Language development and The Beatles’ changing sound

It’s great not to have to source everything I’m writing.  For the past year or so I’ve had my head down working on my TESOL MA.  This could be used as an excuse for not having written a post for so long, but it’s probably down to human distraction/laziness/being-busy-with-other-projects.  Nonetheless, here’s the new post.

Let’s talk about the Beatles.  Arguably one of the greatest bands in modern (non-classical) history?  I’ve been into them since I was a kid and have met very few people who don’t like them – or at least who don’t like some of their stuff.  They had an insane effect on the shape of modern music and on top of all that, were seriously nice chaps.  (I promise this will come round to the English teaching world – just bear with me).

The Beatles went through various shapes and guises and managed to go from looking like this:

to this:

and then this:

Their music, too, also went through a similar process of change, each more or less reflecting the three images above.  They started out all clean and squeaky – singing about love and being nice, sincere lads.  The albums over this period shot them to “bigger-than-Jesus” fame among screaming 14-year-old boys and (mostly) girls from shore to shore.  The music was simple, 3 or 4 chord stuff and centred on themes of love, holding hands, missing loved ones, and more love.  (Notable albums from this period: Please Please Me, Twist and Shout, A Hard Day’s Night, Help!).

Then they got weird (see second photo).  It might’ve been hanging around with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, or perhaps it was just the drugs.  But they went on to write some of the material that would cement their place in music history – taking a new psychedelic turn that brought in a lot of complexity to their sound that was almost completely unknown in mainstream music at the time.  Not only did they start expanding the range of chord sequences and the like within songs, but seriously started messing around with samples – and genuinely experimenting.  It was, to use a cliche, a higher plane.  (Notable albums from this period: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Magical Mystery Tour, The White Album).

Finally, as the band was starting to fall apart (let’s not all blame Yoko here, please… such an easy scapegoat), the music took on a more somber, mature tone.  They were growing up and the music reflected that.  In doing so, it took on many of the elements of the early stuff – not just the simplicity, earnestness, and a lack of pretention, but also the uncomplex chord/song structures.  This time however, with a wiser and better-informed* bent. They had pushed the limits of the sum of their parts to an extreme, and come back from it with a better understanding of expressing themselves.  (Notable albums from this period: both of them – Abbey Road and Let it Be).

Musically speaking, the journey The Beatles took throughout their decade-long career went from a simple-building-up-of-complexity stage (let’s call that the development stage), to an (over)-elaborate doing-everything-at-once stage (let’s call this one the play-with-all-the-knowledge stage), to a mature, controlled, enlightened-by-the-previous-two-stages** stage (the slightly less-preposterously-titled enlightenment stage).  If it were a graph – I guess it would look like this:

So that’s that.

OK.  Now let’s talk about English learners’ development.

I’m not going to start at the beginning here, but somewhere in the middle.  Have your students ever come up with sentences like this?:

“I graduated from the department of physics of the University of Marmara.”

or

“The friend of my cousin had turned back to London and came to my home.”

or

“Because of there is too much work, I don’t have time to enjoy leisure activities.”

I come across sentences like this regularly.  These sentences all sound wrong for some reason, but most people, if asked, would find it difficult to pin down the problem: there appear to be no actual errors or mistakes in grammatical terms and the vocabulary itself all makes sense.  Often when sentences ‘feel’ wrong, it’s down to a word being used when a more approrpriate synonym should be used instead, like “do a speech” instead of “make a speech”.  But again, this doesn’t cure this conundrum.  To me, what’s happening here is an overuse of language skills.  The student has reached a particularly high level of language competence and might feel that the more complex a sentence is, then the better their English is going to be perceived.  Fixing these sentences in order to make them sound more natural would actually require a sort of ‘downgrading’ of the language:

“I graduated in Physics from Marmara University.”

“My cousin’s friend went back to London and came to mine.”

“Because there’s too much work, I don’t have time to enjoy myself.”

I want to point out that in order for this post to work, I’m about to make some rather broad generalisations.  It’s intended only as food for thought rather than an all-encompassing perspective on language learner development….

… but I have noticed this trend among students within my own teaching context on a regular basis.  I’ve also seen such over-elaborate use of English in places and from people who should know better: plaques describing various tourist attractions in the city (soooo much use of past perfect), and academics almost arrogantly showcasing their modal-ridden robot-English, and unable to have a normal conversation as everything appears to get lost in a fog of dangling modifiers and, again, an obsession with the past perfect.

It’s at this stage, when the learner has a respectful level of competence and confidence with the language, that they start experimenting with their acquired knowledge.  I suspect that this is a necessary stage of that long journey to near-native levels of English (no citations – but any comments on this notion would be welcome).  It’s like that classic saying art teachers always seem to be telling their teenage students who just want to paint cubes for their course work: “In order to break the rules, you have to learn them first”.

I’ve seen people get stuck in this stage, having conversations about relatively inane topics such as their favourite bands, or what was on TV last night, but sounding like some sort of mad legal document.  To me, the final stage of the learning process (is there such a thing?) is to sort of deprogram a lot of what they have learned.  Using that impressive level of acquisition and honing it in, streamlining it, humanising it, or downgrading it.  The English that emerges from this process, in the cases I’ve seen, leads to a beautifully expressed, unpretentious, and mature use of the language.

