Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (31 page)

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Could I stop you there?

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May I interrupt?

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Excuse me!

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Sorry but . . .

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I understand what you’re saying but . . .

Some students of English sound a bit rude because they don’t know what to say. When they use these expressions instead of putting their hand in front of your face to stop you, the politeness factor improves immediately. Sadly, a few people just
are
rude in whatever language they use, and giving them expressions like these just brings their personality to the fore.

Rephrasing

Instead of asking for repetition, you can teach your students to check whether they’ve understood and prove that they’re listening by saying something like to following before putting what they heard into their own words:

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So what you’re saying is . . .

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Do you mean . . .

Summing up

When it’s time to signal the end of a conversation or highlight the main points covered in a discussion, some useful little phrases, which students appreciate (especially in business English) come in handy:

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To sum up then . . .,
or
, in summary . . .

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In conclusion . . .

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So the point is . . .

Chapter 13: Setting Their Tongues Wagging: Speaking and Discussion
193

Planning a Discussion Lesson

In Chapter 6 I talk about production activities that encourage students to communicate freely without
you
putting words into their mouths. Discussion can form just one stage of a lesson that focuses on something else (using a grammatical structure or some new vocabulary) or you make discussion the main aim in itself. When you plan a discussion lesson you still need to have presentation and practice stages, which I discuss in Chapters 5 and 6, and then the discussion at the end. Even if the lesson is about discussion skills such as introducing your opinion, there should still be interesting subject matter for the class to talk about.

Choosing the right topic

An error many new teachers make is to expect students to put their heart and soul into discussing something that they’d never even mention in their own language. If you ask your students to have a five-minute discussion on the difference between their own pencil and their partner’s, your lesson is unlikely to be a roaring success.

Although it’s true that you need to find simple things for your students to talk about, you can’t milk a topic beyond its natural length. So my best advice for choosing the topic is to ask yourself a few questions:

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If you had to discuss this topic yourself, how keen would you be?

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For how long would you be willing to discuss it?

Personally, I’d be prepared to talk about pencils for two minutes and no longer. So, be realistic. Your students’ enthusiasm and goodwill only go so far.

Give some thought to the age and backgrounds of you students too. For example, with children ask them to talk about and role-play things that are relevant to them such as cartoon characters and pop stars.

In general, topics with international appeal are great to get everyone talking.

A few famous people are so well known that you can bring them into discussions almost anywhere in the world: Michael Jackson, Jackie Chan, Queen Elizabeth, the Beatles, Mickey Mouse and so on. Issues related to the environment, crime, family life, finding and keeping a job and love transfer very well across ages and nationalities.

If you ask students to discuss their local issues, find out beforehand whether it’s possible to translate the words they need into English. If the situation has no real comparison in the English-speaking world, your students feel frustrated trying to express it.

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Creating structure in the discussion

A 20-minute discussion doesn’t just happen by itself in most cases. Unless you happen to strike on a golden topic, you’re likely to find that the conversation dries up within ten minutes.

The best way to avoid this is by using a
slow reveal
method. By this I mean that you can feed in the details one by one, adding another piece of information every so often. It’s like putting in another piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

For example, the class begins by discussing how the government should use a piece of land. The options may include a shopping centre, a housing estate, or a nature reserve. After the students give their initial reaction you can give them information about the local population and problems that are prevalent in the area. This may change their minds somewhat. Before they make a final decision you can tell the students about the surrounding towns and other building developments taking place nearby. By adding the information gradually students explore different perspectives and extend the dialogue.

You can also move people around. So, one group can think of all the pros of an argument and another group all the cons. Then you can regroup the class so that each group contains students with both pros and cons. Assign a spokesperson for each group who has the responsibility of reporting to the class the final decision of the group. You’ll find this more effective than simply saying, ‘Talk about . . . ’.

Paying attention without taking over

While the students are having a good old chat, don’t just go off to the teachers’ room for a cup of tea. You need to monitor the dialogue so that you know when to add a point to fuel the discussion.

Of course, this doesn’t give you licence to talk about all your opinions. It’s time for the students to speak, remember.

However, as you monitor, you may notice that one student is rather too quiet and needs a prompt from you to get involved. Apart from this, you also need to have your pen and paper ready so that you can note errors and teaching points for your feedback session or for a future lesson.

Chapter 14

In One Ear, Out the Other:

Learning To Listen

In This Chapter

▶ Listening twice for good measure

▶ Finding a format

▶ Getting students ready to listen

▶ Playing it again, Sam

▶ Assigning follow-up activities

When students are able to listen to texts in English and get the sense of them, they feel a real sense of achievement. But how can you train your students to listen without them feeling overwhelmed? In this chapter you find out what to have students listen for and which activities make for an engaging listening lesson.

Structuring Your Lesson

When you teach listening skills, it pays to remember that it takes most people a little time to tune in before they listen well. Students need to pay full attention and have had some practice time before they can cope with detailed information in a foreign language. So, to help your students feel relaxed and prepared you can begin with a warmer activity lasting a few minutes. It doesn’t have to be related to the listening activities but is a short game or puzzle that focuses the mind.

