experiences.
Activity One.
This involved solving a nine-letter anagram recorded from a
television programme. There was a time limit of thirty seconds
and a clock ticked out each second accompanied by suspense-
building music.
decoding an anagram
was not an intrinsically
motivating task
None of the participants were able to decode the anagram in the
time available. They discussed their reactions to the task and the
strategies they had used. There was a strong reaction by some
people who said they found the ticking clock, music and time
limit intrusive and distracting. Other people commented that the
time limit narrowed the activity and did not allow for enough
feeling of success in a problem solving activity. A minority added
that, for them, decoding an anagram was not an intrinsically
motivating task. One person, for example, said that his strategy
was to look at the anagram, look for possible combinations of
letters (like un or ness), start to feel frustrated if he couldnt find
any or couldnt make them get into any logical sequence, feel
worse and then give up. When he could solve an anagram it
would happen automatically and he was not aware of how he
did it. By listening to strategies used by other students, this
person could introduce more choice and flexibility to his
strategies.
Other strategies discussed included separating the vowels and
consonants onto different sides of a piece of paper and then
moving them about to find combinations. A number of others
looked for likely letter combinations such as un, inter or ing
and tried to cobble the other letters around them. Others tried
writing the letters in different orders. A few tried saying various
combinations of sounds to themselves. One of us suggested
writing the letters in a circle to break the original linear
sequencing. This proved to be a popular and useful additional
strategy for solving the next anagram.
Some people gave up quickly, others worked to the last second
available. Several people reported that they thought they had the
answer but on checking found that it was not correct, but were
unable to stop going back to the incorrect answer.
Becoming aware of exactly where we get stuck can be an
important learning experience as it gives us the choice to change
or add to our current pattern.
Activity Two
Participants were invited to solve another anagram from the
same programme. (sissesnob)
1
. This time we did not play the
music or have the clock ticking and one of the participants was
able to solve the puzzle in about ten seconds. He reported
finding the answer almost immediately but doubted it and went
back to check. How did it feel to solve the anagram? The person
who solved it said he experienced a somewhat watered down
ah-ha as he was not entirely sure he had got it correct
ihj October 2002
Ah-ha and Hmmm - Those Magic Moments.
Judith Baker and Simon Marshall
Judith Baker is a freelance teacher and teacher trainer. Her main interest is in how we learn and this led her to find out more
about Neuro-Linguistic Programming. She now works mainly as an NLP trainer mostly with language teachers.
Simon Marshall is a freelance Teacher/Teacher Trainer. He is especially interested in etymology and the role of awareness in
teaching and learning. He works for Pilgrims in Canterbury.
1 Bossiness in case you were wondering!
29
immediately. More spontaneous ah-has are typically
characterised by strong physiological responses.
Other participants reported using some of the strategies pooled
during the first discussion and said that they found it useful
having additional strategies. A couple of the participants were
asked to describe to the group the strategies they had used to
solve (or not solve) the anagrams. Maps of these strategies were
written up. We asked participants to think about exactly what it is
we do when we engage in an activity like this.
The strategies were annotated using an NLP mapping which
enabled us to note the processes in terms of whether they were
visual, auditory or kinaesthetic and whether they happened
inside the head or body or outside it (internal or external).
Sounding combinations of letters aloud would count as an
external auditory strategy, whereas imagining the letters
rearranged counts as an internal visual strategy.
The NLP thinking behind this is that whenever we do something,
we activate a combination of representational systems (seeing,
hearing, feeling) to varying degrees. It is possible to map these
and alter them if they are not working as well as we want, or
duplicate them in other situations when we are looking for more
successful strategies. For example, someone trying to spell a
word, is unlikely to be successful without using at least some
visual strategies. Similarly, in English at least, it is unlikely that
students will be able to achieve reasonable pronunciation
without using strategies which involve a lot of listening (auditory)
strategies.
spontaneous ah-has
are typically
characterised by strong
physiological responses
Activity Three
We asked people to think of words which contain the sound /:/
after being given definitions. e.g. An adjective which means
usual, remarkable (extraordinary); A verb which means to
encourage fiercely (exhort); An adjective which means arrogant
and proud (haughty). Once again, the group discussed how they
went about arriving at their answers. As expected, many more
auditory strategies were used for this activity
Activity Four
This was taken from a series of Silent Way inspired sentence
level exercises from Grammar Games by Mario Rinvolucri. The
teacher writes I am a hotel on the board. Students can come to
the board as inspiration strikes and change the meaning of the
sentence by adding one word only at a time. So, for example, a
student might write I am a hotel manager. After they write this
sentence, the other students read it and agree that it is an
acceptable sentence. Another student then comes to the board
and writes e.g. I am not a hotel. The class accepts or disallows
all the following sentences according to whether they are
grammatical or not.
