Becoming a Good Teacher

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

What are the qualities of great teachers? According to Jeremy Harmer, good teachers are attentive, understanding, good listeners, passionate. They give interesting classes. They bring their personalities and life experience into the classroom, and develop common ground with their students. They are flexible, student-centred, professional and knowledgeable, empathetic and motivating. They know their students’ names.

There is more. Good teachers adjust their language to a level students can understand without sounding unnatural or patronizing (this is called “modified input”.) They also use gestures, expressions and mime to communicate (this is called “comprehensible input”.)

The qualities students want in a teacher vary from culture to culture. For example, a TEFL student recently undertook a survey of Thai students in a TEFL class. What do Thai students want in a teacher? First, they want a teacher who is kind. They also want a teacher who understands the subject and is prepared for class. They want a teacher who is “human”, by which they explained that he should not be egotistical. And they want a teacher who arrives in class on time. These ideas are largely consistent with Harmers, but you can see cultural differences brought on by the insistence on kindness, humanity and being on time. (Thais are more frequently late than in the West.)

Here are some other ideas about the teacher’s roles and responsibilities. According to one writer, “great teaching comes from preparing thoroughly, challenging the students, listening carefully and respectfully, constantly learning as you teach, and including in every class a clear, insightful, new concept.” According to another, “the teacher’s main responsibilities are to choose class materials and to set class standards.” And according to a third, teaching and learning are part of the human condition. “We are all here to teach and learn.”

So those are the qualities of the good teacher. And there are as many ways to be a good teacher as there are teachers who are determined to do a good job. However, one choice that does seem to go a long way toward helping the teacher become a better teacher is the decision to use inductive methods. Here is a brief explanation of how that works, with examples.

Inductive and Deductive Teaching: Let’s start with the basics. English language teaching consists of applying four linguistic skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) to three groups of language items (structural, lexical and phonological). The latter correspond roughly to grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation; they amount to linguistic content.

There is endless discussion among teachers about the relative merits of “inductive teaching” compared to “deductive teaching.” In inductive teaching, the students practice language forms, but discover rules or generalizations on their own. They induce the rules from the examples they have practiced. In inductive presentation, the teacher makes the rules explicit by asking students to provide the answer. In deductive teaching, the teacher first gives the students the rules for a language form. Then they practice using them.

Here are examples of each.

Inductive Teaching
1.Write the following sentence on the board (or give it to them as a handout): “She gave me a beautiful big old brown Chinese hat.”
2.Then give them additional sentences, and ask them to put the adjectives in the right order. Example: “I want to buy a ____ ____ ____ ____ ____motorcycle.” (Japanese, red, pretty, new, small).
3.Make the scrambled adjectives increasingly more challenging in the worksheet sentences. Thus, they have to think a bit harder with each new sentence. In this way they will figure out for themselves (induce) how to place adjectives.
4.Elicit ideas from the students about the correct order of adjectives. Using that input, write the rule on the board.

Deductive Teaching:
1. Give the students the following information in a handout:

In English, adjectives come before a noun in a particular order. The order of adjectives is the following:

A. First comes opinion: (Lovely)
B. Then we provide physical description, in a certain order:

1. Size (big)
2. Age (old)
3. Condition (faded)
4. Colour (red)
5. Shape (elongated)
6. Sex (N/A)

C. Then origin: (Canadian)
D. Then material: (birch bark)
E. Then purpose: (racing)
F. And the noun brings up the rear: canoe

2. Give them some adjectives and ask them to write sentences using three or more adjectives in the right order. Their job is to "deduce" the right answers from the rule you set out at the beginning.
3. Check the sentences to see whether they got them right.

These two forms of teaching practice are quite different. In general, use inductive teaching. This may require putting more work into your lesson plans, but it is worth it.

Classroom Management and Student Discipline

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

I recently encountered two of my former students in a Chiang Mai restaurant, and asked them how they were doing in the job market. They had completed their training in December, and both quickly began to teach. But their working situations are as different as chalk and cheese. One teaches six classes of young Thai teenagers in a public school, and each of her classes has perhaps 50 students enrolled. The other works as a one-to-one English tutor, and teaches only 18 hours per week. His students are mostly Thai adults, but they also include two Korean teenagers.