Then you need two activities based on the same listening text but the first should be easier than the second. With the first activity you set the task and let students, read, discuss or work on it. Then you play the recording for them to listen to. After that there’s a feedback session in which the students 196
Part III: Teaching Skills Classes

compare their answers and discuss them with you. You follow the same order for the second, more difficult activity. In each case the students should be prepared for what they have to do before they listen. It’s up to you how long the recording lasts but the second, trickier task should take longer and be more detailed than the first.

Finally, have a follow-up activity that doesn’t involve listening to the recording again but is loosely related to it. If the follow-up activity lasts longer than the two listening activities combined, it’s too long for a true listening skills lesson.

Choosing a Listening Activity

The first question you may confront is the problem of what your students should be listening to. If you use a course book, quite likely it’s accompanied by a cassette or CD with a simple cheesy dialogue. Great! But hold on.

Perhaps it’s better to give them real recorded conversations to set them up for life outside the classroom. There are pros and cons on both sides, which I lay out in the next sections.

Finding material from the real world

If you happen to be teaching in an English-speaking country or area, you could, in theory, have your students engage in entirely authentic listening by taking them out onto the streets. Realistically though, this isn’t your best option, as you’ve no control over what your students hear in terms of grammar, vocabulary, slang or even good manners.

Having said that, a few real, predictable situations exist, which students can manage with a little preparation. For example, guided tours around cities and museums provide opportunities for quite extended listening. Tours are reliable in that they tend to follow the same pattern each time despite being a little longwinded. Another advantage of a fairly controlled situation like that is that listeners can predict more or less what’s coming and this is a key point. In the real world you usually know more or less what kind of information you’re about to hear. So it’s useful for you to use spontaneous, authentic listening exercises, but they’re quite hard to find.

You rarely listen to anything without an expectation of what’s coming next. So students also need a bit of preparation before they get stuck into a listening task and they need a reason to listen. (The upcoming ‘Motivating students to listen’ helps with expectations.)

Chapter 14: In One Ear, Out the Other: Learning To Listen
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Short, authentic listening texts work because they provide students with a clear example of real, live English and this is motivating for them because it’s what they want to be able to do in the future. However, the activities are hard to prepare and present challenges of unnecessary words and sounds. I give more information on authentic listening texts such as CDs later in this chapter.

Normally your students are confined to the classroom where only your voice provides a realistic listening situation. Being in front of your students is great because apart from the words you say, you give other non-verbal clues.

The environment you’re in offers a great deal of context and meaning to the language spoken there. After all, you don’t expect to hear an order for fish and chips with a pint of beer in a fast food hamburger place. When you look at the menu in such a place, you realise that there are fairly limited possibilities as to what the speaker can say.

In addition, the speaker’s body language varies according to the needs of the situation. Most people use facial expressions such as smiles and frowns to match their words and in addition, it’s normal to point at things you’re referring to or to use emphatic gestures to stress certain words.

Of course, a film can record the environment and the body language, which is very helpful but the communication is pretty one-sided. Your students can only respond to what’s said on screen. So a film is a little more authentic than a tape recording (unless you’re practising phone calls or radio broadcasts).

If you’re anything like me, the idea of using a video camera, TV and or projector seems quite labour intensive. To do so you probably need a transcript and exercise you’ve designed yourself. Some schools just don’t have the budget for that kind of hardware anyway. Another problem is that when you record people they get nervous and stop behaving naturally, which results in bad acting and stiffness. After all that preparation you lose the authentic air that you’d hoped to capture. But if you just leave the camera running until the subjects forget it’s there – a sort of Big Brother approach – you may also get a stream of word whiskers and pausing, which distracts the students.

Word whiskers
are the meaningless things you attach to sentences to fill the gaps when you don’t know what to say. They include
um
and
err
as well as other annoying, repeated phrases. How much of this kind of dialogue do your students need to understand anyway? Here’s an example of how native speakers can really sound: ‘So I told her yeah. I went . . . I told her right . . . um

“You’re out of order!” You know what I mean though. Cause like, she really is’.

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Choosing the material from course books

Pre-recorded listening texts that accompany the course book are usually designed to have students practise exactly the language or concept the lesson plan teaches. These texts tend to appear in every one or two units of a course book to balance out the four skills (reading, writing and speaking are the other skills). Listening texts made especially for EFL are:

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Easily accessible.

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Appropriate to the level.

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Focused on the target grammar and structures.

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Free of slang, distractions and interruptions.

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Labour saving.

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The right length for the lesson.

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Usually accompanied by a tape-script.

Unfortunately they have some drawbacks too. Some of these pre-prepared texts may be unusable because:

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The initial expense for the CD/DVD/cassette is often quite steep.

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The dialogues are often so carefully staged that they sound fake or patronising.

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They give a false impression – in real life people aren’t so clear and concise.

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They may not cover the situations that students actually need.

Ultimately the teacher needs to look at the circumstances of each class and consider the time and resources available before deciding which kind of text to choose.

Using CDs and DVDs for

authentic listening