All the while, the teacher remains as detached as possible from
the activity, leaving students to decide who will write the next
sentence and which sentences are acceptable or not. This
activity is true to the Silent Way principle of encouraging students
to test and reject their own hypotheses through experimentation
within a less judgmental classroom environment. From an NLP
view, it develops awareness of whether we as students pay more
attention to our own judgements (internal referencing) or the
judgements of others (external referencing).
Conciousness
In NLP, something is described as being conscious when it is in
a present moment of awareness making everything else at that
moment unconscious (or out of awareness). Mostly when we
try to learn something, we use our conscious awareness, but
when we have learnt it or are doing something at which we are
already skilled, we do much of it outside our conscious
awareness using well formed habits and strategies. This is why it
is often hard to describe how to do something we do well. The
activity has become so automatic we have forgotten the
strategies we use. The NLP practice of modelling, discovering
the structure of those skills, allows us to out these successful
strategies, thereby making them available to others and to
ourselves in other learning situations.
A central tenet of Gattegnos Silent Way is that only awareness
is educable. Expressed more concretely this means that one is
only able to learn something when one is ready to do so. Once
awareness is opened up, then, and only then, is true learning -as
an immediate, conscious act - possible. The role of the Silent
Way teacher is to force awareness by setting tasks and
challenges that require constructive effort on the learners behalf.
Learners are encouraged to test and reject their own hypotheses
through experimentation within a less judgmental classroom
environment.
The Silent Way teacher informs the learner if they have, for
example, pronounced an ed ending correctly, without
encumbering them with either condemnation or praise. The
tyranny of the correct answer is eschewed and substituted by
the continual process of striving to learn.
ihj October 2002
30
The Silent Way is educative in that its practitioners attempt to
lead out (the literal meaning of educate) from the learner rather
than try to spoon-feed well intentioned but haphazardly directed
information.
The Silent Way demands that the learner builds their own inner
criteria, thereby becoming more autonomous and less
dependent upon the teacher.
The Silent Way is one of elicitation rather than instruction; goals
are achieved at the learners own pace, as they transform their
time for their experience.
Gattegno demanded that The teacher works on the student
while the student works on the language. By doing this the
pinnacle aim of the Silent Way is achieved, namely, the
subordination of teaching to learning. Overteaching can block
learning, merely giving the teacher the impression that the
students are doing something and that because of this doing
then they will learn.
Recognition and emergent awareness require time and space.
Just as NLP encourages the learner to notice and take stock of
how they process information most effectively, the Silent Way
asks the learner to register moments of awareness.
An Ah-ha moment is that magic moment when you notice the
process; hmmm is the one when you reflect on what you have
noticed.
Learners whose teachers can give them these moments, will
make a great leap into a higher level of learning consciousness -
the awareness of the awareness.
ihj October 2002
31 ihj October 2002
Growth
The Affiliate Network (officially: the International House World
Organisation) is going from strength to strength. We are
continuing to grow worldwide, and open new countries to the IH
approach to learning and training.
In the last year new affiliates have joined us in Saudi Arabia,
Vietnam, S.Korea, and Malta as well as the countries in which we
are already represented. The newest school is IH Naples, which
is opening October 2002 and more schools are waiting in the
pipeline. Each school has to undergo a rigorous inspection in
order to be considered for affiliation, and many applications are
not successful. But we are able to find a few schools each year
that are prepared to live up to the IH quality standards and are
keen to contribute to the development of IH worldwide.
Whats New?
Whats new in the network? We are continuing to develop new
teaching and training materials to provide extra support for
schools. This year we have produced several new products,
such as the IH DOS handbook, a CDROM of Business Tasks, a
guide to teaching exam classes, and an update to the computer
lab software provided to all schools. In the pipeline are new
products such as a Language Awareness Training Pack for
newly-qualified teachers, a guide to running Theatre Groups for
YL students, the IH Academic Framework Handbook (for
teachers and DOSes).
One of our main development tasks is to update the IH Quality
Standards system to ensure that our inspections are rigorous,
objective and based on clear criteria. Our standards handbook is
being updated to ensure it is harmonised with the
EAQUALS/Council of Europe standards, and there will be new
Training Workshops in early for 2003 for IH inspectors.
Each year we organise several conferences and workshops, and
this year we are adding a new one - the IH ICT Workshop. The
goal of this workshop is to provide support and innovation in the
area of educational technology, both in the classroom and the
self-access centres. Our first workshop (Oct 31-Nov 3) will be
held in London and will feature a number of affiliate staff
presenting new materials and sharing their CALL, Internet and E-
learning experience.