As far as classroom management is concerned, this study in contrasts illustrates the extremes that English language teachers are likely to experience.

Think about it: The teacher with hundreds of students is dealing with individuals she will never know by name. The situation militates against her being able to give personal attention to anyone. Her students are there because the law requires them to study English. Their previous English teaching has been from teachers with mixed (generally poor) language instruction skills. The distractions of the classroom are legion for both teacher and student. Many of her students have raging hormones and little motivation to learn English.

In the tutor-teacher’s case, the situation is upside down – or, some would say, right side up. The students only get personal care. The teacher gets to know them quite well. They are studying English because they want to learn the language, and are therefore highly motivated. Their previous language instruction is irrelevant, because their tutor rough tunes to their level, and heals the areas important to them. And besides having motivation, his students are more mature. They do not let their hormones disrupt the operation of the classroom.

Without a doubt these classes illustrate two extremes in classroom management. But has one of these teachers been dealt a bad hand in the gin rummy of teaching, while the other got a royal flush? I suggest not. When I asked the two teachers how their first month had gone, both said “I love it!” Different strokes for different folks.

Classroom Management: And this brings us around to the issue of good classroom management. Teachers have to manage their classrooms well so their teaching can be effective. Good management creates an environment that helps students learn. Good classroom management reveals and influences your attitude, talents, perceived role, voice and body language. It strongly affects teacher-student interactions, including the challenges associated with teaching to large groups.

Okay, enough of the abstractions. What exactly is classroom management? It is what you do to make your teaching area a good place to learn in. For example, the physical environment of the classroom can contribute to student learning; while all classroom seating arrangements have strengths and weaknesses, you have to decide which one works best for you. There are ways to arrange classroom seating to encourage student interaction. Should you set your students’ chairs in a horseshoe? A circle? How about the old standby, rows of student desks? Each works best in different situations. As a classroom manager, your job is to think through seating plans and other physical arrangements (like making sure the classroom isn’t too hot) that will work best for your students.

What else can you do to optimize the learning process? Perhaps nothing is more important in a classroom than letting your students feel safe – the process Stephen Krashen calls lowering the affective filter. A huge part of your role as a teacher is to build a positive climate, letting your students know there are rewards for taking risks in your classroom. Classroom management involves looking after such details as having a place to post student essays, for example.

One way to make students feel safe is to clarify classroom procedures and rules. Part of helping students feel secure is to establish clear rules and class routines. And it involves discipline. Let’s talk about that.

The Learner’s Age: One place to start is to consider that each class you teach is likely to include students of about the same age. Thus, your students will probably be children, adolescents or adults, not all three. So let’s look at those three groups in age rank.

1. When you teach children, it is important to differentiate between two life stages – young children who are 5-8 years old, and mature children who are 8-11. In terms of how their minds work, the mature children are cognitively close to adolescents and adults. Young children, by contrast, are cognitively closer to Martians. According to one popular text on teaching English to children,

The adult world and the child's world are not the same. Children do not always understand what adults are talking about. Adults do not always understand what children are talking about. The difference is that adults usually find out by asking questions, but children don't always ask. They either pretend to understand, or they understand in their own terms and do what they think you want them to do.

In both cases, young learners have special requirements. They have short attention spans, and require lots of physical play and teacher patience. They sometimes have trouble differentiating between fact and fiction. They have little life experience, but buckets of honesty. And while they may have respect for authority, they have a great deal of imagination. A teacher may feel that on some levels communication is impossible.

2. When you teach adolescents, you are dealing with a different crowd. They often have attitude. They respond to peer-pressure. They are often insecure, their hormones may be running wild, and they are developing life experience. As they go through the rapid transition between childhood and adulthood, they are often seeking knowledge and self-identity. Many challenge authority, and in the language classroom that means you.