To recap: we’ve got the general acquisition process (not mentioned here, but plenty on the web discussing it), which we could call the “development stage”, the point where overcomplexity comes into the picture, the “play-with-all-the-knowledge” stage, and the streamlining process leading to what we could call the “enlightenment stage”.  I suppose if it were a graph, it’d look like this:

As I mentioned above – this is clearly a massive generalisation.  Native speakers themselves continue learning their own language as they go through life, so L2 learners are no exception.  But there does appear to be this interesting point somewhere when overcomplexity kicks in and the next place to go is down.

Also – the Beatles were great.

 

* This is the second compound adjective in this article.  By no means will it be the last.  You’ve been warned.

** Told you.

Doamisdoesare – teething issues for starters.

Do you ever feel like you spend a lot of time sorting out issues with lower level students that see them saying things like ‘I am live here‘ and ‘Do you late?‘, sometimes all the way when they’re well into Pre-Intermediate?   I don’t think I’ve yet met a teacher who hasn’t come across this on a regular basis.   As children growing up and learning the language, us native speakers appear to distinguish between the ‘amisares’ of the world and the ‘doesdos’ quite effortlessly.  These are not mistakes you hear native speaker children make.

When teaching Starter students, I’ve always found clarifying this conflict between the ‘am/is/are’ and the ‘verb/do/does’ challenging.  By the end of the course, the students are still instinctively going for the ‘be‘ after the subject. ‘I am go to the cinema‘.

So why do students of English as a second language commonly make this error, while native speaker children commonly don’t?

I think it has a great deal to do with how the course books tend to pace their Starter level course.  What they almost always do is go for a ‘baby steps’ approach.  They introduce the ‘I am / you are’ etc. and don’t introduce a verb until much later.  On the other hand, young children start playing around with verbs around the same time they do so with ‘be‘.  When the students finally see a verb,  they aren’t given much flexibility with it until even later.  For example, the course books almost always deal with verbs in the first and second person singular and not the third (that is the ‘he / she / it’), due, no doubt, to the problematic addition of ‘s’ to these verbs: ‘she goes’ ‘does he like?’.  To solve this, the book further ‘baby steps’ it.  A similar problem arises when addressing the past tense for the first time.  Books often go for the regular verbs before the irregular.

I have an issue with this for two reasons:  Firstly, it simply patronizes the student, who may be very capable of expressing themselves on a basic level with verbs, but do not get the opportunity to do so until quite a way into the course.  Secondly, I think it creates more problems than it avoids.  When students, for the first month or so of their course, have the ‘I am / you are‘ form practically drilled into their heads, when the time comes to start using verbs, they’ve basically been trained to use ‘be‘ in every sentence they’ve made.  They have to undo a habit – one that’s particularly hard to undo as it was obtained in that influential early part of the language learning.

The solution?  Well – I’ve been developing this in my mind for some time and it wasn’t until recently that I got to put it into practice.

Yesterday I had two Starter students.  They were both false Starters and had had a fair amount of exposure to English as they both worked at the school I’m working at.

What I did was I wrote a handful of verbs ‘have / live / study / work’ and ‘be‘.  I wrote them in red, following my ‘blue -red-blue’ method.  Then I gave them some objects to match up to the verbs.  These I wrote in blue.  The important thing here was that they were, from the off, seeing ‘be‘ as a separate verb to any of the others.

Already – due to the fact they they were false beginners, they started attempting sentences.  ‘I can live with your parents‘ and ‘I be happy‘.  It was promising, but I kept them from experimenting too much yet.  The next stage was the first ‘blue’ of the ‘blue-red-blue’ system.  For this I found some clear personal pronoun flashcards online and elicited the subject pronouns.  Then it was easy enough to just indicate that they were blue (in retrospect, printing them on blue paper would have been better – but in this case I just swiped a blue line down the side of the page), and put them in place.   The students had all they needed:  I clarified further by telling them that all English was ‘blue-red-blue’ and drew this on a piece of paper that was later to become their ‘grammar book’:

Immediately the shape of the English sentence is visibly clear.  What is also clear is that the verb ‘be‘ isn’t to be used with any of the other verbs.

This is when I allowed them to start practicing, getting them to make sentences at random using the clear structure in front of them.  When they wanted to make a ‘he / she / it‘ sentence, I simply told them then and there that they just have to add ‘s’ to the verb.  I find this approach of giving crucial information as a casual aside works wonders.  The book that I adapted this exercise from (Longman’s Cutting Edge Starter), for example, has an entire lesson dedicated to the addition of the ‘s’ in the third person singular.  In a way, setting aside so much time for such a little thing immediately signals to the student that it’s a big deal, and they will allow themselves to get daunted by it.  If I just mention to it to them casually, and have them use it immediately without really thinking about it, I find that they take it on board a lot more efficiently.  The same goes for the ‘am / is / are‘ as opposed to using ‘be‘.  e.g. ‘He is interesting‘ not ‘He be interesting‘.