IHs 50th Birthday
Next year, 2003, is the 50th anniversary of the founding of IH by
John and Brita Haycraft, and the annual Directors Conference
will be held in Cordoba, the home of the original school. To
celebrate the 50th anniversary there will be a wide range of
events worldwide, including an IH Day in October 2003 to mark
the anniversary of the first classes. More details will be available
later this year on our website, www.ihworld.com.
Get involved
We are looking for new ideas and developments that will provide
support to all our schools, through our online Resources Bank. If
you have some teaching or training development ideas that you
would like us to consider commissioning, please get in touch
with us at: affiliates@ihlondon.co.uk
Whats Going On In The IHWO
Michael Carrier Director IHWO
At the centre of the IHWO are three small offices up four
extremely high flights of stairs (no lift, so everyone is very fit).
These were the maids bedrooms when this building was
designed as the private home of an eighteenth century Duke and
Duchess whose names escape me at the moment. Concern for
the physical wellbeing of their employees was not uppermost in
the thoughts of the builder: its freezing in winter, boiling in
summer and very high up at all times. We overlook Piccadilly and
Green Park though you have to stand on a chair and peer
through the skylight to see anything. We know Buckingham
Palace is there: sometimes the wind wafts the sound of the band
changing the Guard across the tree-tops. Unlike the Duke and
Duchess, IH looks after its people; we have air conditioners and
heaters and theres only one thing missing in the fridge: a bottle
of wine.
We exist above and alongside IH London in a symbiosis which
has many advantages to both parties. There is the Directors
office whence Michael issues a stream of new ideas and fizzing
energy; the admin office where Nadia organises - guess what -
admin and printers and designers and the web site, and
Susanna writes emails to everybody and edits the amazing
materials IH people write for eventual publication and distribution
to the schools.
The Recruitment Service team is the one most teachers, DOSes
and Directors have to deal with and as their names are familiar, it
seemed a good idea to let you know a little bit more about them.
Lucy does the interviews - many of you will have met her - and
matches candidates with jobs; she needs inexhaustible funds of
patience and good humour. She and Alex and Hilary - the
summer team - juggle supply and demand (everybody wants to
work in Italy, right?) air tickets, contracts and visas and never
drop one - as all of you who were recruited through the office can
testify. Things can and do go wrong: when the email goes down
for several days in any given country - and its always the one
where somebody really needs to finalise an appointment
urgently; when the teacher wont be allowed in to their country of
choice without a medical certificate signed in triplicate and a visa
which had to be queued up for in the rain for several hours and
the Royal Mail has sent the relevant documents to another
International House in North London which has nothing to do
with us. But they keep their cool - even during the heat-wave we
had at the end of this summer.
Isabel deals with initial requests for work and keeps all the
records in order as well as helping with updating the website; she
comes from Durango a village near Bilbao. Shes been in the UK
fourteen years and shes been with IH since last January. Shes
the one who organises trips to see Flamenco dance.
inexhaustible funds of
patience and good
humour
Come and see us next time youre in London: youll be very
welcome - especially if you bring a bottle of wine.
32 ihj October 2002
Whats Going On In The IHWO Office
Lucy Horsefield at her desk - behind her is the office shared info
list - look carefully: you may see your name.
Isabel Lubeiro taking a brief break from
databases and the web.
There are a number of highly influential and revered names in this
business; those who write coursebooks, those who devise new
teaching methodologies, trainers, linguists, managers and
directors. People who influence the way we teach and people
who influence the way we think we should teach until we enter
the classroom and somehow decide to stick to the tried and
trusted methods. But these people arent the most important
people in TEFL. They dont bring in the customers to our school
or help newly qualified staff cope with the stress of a full time
teaching load or look after homesick teachers in times of need.
There are people who are invaluable to any school and who
enable it to evolve and, hopefully, expand, bringing ideas and
enthusiasm and asking for nothing in return. At the end of the last
two years I have written a newsletter for our teachers, students,
directors and owner, thanking people for what they have done,
ensuring that their efforts are recognised. They have all been
grateful for such recognition and the knowledge that their efforts
have been noticed and appreciated. Now I feel that recognition
on a much wider scale, through the pages of the IH Journal, is
also deserved because, if we dont recognise and appreciate
their efforts then, no matter how many IT classrooms, training
centres, conferences and self-access centres we proudly fund,
our schools are doomed to contract, wither and ultimately fail
because the ideas, energy and enthusiasm will dry up and
without them the rest is worthless. You can learn English from a
computer or set of cassettes.
The idea for this article, though, was really inspired by something
that happened a couple of days ago, during induction week here
at IH Opole. Two of our second year teachers came to me having
just completed an IHCYL at the Wroclaw Training Centre. They
knew from experience how difficult they had found teaching
younger learners when they first came to us and how grateful
they were to Alison Rogers, our YL co-ordinator who gave
them so much support and encouragement and who created
and planned a series of YL input sessions for those unable to
take an official YL course (in effect the entire new teaching staff).