3. Adults are another story. They have life experience and, because they are unlikely to be taking English because they have to, they are likely to be well motivated. They are also likely to be more tolerant and self-aware, but they may be status conscious. This latter issue can be an issue in a number of ways. For one, in terms of age they are peers of the teacher. If they are wealthy, older or high-status professionals, they may consider themselves to outrank you. Therein lay minefields. Don’t ever believe that adult students won’t ever give you discipline problems. Most won’t, but some do.

An article by US educator Budd Churchward suggests a way to apply the thought of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg to the problem of classroom discipline for children and adolescents. His ideas put the lie to the urban myth that a class full of young adolescents is a class out of control. Purveyors of this notion, which is common in the United States, for example, support it with such unexamined statistics as the one that the dropout rate for America’s urban teachers is 40-50 percent. Does this mean the students were out of control, the teachers got offers for better jobs, or the teachers were ready for a change?

Kohlberg developed theories about the stages of moral and ethical reasoning among people. Through his work, which included in-depth studies of youngsters from many parts of the world, he developed a scheme of moral development consisting of three levels (each made up of two separate stages). He suggested that almost everyone, regardless of culture, race, or sex, experiences at least the first four stages.

The Encyclopedia of Psychology explains the four stages thus:

Each stage involves increasingly complex thought patterns, and as children arrive at a given stage they tend to consider the bases for previous judgments as invalid. Children from the ages of seven through ten act on the pre-conventional level, at which they defer to adults and obey rules based on the immediate consequences of their actions. The behaviour of children at this level is essentially pre-moral. At Stage 1, they obey rules in order to avoid punishment, while at Stage 2 their behaviour is mostly motivated by the desire to obtain rewards. Starting at around age ten, children enter the conventional level, where their behaviour is guided by the opinions of other people and the desire to conform. At Stage 3, the emphasis is on being a "good boy" or "good girl" in order to win approval and avoid disapproval, while at Stage 4 the concept of doing one's duty and upholding the social order becomes predominant. At this stage, respecting and obeying authority (of parents, teachers, God) is an end in itself, without reference to higher principles. By the age of 13, most moral questions are resolved on the conventional level.

For purposes of classroom discipline, Churchward says that only these four of Kohlberg’s stages are important.

The Learner’s Stage: At the risk of over-simplifying his ideas, here is a brief review of the approach to discipline that Churchward develops. It strongly reflects Kohlberg’s stages.

1. Stage 1 discipline problems, he argues, involve recalcitrant behaviour. This is the power stage, in which might makes right. The students refuse to follow directions. They are defiant and require a great deal of attention. “Fortunately, says Churchward, “few of the students we see in our classrooms function at this stage. Those who do, follow rules as long as the imbalance of power tilts against them. Assertive teachers with a constant eye on these students can keep them in line. Turn your back on them, and they are out of control.”

2. Self-serving behaviour is the ruling characteristic of Stage 2; Churchward calls it the reward and punishment stage, in which the student’s key question is, “What’s in it for me?” In class, these students behave either because they will receive candy, free time or some other reward, or because they do not like what will happen to them if they do not behave. “Most children are moving beyond this stage by the time they are eight or nine years old”, Churchward explains. “Older students who still function at this stage do best in classrooms with assertive teachers.” Assertive teachers – the ones who insist on class control – are the ones who fare best with stage 1 and 2 students.

3. Churchward characterizes Stage 3 as one of interpersonal discipline, in which the student is out to make the teacher’s day. In this stage the student’s main question is “How can I please you?” He adds, “Students functioning at Stage 3 make up most of the youngsters in our middle and junior high schools. These kids have started to develop a sense of discipline. They behave because you ask them. This is the mutual interpersonal stage. They care what others think about them, and they want you to like them.” These children need little discipline. Ask them to settle down and they will. They rarely need a heavy-handed approach to classroom discipline.

4. The last stage of classroom discipline involves self-discipline. This is the social order stage, characterized by the student belief that “I must behave because it is the right thing to do.”