After this I used my ‘blue-red-blue’ approach to explain how questions are formed.  I’m not putting up what I did as I want to protect the material.  It took little time and I had them practicing immediately on ‘seeing’ how it’s formed.  I had to differentiate between ‘be‘ and the verbs, but that was little problem for them as they’d been using both forms in the positive for a while and had understood that they behaved differently.  Again, the important thing here was that they saw the verbs and the ‘be‘ as separate entities throughout.

I cleared up the cards, placed the verbs together in one pile, and ‘be‘ in a separate spot on the table.   Most of the rest of the lesson consisted of one of the students picking up one of the blue object cards at random and making questions using the subject pronoun decided by a roll of the dice (1-she 2-he 3-I 4-you 5-we -6-they).  I made sure the questions kept their context, so when a student would ask ‘Does she live in a flat?‘ I made them use names.  Learning is stronger when meaning is conveyed.  I also got them to answer the other student’s questions.  This brought about an understanding of the ‘Yes, I am‘ ‘No, she doesn’t’ short answer forms in a natural context.  They were less daunted by this new input as it occurred organically and wasn’t presented to them as a new ‘grammar point’.

For the final part of this 1 hour and 15 minute lesson, I took a few pictures from the Cutting Edge book.  They depicted people and their home lives.  I elicited some sentences about them from the students; ‘She has a big garden‘, ‘He lives with his grandmother‘.  Then I got them to match 3 texts to the three pictures.  They managed it effortlessly.  We went through the texts to make sure they both understood them fully. They did.  Finally, their homework was to write such a text themselves.  If all goes to plan, they should have a writing each demonstrating a basic command of the use of verbs and the mad, mad ‘be‘.

This was all adapted from Unit 5 of the Starter book.  Although my students were certainly False Starters, I think that there’s no reason for ‘baby stepping’ any course (Elementary courses often start off the same, not introducing the use of verbs until a few units in).  The students seem to be able to learn much more efficiently and enjoyably when given several things at once.  Not only do their expectations of themselves rise, but they are also in a much better position to compare the forms with each other than if they had been exposed to them in isolation.

For my next lesson I intend on simply increasing their vocabulary with red verbs and blue subjects/objects.   The students already have the ‘blue-red-blue’ formula comfortably formed in their heads.  This means that anything new, such as object pronouns, which I intend on introducing to them soon using the same piece of paper, can simply be placed into the ‘blue-red-blue’ pattern.

Collective terms and matches

I love those mad revelations you get when you’re in between sleep and full-consciousness.  It must be the Theta brain waves.

Anyway – it occurred to me in my slumber that so much could be done in a lesson with something as simple as, for example, a match:

The teacher could illicit a large amount of vocabulary from it, and with any luck, learn something from the student as well.

How to do it: Well, start by going backwards in the match’s life.  Elicit where it came from – a tree, right? Was it a forest of trees or merely a patch of trees? What happened next? The tree was cut up, with what? With chainsaws or axes? Then what was the wood turned into?  Planks of wood or bundles of wood or just plain logs or could it have been turned into sawdust? Then what? It was taken to the factory and cut up into the matchstick we know today.  Then there’s the head of the matchstick that you could go into, something I’m going to tactically avoid right now, as you may choose to if, like me,  you’re not carrying a very science-minded head on your shoulders.

Next, what about the match itself?  Well, they’re usually found in a box of matches, but then you can get a packet of match boxes or even a crate of them. You can use the match to start campfires, light the cooker, make a model ship or determine which one of you is going to jump out of the hot air balloon to save the lives of the others by drawing the short match.

And that’s just with a match.  You could then get the student to think of an everyday object and continue such speculation. Perfect for a high-level one-to-one.

A summary of our methods!

The school my colleague and I are working at (a small school, hence the singular ‘colleague’) has asked us to summarise our teaching methodology, which they intend to translate with an aim of letting the students know why we do the things we do.  I think this is a great idea.  Every now and again I come up with various ideas for a one-day-to-come accelerated learning course.  One of them involved a pre-course seminar where the prospective students are let into the world of the learning process so that they can apply the techniques to their own self study.  What’s more, they would feel more comfortable with the more unusual approach that accelerated learning usually ends up becoming.

Now as I mentioned before, although we are bound by a ‘course book’ system, accelerated learning approaches can still be applied in places.  After discussing what we would write in our summary over a pleasant walk in the first snow of the year, we came up with this:

“The methods we use in the classrooms here at Istra School of English are varied and are largely based on what is broadly termed the ‘Communicative Approach’.  On top of these we also apply a number of techniques that are known to increase the pace of learning.

The foundation of the way we teach is through communication.  This means that we generally favour fluency over accuracy.  A student’s fluency is what allows them to speak in a ‘flow state’, conveying a larger amount of information and being understood regardless of small mistakes made.  This ‘flow state’ is also much more enjoyable for the student and also leads to greater accuracy with time.

Another cornerstone of the communicative approach, and one that may surprise students familiar with the more traditional classroom setup, is that the Teacher’s Talking Time (TTT) is kept to a minimum and the students are expected to provide the majority of the language spoken in the classroom. The teacher’s role is not to stand at the front of the class and give a lecture while the students passively take in the information. Their role is to guide the students through the language while interfering with the ‘flow state’ as little as possible.