So these two teachers, Laura Britchford and Liz Copley took
me to one side: Were really worried about the new teachers.
We want to do as much as we can to help them. We want to run
Alisons YL sessions starting as soon as possible and to give
them as much support as we can. Not, Well run some input
sessions if you give us more money/less hours: just a pure,
selfless desire to help less experienced colleagues through the
potential nightmare of YL classes.
And then I thought of Ed Lowczowski, who spent the summer
e-mailing me about new ideas for getting student information
onto databases so we can make report writing much more
efficient and easier for teachers. Not his job at all, certainly not
during the summer holidays, but something he wanted to do to
make life a little less fraught for everyone here. Something which
he spent many hours of his own time working on, just as he has
spent hours and hours on resource development, storage and
cross referencing.
And its not just teachers. The admin staff here are all wonderful,
it has to be said, but Ania Ciesla is one of the main reasons why
teachers in Opole feel so welcome and secure when first arriving
here. Whether she is meeting them at the station at 11pm,
staying on late in school waiting for phone calls, accompanying
teachers to doctors, dentists or hairdressers, booking tables in
restaurants or simply going out with teachers socially, she is
always friendly, cheerful and the best ambassador the school,
and indeed, Poland, has ever had.
33 ihj October 2002
Who Are The Most Important People In ELT?
Rod Fricker
Rod Fricker has worked at IH Opole for the last 8 years and as DoS for the last four. Working in an unknown city in a country
that many teachers didnt plan on going to when they entered the profession has made Rod acutely aware of the need to
really look after teachers from before they have even been recruited to when they leave. The same applies to students in this
increasingly competitive business. Therefore much of his time is devoted to ideas that make people feel wanted and
appreciated and part of a team - not just employees and customers.
The teaching team at IH Opole - in their amazing T-shirts -
generously designed and bought by David Nicholson
34
Well, maybe David Nicholson was the best ambassador the
school ever had. In four and a half years in Opole he devoted his
whole life to the school, to the teachers and to the students.
From the minute teachers arrived in Opole he was looking after
them, entertaining them, making sure they felt at home and part
of the team. No other Exams AdoS has included a pack of mints
in the invigilators packs, no other organiser of a school sports
event has ever turned up with a set of team shirts for all teachers.
No conversation club, pantomime, cabaret, football match, quiz
or debate will ever be quite the same again now that David has
gone. So what? I hear you say. We have many people like this
in our school. Why should these five teachers get their names in
the IH Journal? Which is exactly the reason they should get a
mention in the Journal. Yes, every school has the social person,
the meeter and greeter, the ideas person, the shoulder to cry on,
the dependable one, the volunteer, the responsibility taker. But
how many times have you read anything about what they have
done for their school? More importantly, perhaps, how many
times have they felt that their efforts and initiatives have been
appreciated or even noticed? Imagine your job as a DoS or
Director, if they werent there. I think it is high time that we made
a little bit of an effort in return. They are, after all, the most
important people in ELT.
ihj October 2002
Using News and The Guardian Weekly in
Class A Chance To Win Some Money!
Max de Lotbinire
Max de Lotbinire is editor of Learning English, the Guardian Weeklys ELT section, www.guardianweekly.co.uk
There are very good arguments for using fewer, and not more,
authentic materials in class. Teachers should leave their armfuls
of props, pictures - and in this case, news sources - at the door
of their classroom, step purposefully across the threshold and
shut the real world out. You should either be able to find
enough spontaneous material among the group of people you
are going to spend the next 45 minutes with - their loves, hates,
interests, hopes and fears - or everyone concerned would be
better off if you turn to the next page in the coursebook and get
on with it.
The real world can also be a dangerous place. ELT publishers
who like to put extracts from newspapers in their coursebooks
know to their cost that even the most innocuous looking article
can carry unseen meaning that will insult or alienate some
segment of their global market. And who needs a heated
argument over politics or religion anyway, even if it does bring
verbal cross fire from normally silent corners of your classroom?
So when is it a good idea to use news and news sources like the
Guardian Weekly in class? This is the question we would like IH
teachers and students to help us answer. The Guardian Weekly,
in collaboration with the International House World Organisation,
is launching a consultation exercise that we hope will be
something between action research and a reader competition.
We would like you to show us why and how you use news to
teach, and the advice, activity ideas and observations that we
collect from you will be put together to provide an online
reference for other teachers. This will be put up on the
Guardians TEFL website and IHs Affiliates Network site
www.ihworld.com and updated as your contributions come in.