“Students functioning at Stage 4 rarely get into any trouble at all,” Churchward says. “They have a sense of right and wrong. Although many middle school and junior high school students will occasionally function at this level, only a few consistently do. These are the youngsters we enjoy working with so much….You can leave these kids alone with a project and come back 20 or 30 minutes later and find them still on task.” Many adolescent students do not operate at this stage, but they are near enough to it that they understand how it works. “Cooperative learning activities encourage students to function at this level,” he adds. “The teacher who sets up several groups within the classroom gives students a chance to practice working at this level.” You should wait close by, though, ready to step in when needed.

Churchward’s ideas are useful and relevant, and he does a good job of developing a practical application for Kohlberg's theoretical concepts. Put in the context of managing the classroom, his thinking offers a helpful understanding of the psychology of our younger learners, and contributes to the larger issue of class management.

On Churchward's website – which also promotes a computer system for managing classroom discipline (free trial available) – is a description of 11 techniques for better classroom discipline. I recommend you take a look at it.

The Great Motivators

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

For teachers, four key factors affect the rate at which a student learns a second language. (I am referring to external factors. Although they clearly have roles to play, such considerations as attitude, aptitude and previous experience in language learning don't count in the context of this discussion.)

The most important factor relates to the student's primary motivation. Language theorists often describe a language student's primary form of motivation as either instrumental or integrative motivation.

Instrumental motivation is the weaker form. Common among those learning English, for example, with no intention of ever living in a country like Britain or Canada, instrumental motivation is the prime mover of those who want to learn a language as a tool for some secondary purpose – talking to tourists, for example. Integrative motivation is a greater force. It is the motivation of those who are learning a second language in a new country, and they are learning the language so they can integrate into a new society.

The second fundamental factor affecting language learning is the amount of time the student spends in class and practicing the language. Generally speaking, more motivated students spend more time; less motivated students, less.

The third factor is the teacher’s approach (for example, communicative language teaching or audiolingualism) to language teaching. The fourth is the instructor's teaching effectiveness and style.

You can probably see a big problem here. The myth of the great teacher whose motivational abilities inspire her students to world-shattering achievements is essentially flawed. I think of this as the paradox of motivation. The student's main motivator - integrative or instrumental motivation - is the one factor the teacher essentially has no control over. And that motivation drives the second most important factor behind student success, time spent on task.

What's a teacher to do? Accept this reality, and develop your ability to motivate students in secondary ways. Primary motivation notwithstanding, the teacher's motivational skills are still critical for both learning and teaching.

Good teachers use many teaching qualities to motivate students. These include a combination of variation and structure in teaching activities. They find ways to show the practical value of learning English. They encourage and nurture their students, and many excellent teachers also bring sympathy and empathy into the classroom. They make the physical teaching space as compatible with learning as they can. They offer tools for learning (for example, mnemonics) and they conduct the class in a fair and balanced way. They also provide the students with consistency and fairness, and they do everything they can to help the students feel safe.

What TEFL teachers think: In a recent class, I discussed this problem with my TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) students, and asked them to brainstorm ways to motivate their students. They concluded that there are five areas where the teacher can really make a difference: in their lesson plans, in classroom management, in teaching style, in testing and assessment and in professional development. By no means were their ideas exhaustive, but they were good. Here is a summary.

1. Create great lesson plans: Choose great topics. Provide interesting and varied activities. Develop medium-term class themes. Have attainable goals and objectives, which provide real challenges but seek progress, not perfection. KISS (Keep it short and simple). And use authentic materials and situations for classroom teaching.

2. Classroom management: Attend to your students’ comfort and convenience. Find ways to visually represent class progress. Set up the classroom effectively and use equipment as effectively as you can.

3. Teaching style: Your teaching style consists of attitude, presence and rapport. Here are some comments on each.
• Attitude: Know your students’ names. Activate their prior knowledge and nurture their abilities. Be knowledgeable and authoritative, but modest. Be passionate about teaching. Be punctual. Dress and groom professionally.
• Presence: Empathize with your students. Enable your students to have fun. Show your personality, and vary the ways you teach
• Rapport: Appeal to different learning styles, especially kinaesthetic. Be conscious and respectful of your students’ culture or cultures. Give genuine praise and recognition. Involve the students in their learning; for example, use KWL (“what you know, what you want to know, what you have learned”) charts to develop and measure class content. Offer appropriate counsel and advice.