We would like to address four elements of the teaching/learning process to illustrate what we believe to be an effective way of learning quickly, efficiently and enjoyably.

1. Music

There are a number of reasons why we use music in the classroom.  We have it on in the background at all times, with the exception of when a listening exercise is being done.

On a scientific level, when you are exposed to the right kind of music, your beta brain waves are more active.  Beta brain waves (between 12 and 30 Hz) are associated with active concentration.  This allows the student to be more productive as well as relaxed.

The presence of such music, which is usually classical, also creates a pleasant atmosphere where the students can feel more at ease, thus reducing anxiety which is a classic barrier to the learning process.

It also fills in the awkward, but utterly necessary silences that take place when the student is about to produce language, but is still processing the information to do so.  This is a fundamental part of the learning process as we will point out later.

Another good reason for playing classical music is that, due to its being ‘high art’, it provides an atmosphere of ‘high learning’ and suggests achievement. This peripheral association will always improve a student’s performance.

2. Error correction

Within our teaching methodology, there are 3 stages to correcting students’ errors.

• On the first level, the teacher does not correct the student at all, but merely makes a note of the significant errors the students make.  This is chiefly so as not to interrupt the aforementioned ‘flow state’.
• Once the teacher has made notes of the various, significant errors the students have made, there is a whole-class error correction session. Depending on the type of class, this may take place in the form of a game or may be more direct.  What’s important here is that the students have an opportunity to look at their mistakes and may yet correct them before the teacher does.  As well as simply correcting the mistakes, this session also analyses the whys and wherefores of them, giving the students a broader knowledge of the grammar or vocabulary in question.
• If the student makes a mistake that has already been analysed, the teacher will prompt the student – not correct them directly. This involves the teacher letting it be known the student has erred, but leaving it to them to work out their mistake themselves.  This process is vital to learning because when the student thinks about their mistake, they are less likely to make it in the future.  Again, it also lessens the interruption of the ‘flow state’.  It also gives the student confidence in their language skills as they realise that they know the language better than they may have previously been aware.
• As a last resort, if the student hasn’t found the correct form themselves, the teacher will correct them directly.  This is a last resort and in our experience (providing the student doesn’t panic), one that rarely needs to be taken.

3. Language input

The course books used at the school generally offer language input after a relevant reading or listening exercise.  The reading in question is likely to contain many new words and forms.  This is deliberate as an ‘overload’ of information allows the student to pick up on many things peripherally.  The idea here is that it is not necessary for the student to understand absolutely everything in the material – this will be covered in time, but for the student to have enough tools to be able to complete the exercise and assimilate the target language.

The reading or listening is also there to provide context.  Context is vital as language is simply not alive without it, and as a result, very difficult to understand.

4. Revising vocabulary through communicative activities

Throughout a course, there is a lot of new vocabulary to learn.  This vocabulary is best learned through reintroducing it every lesson in the forms of different speaking activities.  This will almost always involve requiring the students to describe the vocabulary in question through games like ‘taboo’ and ‘backs to the board’.

There are two benefits to using the vocabulary from the course again and again in this way.

The main reason is that when the language comes up repeatedly, the students are more likely to assimilate it and effectively learn it.  It’s near impossible to see a word once and remember it forever.  You need to revise it.

The other benefit to this approach is that the students make the ambitious jump into describing language and conveying information effectively. This can certainly be challenging to lower level students, but it is because of this challenge that the students will increase their language skills at a much quicker pace.  Once in the swing of it, the students’ confidence will also be boosted.

Again, the main aim here is not to obtain accuracy, but fluency – the ‘flow state’.  This is an incredibly valuable experience for the student as they can see how their skills will be applicable in the ‘real world’ where there isn’t a teacher there to correct them.

In summary, a positive classroom atmosphere with humour and creativity taking a major role in the process will achieve not only a more enjoyable experience, but a much faster, more efficient and more satisfying learning process.”

The dreaded coursebook Pt 1 – English Zone

So, I’ve been busy … too busy to be doing stuff here obviously.  But having revisited the site and looked over my old posts, I’ve felt the urge to get back to it!

Since last year I’ve been working full-time at a pleasant establishment, but one that works on the more traditional course-book system – something I consider something of an antithesis to the accelerated learning instructor.  Coursebooks are rigid in structure and tend not to have a holistic approach, instead opting for a neat, “today we’re just going to look at the present perfect / future continuous / past perfect continuous / future perfect passive continuous etc.”  Often the grammar will be isolated from any real context, instead being brought out of a constructed scenario that rarely manages to feel natural at all.

To be fair some are better than others, and I’d like to take the opportunity to take a look at the various books I have to use and highlight the aspects of them that aid accelerated learning and those that can be a serious hindrance to it.  Here’s the first of a 4 part installment.

English Zone

I thought I’d start with the worst of the bunch.  I’m going to be savage here as, well, it’s a wonder that this ever got published, especially by Oxford University Press of all institutions.