Everyone who contributes will also have the chance to win one
of five free subscriptions to the Guardian Weekly and the very
best entry, judged by IH teacher trainers in London, will be
awarded a prize of 100 in June 2003.
when is it a good idea
to use news?
Once a month for the next nine months we will be sending one
free copy of the Guardian Weekly to all schools in the IH Affiliates
network. The copies will be addressed to the DoS who will make
sure that they get into your schools resource centre or library -
if you dont start seeing the GW there by the end of October you
know who to complain to. We are also sending flyers and
posters to remind staff and students to look out for the paper.
While we are interested to know how the content of the
Guardian Weekly is useful for teachers, the scope of this
exercise is wider than just this newspaper. We want to start with
the basics - how interested are your students in news and
current affairs issues and what kind of role do they have in your
teaching and their learning? For example, you might have ideas
for activities based on the topic of News that you and your
students have developed.
One of the advantages of news is that students can take the
lead in researching and collecting material. Whether they want to
35 ihj October 2002
compare local news sources with international websites, weigh
up the relative merits of TV and print news reporting or dissect
the editing process to determine what is relevant news to
them, the source materials are all around them and you can tell
us what they choose to use and why.
This kind of research will often start with sources in learners own
languages, so how do they and you make the transition to news
in English? Why do they want to access news in English and
what value does it have for them? The obvious answer to these
questions is that they want to know more about the culture and
workings of an English-speaking country, and compare it with
their own, but what kind of cultural awareness is going on here?
And you might want to use news texts as the basis for reading
and writing activities. It may be authentic, but again, how
relevant is it? If there werent a lot of questions we wouldnt be
launching this exercise, but we feel its time to test some of our
assumptions about news.
So, start sending in your lesson plans and ideas. If you want to
send classroom activities based on items from the Guardian
Weekly include the issue date and page number from the top of
the page and the headline and writers name. Most useful will be
generic activity ideas that other teachers can apply and adapt,
so keep the aims of the activity clear and the instructions
concise. More general observations about using news will need
to be put in context - who are your students? where are they
etc? - and keep focused on specific issues that will inform other
teachers. We welcome as many contributions as you care to
make, although this wont improve your chances of winning a
free subscription. As well as posting your contributions up on the
web, I will report back to the IH Director of Studies conference
in London in January on the progress so far and we are planning
special articles on the competition in Learning English, the
Guardian Weeklys regular ELT section, and the IH Journal in
2003.
In case you havent seen the Guardian Weekly before, it is a
weekly digest of world news and currents affairs coverage,
features and reviews, from the UKs Guardian and Observer
newspapers, the Washington Post and Le Monde (translated
into English). We feel it adds up to some of the best journalistic
writing in the world, plus news photos and cartoons, edited for
a global readership, but well let you and your students be the
judges of that.
Send your contributions to Guardian Weekly Competition,
International House World Organisation, 106 Piccadilly, London
W1J 7NL. Or by e-mail (subject: Guardian Weekly Competition)
to: IHJournal@ihlondon.co.uk including your name, school
address, title, and contact phone and email address. To be
eligible for the first prize of 100 and the runner-up prizes of five
free one-year subscriptions to Guardian Weekly, we must receive
your contributions by no later than the end of June 2003.
Edited contributions will be posted on the Guardian Unlimited
TEFL site (http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/) and IH Affiliates
network site www.ihworld.com For more information about the
competition go to the Guardian Weeklys website:
www.guardianweekly.com/internationalhouse
Schools will receive one copy of the Guardian Weekly, including
the Learning English section, once a month between October
2002 and June 2003. We are also making available free
subscriptions to the email version of the Guardian Weekly,
between October 2002 and June 2003. This is a text-only
version of the newspaper. To set up your personal subscription
to the email version of the Guardian Weekly, send an email with
IH Competition in the subject line to weekly@guardian.co.uk
including your name, school name and address and personal
email address.
Have fun and good luck!
Working In English Language Teaching
Francesca Target
(Kogan Page Publishing Ltd 2002)
Ever wondered to yourself why you stay in this game? Why you
havent been tempted to head off into a recruitment/ publishing /
lottery sunset, leaving endless discarded photocopies of Find
Someone Whos circling in your wake. I have, but this little book
has some reminders why we stay where we do, for decades
some of us, and a lot more useful stuff besides.
Designed primarily for the TEFL-curious, theres a questionnaire at
the beginning Is ELT right for you? and a list of quotes from
teachers working abroad and in the UK, on the skills and qualities
necessary to enjoy the job. I felt that there were rather too many
quotes and some names come up so often, you start to wonder if
youve not met these people before in some far-flung staffroom.
In much the same vein as Teaching English Abroad (but without
the country by country reference sections), there is some very
practical advice on matters like getting your first ELT job abroad,
private tutoring and teaching young learners, but these are dealt
with in greater depth in this little book. There is an informative
chapter on initial qualifications in ELT, containing several
cautionary tales for those considering embarking on the CELTA.