4. Assessment: Give your students good and regular assessment and testing. Get them to help each other. Monitor the class through feedback, and use prizes as rewards from time to time.

5. Professional development: Keep a log of your classroom performance, on occasion get someone to video your performance, and periodically ask a colleague or friend to assess your teaching. And take advantage of whatever professional development training you can get your hands on. We can always improve, and we must.

The Value of Testing

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Students hate tests, and so do teachers. For the student, they are a pain to study for and a worry to take. For the teacher, they are a nuisance to give and a bother to grade. But research shows that failing to give tests is bad educational practice. This is because if you test your students, they will probably better retain the material you are presenting. And oddly enough, they can do so without studying more or harder.

The Testing Effect: The journal Psychological Science noted this outcome in a 2006 report. According to the researchers, “Taking a memory test not only assesses what one knows, but also enhances later retention, a phenomenon known as the testing effect.” They added, “Testing is a powerful means of improving learning, not just assessing.”

Oddly enough, tested students can actually do better with less study. According to a media report,

….students who relied on repeated study alone frequently developed a false sense of confidence about their mastery of the materials even while their grasp of important detail was sliding away. By comparison, students who were either tested repeatedly or tested themselves while revising scored dramatically higher marks. A group of students who read a piece of text 14 times, for example, recalled less than a self-testing group who had read the piece only three or four times.

Now, let’s move from the immediate findings of this research to the realm of common sense. Teachers have long known that testing plays a key role in teaching and learning.

Self-tests in language promote retention, while process-focused tests (for example, writing a journal or preparing to give an oral presentation) activate language. Testing has many other uses. Through testing, both teacher and learner get a better sense of the student’s progress. They encourage students to self-evaluate and they promote autonomy in learning. We can use them to provide a sense of closure to a unit or a course of study. They can give your students a better sense of where their competence has improved, and they can give you feedback on how effective you are as a teacher.

Traditional and Alternative Assessments: Traditional forms of testing fall into four basic categories. (1) Proficiency tests give general information on student language proficiency level. They are not specific to any particular program. (2) Placement tests are designed to be appropriate for a specific program. These tests should reflect the goals and ability levels in the program and help you place students within the program. (3) Achievement tests, which should be part of every language curriculum, should be specific to the goals and objectives of a specific language course. (4) Finally, diagnostic tests focus on individual student’s strengths and weaknesses. You can use information from diagnostic tests to help your students improve in particular areas of weakness.

There are many ways to create standard tests for language students. They are commercially available, and many schools have files of hoary old tests you can borrow or emulate. A frequently raised concern about these tests is the question of whether they have validity (they measure what they are supposed to measure); reliability (the tests are consistent); and objectivity (the assessment is unbiased). In terms of this discussion, those are issues for another day.

From the communicative language teaching perspective, a more pressing weakness of traditional testing is that it is neither communicative nor authentic. Given the importance of assessment as a teaching aid, however, it is worth looking at alternative ways to test foreign language students. For language learners more than for other learners, perhaps, alternatives are particularly important.

There are four obvious forms of alternative assessment. Observe your students, writing notes in student records. Meet with them. Have them write journals. And have them create portfolios of their work. These are just a sample, however, and they are not systematic. For system, consider a review by Jo-Ellen Tannenbaum.

The Alternatives: The American educator wrote a commentary on alternative assessment. She pictures the landscape in these words:

Many educators have come to recognize that alternative assessments are an important means of gaining a dynamic picture of students' academic and linguistic development. “Alternative assessment refers to procedures and techniques which can be used within the context of instruction and can be easily incorporated into the daily activities of the school or classroom”. It is particularly useful with (language) students because it employs strategies that ask students to show what they can do. In contrast to traditional testing, “students are evaluated on what they integrate and produce rather than on what they are able to recall and reproduce”. Although there is no single definition of alternative assessment, the main goal is to “gather evidence about how students are approaching, processing, and completing real-life tasks in a particular domain”.