The book basically has units made up of 4 lessons.  Each of these lessons has almost nothing in it and puts the teacher in a situation where they basically have to come up with all the resources themselves.  It would be just as quick to have an A4 piece of paper with the syllabus printed on it and then the teacher goes forth and makes a new book, which would be better than this one anyway. So in its own way, this book provides great opportunities for accelerated learning because it provides next to nothing.

On the other hand…

The first lesson of each unit consists of a dialogue and a few comprehension questions.  Once these questions are done, the book recommends the students ‘practice the dialogue in groups of four.’  So that means that the students read the dialogue out loud to each other.  I’m not sure what this is supposed to achieve, and with kids being kids,  on the whole they’re not going to be enthused by such an activity.

Following the dialogue there is usually a small (very small) set of vocabulary, most of which the students already know.  I’ve got English Zone 3 open in front of me at the moment and the vocabulary consists almost entirely of words that are the same in almost every language (tennis, badminton, volleyball, football, taxi, hotel, bank etc.).  Once the students have established that these words are the same, and have encountered a feeling of not really having learned anything at all, the book tells the students to ‘ask and answer questions about the things in exercises 5 and 6‘.  That’s it. That’s the lesson for over an hour.  Good luck with that!

Next comes the second lesson of the unit.  See that wonderful picture up there? The one with all the gap-fills? The one that’s almost exclusively made up of gap-fills?  That’s your second hour with kids who, if you’ve been following the book so far, are probably about as motivated as your average McDonald’s employee. This is where all the grammar is bundled together for the unit.  This is the opposite of holistic learning right here. You have one lesson learning words you already know, then you have just grammar – no context whatsoever.  The English Zone 3 I have here introduces the present simple and present continuous like so:

“What are you doing? I’m reading a book.
I read every day. I usually read in bed.
Which sentences are in the present simple?
Which sentences are in the present continuous?
We use the present simple for repeated actions
We use the present continuous for actions happening now”

That’s it!  You read that, then you’ve learned grammar! Now fill in the gaps!  All the gaps!  For an hour!

Usually at times like this, the teacher will turn to the trusted Teacher’s Book.  You know, the one that gives you ideas on how to adapt the material to make it more interactive and interesting. So what does this life-saving paper-bound source of information give us?

“Ask the students to read the examples and to name the tenses of the verbs.
… Read and discuss the notes with the class.”

So nothing.  It basically says “Read the stuff in the book to the students”.

These examples are not a bad exception that I’ve sought out simply to slate this embarrassment of a book. The whole thing is riddled with this sort of laziness.

Next up is the ‘Skills Zone’.  This is the part that supposedly ticks the RLSW (Reading, Listening, Speaking, Writing) box.  I know because it actually says ‘Reading’ next to a reading followed by ‘Listening’ next to a listening followed by ‘Speaking’ next to a speaking exercise and ‘Armadillo’ next to a writing exercise.  That or ‘Writing’. I can’t really tell as I’d decided to do something worthwhile by the time I got to that.

To be fair, there’s not a lot wrong with having the skills put together onto one page if you’re writing a more traditional text book. What really bothers me is the fact that the exercises are barely constructive and severely limit the scope of what the student is to come out with. In the listening I have in front of me, the students have to

“Listen to the interview with Nicole. Tick the sports she speaks about.”

Guess what sports she talks about? That’s right, it’s the sports that you had to spend a good half an hour “teaching” the students two lessons back – you know the ones they already knew: Football, basketball, tennis, badminton.  To be fair, if the students are either Italian or Martian, ‘football’ will be different in their own language, but the Italians are bound to already know that word.

In the second part of the listening, there’s a multiple-choice comprehension exercise, which in itself is fine.  Really, I can’t find much to slate about it apart from its mundanity. No, something else bothers me about it.  We have no picture of the characters in the book that give us an insight as to what’s happening and the questions aren’t very challenging – but I’m nitpicking.

The speaking section is classic English Zone.  Again referring to the copy I have in front of me, the students then have to:

“Think of six questions to ask your partner about sports”.

So that’s the speaking done.  It’s clear that they just want the students to ask the same sort of questions that the listening posed. It’s a kind of limitation, and is forcing them into constructing sentences without giving them a desire to do so.  When faced with an empty lesson structure like this, I basically discard almost everything, get pictures of different interesting sports, elicit what they like about them, get them to find adjectives about them – feeding them vocabulary when they need it, and then possibly they could give a presentation of sports they like and don’t like and why.  I’d make sure some of the target language was embedded into the presentations (stuff like “How often do you go snowboarding”, “My favourite sport is …”), but the main point would be getting them to talk about sports on their terms.  Not simply think of random questions on sports.  If you were asked to do this, as an adult and in your own native language, you’d be struck with the futility of it, as would the children.

The writing consists of a chart with the same questions as the listening put forward and the students simply fill it in.  Then they write what they’ve put in the chart, only not in a chart.

I understand that I seem to be being overly negative about this section, and to be fair, if the whole book was like this, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as bad. Like I said, there isn’t much wrong with having a skills section per se.  My problem is that all the information is too neatly staged.  Too systematic. Too regimented: “Now listen, now read, now speak… speak damn you speak! Now write it down. Twice.”