Heres Alex: It was very tough. We were warned at the beginning
that it would be tough, but I dont think any of us were expecting
it to be quite that hard.
Things dont stop there though. The following chapter focuses on
specializing and moving up the ladder, with entries on the DELTA
and doing an EFL related MA, becoming a DoS and so on.
I was rather taken with the inclusion of a life after TEFL related
careers section listing alternatives (lottery winning aside) such as
lexicography, dyslexia support, translating and IT training as well
as the more conventional moves into ELT recruitment etc - a
realistic, if rather unexpected, addition in a book for those entering
the profession.
Take Sarah looking round at her fellow teachers and thinking
Hang on a minute. The ones in their 40s dont look very happy. I
dont want to get any older in it. Probably time for her to escape.
Indeed, the real beauty of this book is its unwaveringly honest
emphasis, both with the first person advice format and the no
nonsense tone. For example the entry on teaching privately has a
factors to consider list, starting somewhat bossily: You need to
be sensible about this and to think about the following.... But the
thing is that it raises precisely the kind of questions, (eg Will you
charge them for your time if they are late? and Are you prepared
to go to the students home?) I wish Id sussed before starting out.
As the book continues, it becomes increasingly like having an
experienced yet enthusiastic friend giving you pointers and useful
contacts but who wont object to being stuffed in your suitcase
when you do make the big leap. This friend is definitely acting in
your best interests too, with warnings about being exploited
looming large alongside its reminders of the joys of our choice of
work.
Its the ideal book for anyone of any age pondering a start in our
industry. One which I might be temped to furnish with a copy of a
pay slip as a book mark but thats not the point is it? We all know
no one teaches for its financial rewards.
Last word to Ricky When you get a class that gets it, its
fantastic.
Im with you mate!
(Claire Walsh)
The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary
The Oxford Collocations Dictionary For Students of
English
The Oxford Students Dictionary of English
The Oxford Wordpower Dictionary For Learners of
English,
(OUP)
I wonder if theres a collective term for a bunch of dictionaries?
Well, just such a selection has recently been published by OUP.
As might be expected, they are, without exception, high quality
and full of added value bonuses - CD-ROMs, grammar sections
and one of them even comes complete with exercises and
answers!
The Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary has long been a
favourite of students and is a sure-fire recommendation from
their teachers. Its so user friendly - Im sure students wont be
the only ones to benefit from the phonemes that appear as
footnotes on each page! Almost every definition is accompanied
by a useful and pertinent example sentence. Though at first
glance the dictionary seems a little heavy and is rather densely
36 ihj October 2002
Book Reviews
37 ihj October 2002
written, it does have a good indexing system. The text is broken
up into three vibrant colour sections. Liberally scattered
throughout are black and white diagrams and boxes containing
appropriate information on grammatical points and false friends,
etc. It also functions as a reference book for more than just
vocabulary, having a section labelled study page which
comprises sample letters, CVs and information about the use of
phrasal verbs, for example.
The Oxford Collocations Dictionary for Students of English is
aimed at Upper-Intermediate to Advanced students, though I
think that writers at all levels would find it serviceable. It is
extremely well laid out, easy on the eye, organised into bullet
points that relate to adjectives, phrases, prepositions, etc. There
is a useful self-study section, organised into topics, which
teachers could adapt for use in class. Considering that such a
high percentage of English is made up of collocations, for which,
unfortunately, there are few rules, I believe this dictionary to be
invaluable both for improving language dramatically and for
honing understanding of it.
The final two dictionaries, The Oxford Students Dictionary of
English and The Oxford Wordpower Dictionary For Learners of
English, both complete with useful CD-ROMs, are rather more
compact and portable volumes. Their layout is great. The two-
colour printing facilitates the finding of words - these are written
in blue and definitions (incidentally which use a vocabulary of only
2500 words) are in black. Each word is clearly marked as
countable, transitive or intransitive, etc. Both of the volumes
abound with attractive drawings and also they have interesting
notes in boxes throughout. The Oxford Students Dictionary of
English is to be recommended to IELTS students, and to other
exam classes as it is ideal for those going on to study other
subjects at an English or American university.
So, to sum up, these form a valuable selection of dictionaries -
each having a distinct purpose, together they dovetail into a very
comprehensive reference library.
(Pascale Mettam)
Chit Chat 1
(OUP 2002)
Chit Chat 1 is the first of a two-stage series of English
coursebooks for primary-aged learners. An activity book,
teachers book, cassettes and flashcards accompany each
stage. The target age is approximately 7-9 years.