Some sort of presentation activity would integrate these skills much more effectively.

Anyway… onto the next lesson!

Here we have ‘Situations’ and ‘Culture Zone’.  These are the parts that if you followed as the book recommends, your lesson would be over in about 20 minutes and you can get on with doing something more productive for the next 40, like learning English.

You are first presented with an incredibly short dialogue.  The teachers book recommends “Play(ing) the recording for the students to listen to and read”.  Then they match questions with answers. The idea is, I think, to present the students with questions that might come in handy if you’re talking to a friend in a sports centre or a station or a kitchen and have a very limited set of questions you need to ask them.  Now, if you find yourself needing to know what to do to help with the cooking (providing the answer is peeling the carrots), or how your friend is feeling (providing that she’s feeling cold), then these might be a bit useful. A bit.  The range of possibilities for such a lesson are endless, providing you don’t open this book, where they become ridiculously limited.  With this set of 4 questions and answers matched up, the students then proceed with a role play.  In the book I have open in front of me, and in the others (I’ve checked), the task is wonderfully vague:

“(Student A) You want to join the local sports centre. B is a member. Ask B for information.”

That’s good.  Ask him for information.  It might as well say “Do stuff”.

That’s half your lesson right there.  Have fun stretching that out to at least half an hour.

The ‘Culture Zone’ is a reading – and quite a long one and a handful of comprehension questions. Again it recommends that the students ‘Listen and read.’  I don’t know what this book’s thing is about having the students listen and read.  As a native speaker when was the last time you needed to listen and read to something at the same time? This isn’t a skill that we need in the real world.

The next stage of this section however, is actually quite useful. The book asks them to do a project on the topic in the reading. This could be a presentation of the railways of your country, or on English words in their language, or whatever.  I’m not going to spend much time criticizing this bit, because I think projects are a great way of activating the students’ skills. So about 90% of the book could be thrown into the sewer making it mercifully shorter. That way we could just work with that A4 paper with the syllabus on it and throw in the presentations in this section to incorporate the skills.

So a pretty negative review all said.  This book falls well below the standard you think would be required of something printed by Oxford University Press as well as the standards of any self-respecting teacher:

The staging is sporadic and themes don’t blend. This gives the teacher a tremendous amount of extra work in order to make the lesson flow as much as possible.

The target language is severely limited.  My feeling is that one of the benchmarks of Accelerated Learning is that you should always pitch high – giving the students much more information that they can reasonably assimilate in one lesson.  This does a few things.  It makes them feel that you have high expectations of them, which will in turn increase their motivation and output.  Secondly, an almost excessive load of information will leave the students picking some of it up consciously and some of it peripherally.  Should the information be repeated in later units, the information will be be reinforced.

The grammar element is separated from any context whatsoever. This is my biggest quip with this book.  It not only goes against what I understand of Accelerated Learning principles in the ELT classroom, but it even breaks some of the rules of the more traditional CELTA-style approach.  The reasons are clear.  Without context, the brain doesn’t react to information as readily as it would otherwise.  If you want to learn anything at all, giving the information a reference point for it to hang onto will make it much more susceptible to recall.  That’s why kids remember the names of footballers much more easily than the names of old Kings – but to be fair, it doesn’t help when half their names are Henry/Alexander/Louis/Murat (delete according to nationality).

So that’s English Zone. I know I’ve been rather negative with this first entry, but the next one won’t be as seeping with frustration … Wait and see!

Both/and not either/or

I had a phone interview yesterday for a position at a summer course in England.
The first question the chap asked me was “Tell me about accelerated learning”.
I started describing various aspects of the method, focusing largely on a step-by-step account of what a lesson might entail.
He also asked me whether I did any “normal” teaching.
It’s kind of strange to think of what I basically call the CELTA or TEFL approach as “normal” teaching. Compared to other foreign language approaches, this highly-recognised English method is, in my opinion, miles ahead. As I told my interlocutor on the phone, the CELTA approach is not totally incompatible with the AL one. It includes a lot of communication activities and tries to make the lessons as interesting and as enjoyable as possible. This is also a crucial aspect of AL.
Having made this point it reminded me of something that I have to remind myself of from time to time: in any situation, teaching approaches included, one should always have an ‘both/and’ approach, not an ‘either/or’ one. When getting into a new aspect of learning (or a new aspect of whatever job/studies you do), it can be all too easy to drop into a militant frame of mind – expelling all that you had previously learned and trying to start again from scratch.
Having been an English teacher for almost 7 years and having started speacialising in the AL method only a couple of years ago, I’ve found the experience of doing “normal” teaching beyond invaluable. It hasn’t merely been a stepping stone leading to my new method, but also consists of so much that is directly applicable to the AL approach. An either/or attitude can be severely harmful to your performance as a teacher as you start exploring new (and sometimes uncharted) areas of teaching.
In the (slightly altered) words of Black Francis from the Pixies “(keep) your feet in the air (but) your head on the ground”.

Getting into something

I was discussing the concept of learning something with some friends yesterday.

These friends in question were my bandmates and our drummer was talking about how she ended up getting into playing the drums.  She was mucking about on the school set apparently when a schoolmate turned up, showed her how to play a basic beat and from thereonin she simply started replicating the drummers on any of the music videos she could lay her hands on.

During this part of the conversation the word learning barely came up.  Why?  Because she didn’t feel like she was learning something, but getting into it.  Although she linguistically speaking she was learning how to play the drums, but for her the word didn’t quite feel right.  Why? Presumably we associate learning with school, obligation, discipline and all that Thomas Hardy stuff we didn’t really feel like getting into as kids at school.  Getting into something is reserved for the extra-curricular stuff: stuff like the names of footballers, the complex storylines of teenage soap operas, how to play a g sharp 7 and how to recite the spells from Harry Potter.

Significantly, these are overwhelmingly the things that kids always, always commit to memory compared to the information they’re supposed to learn at school.  This, in my view, is one of the cornerstones of Accelerated Learning; maybe even the very foundation of it.

This got me thinking about the word learning.  In much the same way as I like to avoid the word teacher because it has potentially negative schoolday connotations, I think perhaps that the word learning should also be avoided.  In place of teacher, the word guide might be preferable.  In place of learning, the phrase getting into might lay out a more positive groundwork for a more enjoyable and thus more effective process.

“You’re not learning English, you’re getting into it”…

Blue Red Blue and The John Lennon technique

The greatest things happen when you don’t plan them.  Further evidence of the fact that the best way to learn is by doing!

Today I created a simple technique for improving sentence structure.  Always a nightmare of a thing to master in English due to various irritating ambiguities.

Let me start of by explaining the blue red blue technique, which I came up with about 2 years ago.

(Almost) everything in English can be explained by thinking of blue red blue.  Take (almost) any sentence in English and you can break it down into blue red blue.  Red being the action and blue being … well, not an action.

Let’s start with a really simple example:

I like you.

Very simple and straightforward, right?  This is obviously ideal for low level learners.  It introduces a visual element to the boring subject-verb-object.  It’s also ideal in sorting out the weird abiguities that often confuse students.  Things like when ‘work’ is a verb or a noun (or when it’s red or blue):

I ‘m going to work.

or

He works in the office”.

When the sentences start increasing in complexity, extra information is added.  This is simply black.  Once the students understand the golden blue red blue rule, they can then add the extra information at the end or the beginning of the blue red blue formation which is (almost) never broken.

They get their giro on Wednesdays from the post office.

From hereonin the extra information can fall in any order, as long as the blue red blue remains intact:

They get their giro from the post office on Wednesdays .

Anyway – you get my point!

The blue red blue technique can be reinforced kinasthetically by putting up three fingers.  This can also be done while a student is making a mistake while speaking as a kind of promt.

The three fingers obviously representing the blue red blue.

Moving onto more complex structures can get more challenging, but in fact doesn’t have to go far beyond this simple three-fingered technique.

This afternoon I was teaching one of my more productive students.  Her level of English is at a strange point and one I’ve seen with many students over the years.  She has pretty much all the grammar she’s ever going to need, her vocabulary is beyond impressive but somehow stringing it all together can be a bit of a nightmare and she comes out with very muddled sentences.  I’ve found myself with students in this position before and unlike with those with straight-up grammar problems or those that need to expand their vocabulary, I’ve found getting students over this word structure barrier one of the most challenging parts of teaching a new language.

Today she was saying sentences like She advised to us “you should try the 2nd level” and He recommended to us should try again.

Now the classic way to deal with this is to drum up a massive list of dull structure templates that look a bit like this:

suggest + (that) + s + v + o

suggest + v-ing

recommend + (that) + s + v + o

recommend + v-ing

ask + (obj) + to + v

hope + (obj) + v + -ing

Pretty boring stuff, right?  Not only boring – which is reason enough not to use it – but the problem with presenting language like this is that you turn it into a mathematical being, which requires the use of a different part of the brain to the one that uses language.  This means you have to go out of language mode to assimilate the information and back into language mode to use it again – killing the flow.

All I needed to do to help clear up these problems with my student was to put my fingers in the air like this:

Because she already was familiar with these strange things I often did with my fingers to illustrate the blue red blue, it wasn’t much of a jump for her to take a look at my fingers and come out with She recommended we should try again.

Sure, should shouldn’t be there, but that didn’t take that much explaining to clarify.

I then put my fingers up again:

and had her come out with She recommended trying it again.

Most verbs worked that way and most complex sentence structures work this way.  We went through several examples:

say, ask, complain, apologize …

Fingers can say the most amazing things!

Intergrating this into an AL lesson could be pretty fun.  Starting off with a picture of John Lennon, maybe some of his songs and coming out with something ridiculous about how the two-fingered peace gesture is really a secret way of learning English known only by hippies and peacenicks.  And Winston Churchill, too of course (if you’re political persuasion is more to the right).

You could even get into singing some Lennon songs but changing the lyrics improvisationally and replacing them with random sentences using the new structure.  I don’t know – the choice is yours!

Storylining

During a private session with one of my more enthusiastic students the other day, I stumbled upon a great technique for learning vocabulary and aiming to keep a high retention level.