Competition is tough in this age range: publishers are launching
coursebooks with accompanying CD-ROMs, puppets and
videos. Yet Chit Chat is relatively simple and fresh while still being
a comprehensive resource bank for different teaching situations.
So what gives Chit Chat any special appeal?
Certainly the course consultant Derek Strange is a well-
established name in this area of coursebook writing. But lets
examine the coursebook according to three important criteria to
bear in mind when planning a young learner syllabus:
Is it visually stimulating?
Does it provide kinesthetic activities?
Would it be considered fun and promote a positive attitude to
learning English?
Visually it is appealing. For example, the language and activities
revolve around three groups of characters suitable for this age: a
teenage pop group called The Superstars, some different
coloured cartoon bugs and various comic strip characters. All
are bright and life-like and also appeal to childrens capacity for
fantasy and humour, eg in the comic strip adventure a child
encounters a friendly monster with a pet dinosaur.
These sets of characters provide variety of context while also
developing learning in a systematic way, including revising
language through the on-going comic strip story and activities to
encourage independent learning such as a D.I.Y. (i.e. colour it
yourself) picture dictionary. The Superstars also take part in a
game show and other language games, which help students
develop cognitive skills such as memorising or deducing
language.
In terms of lay-out the coursebook is also easy to use whilst
being bright and attractive for children. In addition the activity
book is colour-coded so the students book and activity book are
not easily confused by children just learning to read.
In addition to the coursebook, the pack of related flashcards are
an invaluable tool for presenting and reviewing language
memorably. Another visual asset are the word bricks which make
up a wall for sentence building in the activity book and these
could be blown up and displayed on the class wall to give this
activity more prominence in the classroom.
Is there a hands-on methodology for kinesthetic learners? Chit
Chat professes to be topic-based although there is still quite an
emphasis on structure. However, it introduces plenty of games,
songs, dances and action chants and has teacher-friendly
guidelines to setting these activities up. It also has quite a
modern feel, so a body rap presents the imperative and parts of
the body (shake your hands, kick your legs!) and a genuine
motivation to move!
A distinctive feature of Chit Chat is the karaoke-type approach
to singing and reading presented on the cassette. This provides
first a model for learners to hear and then a practice version to
enable children to practise small chunks of language. This also
integrates pronunciation work by encouraging students to
express, for example, the emotions presented in a story such as
being surprised, scared or friendly. One problem with this
karaoke format might be that it becomes a bit tired by the end
of the course but then the teacher can pick and choose if they
feel things are getting ritualistic.
Additional topics include some art projects such as making cards
or a Christmas decoration. These may not always be feasible in
large classes or classes with few resources but they are offered
as optional topics.
All these activities enable learners to communicate purposefully
and allow for different learning styles whether the children are
more auditory or physical learners. They also help children
appreciate other cultures and customs through the development
of a topic - for example, Halloween.
Are we having fun yet? Well I think so, as far as language
learning in a classroom for an eight-year old goes. There is a fairly
balanced diet of language, although I think it is fair to say, Chit
Chat is quite eurocentric. Thus it is less accessible to, say, Asian
students, who could not relate so easily to some lexis such as is
found in the unit on food. So noodles and rice would have a
much higher surrender value in Hong Kong than cereal and
yoghurt.
Other attractive aspects are that children are able to see their
progress through self-evaluation and review tasks (these,
incidentally make convenient homework tasks). Also the delivery
of the songs and activities is realistically paced to encourage
success and there is a motivating end-product - a certificate
certifying that level 1 of Chit Chat has been completed and the
child is a superstar!
However, often the fun part for the teacher is having preparation
time cut to a minimum. This would be the case if the language
school in question were always to buy the entire course (i.e.
coursebook, activity book, poster and flashcards). Unfortunately
this is not often the case, so how much less fun this would be if
creating flashcards and supplementary activities were down to
the teacher. It seems, though, that at least OUP are coming up
with their part of the deal and Chit Chat is fairly stand-alone
material, whilst also providing a sound and interesting framework
for primary courses.
(Nancy Wallace)
Intercultural Activities
Simon Gill & Michaela Cakov, (Oxford Basics, OUP 2002)
Intercultural Business Communication
Robert Gibson, (Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers,
OUP 2002)
Culture is a vital part of language learning and.. language and
culture are interlinked.. - part of the opening sentence to the
Introduction to Intercultural Activities. The intention is to promote
understanding of the customs, opinions and lifestyles ...,
obviously those of the learner members of the group and of
course, also of the target language country or community.
This is an unpretentious little book full of useful and interesting
activities designed primarily for mixed nationality (culture) groups
of learners, although the activities would be perfectly suitable for
single culture groups as a means of promoting learners
understanding of other cultures and ability to describe their
own.
There are 30 topic-based units, each of which should provide
between 45 and 60 minutes of classroom work/discussion. The
activities are easy to set up, in most cases, very little material is
required, other than something to write on for the teacher and
the means to write or draw for the learners. This would be
extremely advantageous for teachers working in difficult
circumstances.
Each unit begins with a guide to the language focus, the
culture focus, a description of the type(s) of activity involved and
a list of materials and what preparation would be needed.
The authors suggest that the book is suitable for learners
between the elementary and intermediate levels. My feeling
would be that between elementary and pre-intermediate would
be the better ability range.
Intercultural; communication has become one of the hottest
labels of our times - the opening words to Intercultural Business
Communication. This book is intended fairly obviously for
business people working in a multicultural environment and, as
such, is of extreme interest to teachers, especially to teachers of
Business English.
The author has done all the hard work. He has read and studied
the most important writing in the field and the book presents us
with a digest of expert opinion, results of surveys, etc in all the
various areas covered (which are many!).
Each chapter or section deals with a specific aspect of
communication and includes short case studies and/or Critical
38 ihj October 2002
39 ihj October 2002
Incidents and practice exercises (with suggested answers).
Every chapter ends with a list of Further Reading suggestions for
those who would like to deepen their understanding of a
particular area. At the end of the book there is a useful glossary,
another list of recommended reading and a bibliography.
Personally, I am very afraid that this bibliography will play havoc
with my own book-buying budget! You have been warned!
It is difficult to do other than to give a wholehearted
recommendation to everyone working with adult learners to get
and read this book. It will certainly help teachers or trainers to
better understand the various levels of communication in the
classroom, not only between the learner(s) themselves, be they
from mixed nationality (culture) groups or single culture groups,
but also, and perhaps more importantly, between the learner(s)
and the teacher or trainer.
In my view the book has only one small weakness, although this
certainly does not stem from the author, but rather from the
paucity of research in the field itself - there is almost no work on
aspects of communication in the various African cultures. We
can only hope that this will be remedied soon.
Most of the exercises and Critical Incidents (with perhaps a little
adaptation) would be very suitable for classroom work in
Business English classes and would certainly prove extremely
useful for the ever increasing numbers of adult learners of English
who are working internationally. Of course, the book would also
be very useful for any English-speaking business person working
with anyone from any other country or culture.
Highly recommended.
(Gail Richards)
Business Grammar Builder
Paul Emmerson
(Macmillan)
This book makes a neat pair with its predecessor, Business
Builder, also published by Macmillan, but unlike its twin, is
designed for use by the student/client as well as the teacher.
It joins the very small number of grammar study books designed
specifically for the student of English for Business - the brown
one, the beige one and the other one as they are known in the
Executive Centre at IH London. So it is all the more welcome for
providing some much-needed variety to the teacher whose client
insists that what s/he wants is grammar practice. It comes with
its own CD, providing listening practice to reinforce points made
in any particular unit. This is nice, clear speech - very reassuring
to the student working alone. It gives valuable practice in
intonation and stress patterns, which students find useful in
incorporating grammar points into actual language production.
The only problem with the CD is that you have to more or less
destroy the book to get at it in its plastic envelope.
Like all Paul Emmersons work this is a formidably thorough and
exhaustive piece of work. Unfortunately this is reflected in the
layout, which colleagues almost universally found congested and
unattractive. The print is rather small and it takes a second or two
to discover the exact point being studied on any given page. The
headings are not always self-explanatory, which is a point to
consider for a self studier. It would be nice to have a little more
light interest in the shape of more cartoons and illustrations.
However, the use of colour helps in finding ones way about. The
organisation is logical and each unit offers good topical and up to
date examples of authentic business language. The texts are
interesting and relevant to the needs of todays business student.
The material is well-paced and will be extremely useful to
students and teachers looking for consolidation and remedial
work on any grammar point which may emerge in class. The
book is an essential addition to the resources shelf of any self-
respecting Business English Centre or Business English teacher
and is thoroughly to be recommended to students who feel they
would like a reference and practice book to give them more
confidence in constructing accurate and clear language. All the
copies on the shelves of the Executive Centre in IH London were
in use at the time of writing - in itself an indication of what a
welcome addition it is.
(The Executive Centre, IH London)
For further information please contact:
Jo Greig, Sales and Marketing Department,
Macmillan Education, Between Towns Road,
Oxford, OX4 3PP.
Tel: 01865-405825
Fax: 01865-405885
Email: j.greig@macmillan.com
www.businessenglishonline.net
In Company is the new
multi-level business English
course for professional adults.
Now were talking
Business!
Business Grammar Builder
is the new grammar practice
book for self-study or
classroom use.
By Mark Powell,
and Simon Clarke
By Paul Emmerson
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Busi ness Grammar Builder
41 ihj October 2002
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