We were discussing ways to ‘learn’ new vocabulary and he showed me some cards he was carrying round with a little dictionary definition of various words.  He decided that he’d aim for about 15 words a day.  A fairly realistic target in my opinion considering the guy’s commitment to his project.  It was then that I remembered a couple of things from the AL books I’d been reading.  The first was that the brain can remember 7 words give or take two at a time.  The second was one of the recurring themes of AL: that you always remember things much better when you associate them as much as possible with visual images, the more striking, or even arousing the better.

I decided to take these two concepts together and advised my student to put the new word into a sentence.  We selected a random new word from his cards and discussed how we could put this into a sentence of about 7 words that he’d be able to remember easily.  Not an amazingly new concept and something that he was used to doing.  The new word was array and he came out with something quite appropriate, but rather dull and easily forgettable like there are an array of planets in space.  This sentence has no personal meaning and very little visual quality to it.

Now, because I’m quite familiar with my student and because we’ve actually got quite a lot in common (I would probably happily go for a drink with him in my free time), I decided to take a bit of a plunge.  I suggested that he could think about Amsterdam and imagine the array of women on offer in the streets.  Sexist and politically incorrect for sure, but (partly because of that) it provokes a strong emotional and even physical reaction, thus becoming easier to remember.

He immediately understood what I was trying to get at with this and as we went on to discover new words, instead of creating a completely new sentence to put the subsequent vocabulary into, we decided that we could continue the story.  Perhaps the next word would be quarrel, and he could imagine quarreling about the price and as the list of vocabulary continued, by the end of the day he would have not only a set of vocabulary in a real English usage context, but a story about a trip to Amsterdam.

Doing all of this increases the potential retention of the new vocabulary as it allows the brain to make more connections with the new words.  The more associations the brain is allowed to make, the better remembered the new input is.

Often at the end of a one-to-one class, there’d be a piece of paper with any new vocabulary that has come up throughout the lesson.  Usually I just give it to the student and hope they can remember the context.  Not any more!  From now on I will see if my students can adapt this ‘storylining’ technique with new vocabulary.  A good habit for any learner to get into!

Summarising AL

I guess a good place to start on this would be to try and summarise what I’ve learnt so far and explain what I think is meant by the phrase Accelerated Learning.

In short, Accelerated Learning is a method that addresses various aspects of our personality, emotions,  thought processes, learning styles, sub-consciousness, preferences and personal interests and abilities in order to vastly improve our learning process, hence its rather bold phrase.

How is this done?  Well, here the devil is in the details.  As a teacher, it helps to have a “both/and” attitude as opposed to an “either/or”.  If something doesn’t work, try it differently.  If something works, don’t just stick to that; try and look at more different ways of doing it.

At the moment the English Language teaching world is very much focused around something I like to call the TEFL mindset.  This is basically the standard, recognised way to teach English around the world and is backed up by various instiutions (most notably The British Council) and qualifications (most notably the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults or CELTA).  This is the way I and almost all of my peers are expected to teach the language and has been so for a long time.

Before my journey of discovering the theory and logic that is applied to Accelerated Learning, I was expecting to have an “eye opening” experience where I would have to completely unlearn all that the TEFL world had taught me, and reprogram myself for a new world of new techniques and new ways of approaching my art.

In fact, that really didn’t turn out to be the case at all. What I discovered was that the TEFL mindset, although in some ways quite reactionary and ineffective, had already taught me much of what I went on to learn in my AL research.  As well as flattening the learning curve, this prior knowledge led me to find new ideas more and more enriching and exciting.  The fact that I was familar to many of the principles of the method before setting out to learn it didn’t just enable me to understand it much quicker, it also taught me a lesson in itself of AL; nobody really starts learning anything from scratch because we all have some prior knowledge about something that will fit somewhere into whatever it is we decide to learn.  Everything is connected. Granted; my position was particularly fortunate because I wasn’t studying something dramatically different from my professional field, but nonetheless the principle remains the same: you can always achieve understanding through relating what your trying to learn to something that you already know.

6 paragraphs in and I still haven’t been able to express what AL involves.  So let’s break it down into some general areas.

1. Addressing the conscious and sub-conscious at the same time.  This way the new information is stored in both the short-term and long-term memory.  Colours, music, and even smells can play a large role in the effectiveness of memory.

2. Being aware of various scientific studies in the field of memory.  These can be utilised to dramatically increase the amount of information you store in your head and can have ready for recall.

3. Being aware of your own personal learning preferences. From learning styles to what time of day you are most productive.  Knowing yourself is a key element of the AL process.

4. Understanding what kind of learning environment helps you the most. Everyone is different in this respect; some people prefer silence while others are spurred on by hustle-n-bustle, some like to have an orderly workspace, others thrive on organised chaos.  Under what conditions you learn plays very strongly in how effective your learning can be.

5. Using as many of these methods as possible at the same time. Keeping the brain interested is the key to increasing memory and thus seriously aiding your learning experience.

As I continue to understand more and more about AL I may add or recategorise these basic principles.

As I go on with my research, the details will come post by post.