Alternative assessments, she added, generally meet the following criteria:
• Focus is on documenting individual student growth over time, rather than comparing students with one another.
• Emphasis is on students' strengths (what they know), rather than weaknesses (what they don't know).
• Consideration is given to the learning styles, language proficiencies, cultural and educational backgrounds, and grade levels of students.

In her thoughtful article, Tannenbaum puts alternative assessments into five categories. The first she calls “non-verbal assessment strategies”, in which students use physical demonstration or pictures, for example, to illustrate their comprehension.

A second is the KWL chart. The initials refer to “what I know/what I want to know/what I've learned”, and she advocates using this tool to begin and end a unit of study. In an EFL class, you might begin by surveying students on their course expectations. At various points in the course, you could then assess what they know and what they are learning. At the end of the unit, you can work with the students to determine how much they have learned of what they wanted to know.

Tannenbaum also suggests oral performances or presentations as alternative forms of testing. “Performance-based assessments include interviews, oral reports, role plays, describing, explaining, summarizing, retelling, paraphrasing stories or text material, and so on.” Other possibilities include role play and oral presentations. She adds that oral assessments should be conducted regularly so you can monitor your students’ comprehension and thinking skills.

A fourth cluster of alternatives includes what she calls “oral and written products.” She suggests that the teacher can assess student progress include “content area thinking and learning logs, reading response logs, writing assignments (both structured and creative), dialogue journals, and audio or video cassettes.”

Finally, she advocates the portfolio of student work, collected over time to track student development. She suggests that portfolios should include a variety of materials -- audio- and videotaped recordings of readings or oral presentations, for example; writing samples and assignments; conference or interview notes and anecdotal records; and tests and quizzes.

Individualized assessment can be a time-consuming task, and it will drift into the realm of the virtually impossible if you ever find yourself with, for example, several large classes of university students. However, the case for assessment is compelling. After all, your responsibility as a teacher is to promote learning among your students, and the much-hated practice of testing can be one of the great tools toward achieving that goal.

A Beginning, a Middle and an End

I recently updated my book, Teach and Leorn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, from which this is a chapter, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive book. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Whichever language skill you are teaching, each component of your lesson should comprise beginning, middle and end. On the surface, this sounds obvious. But in language teaching, nothing is as it seems – or so it seems.

A better way to describe this issue is to talk about pre-skill, skill and post-skill activities. The three sections of a lesson segment should include an introduction that activates any schema the learners may need to succeed in the activity; the activity itself; and a review of the activity. To use reading as an example, the moving parts of a good teaching activity should include pre-reading, reading and post-reading components.

In the balance of this discussion, we will use reading and writing activities to illustrate this general idea. However, you can equally apply it to instruction in listening and speaking.

The communicative language teacher’s main responsibilities are to choose class materials and activities and to set class standards; in many ways, the choices are the hardest part. CL teachers should adapt readings to the level and interest of their students. All else being equal, students learn best when they read items that interest them. When you are presenting a text to students, there are a number of steps you should take to help your students get the most from their reading.

These include pre-teaching essential vocabulary and engaging the students by having them try to predict the content before they actually do the reading. If you have a class full of young adults, for example, you might begin the section with the observation, “We are about to read a short love story. What do you think will happen?” These kinds of pre-reading activities promote comprehension. In turn, this encourages your students to react personally to what they are reading.

You should base a sequence of classroom activities on your reading text. In this way, you can integrate better reading with improvements in one or more of the other skills – listening, speaking and writing.

Student Generated Reading Materials: Sometimes, of course, you won’t want to provide your students with canned material. You may opt instead to have them generate their own reading material.

You can have intermediate or advanced students choose their own research topic and find their own study materials in the newspaper or on the Internet. Once they have chosen their reading materials, you can put them through pre-reading, reading and post-reading exercises. This kind of project will extend over several classes, or even several weeks.

If you have lower-level students, you can use the “language experience approach” to help a class of beginners extend their spoken language into reading and writing activities. Begin by discussing a shared experience in class. Then lead the students in telling you a story. Write words and phrases on the board. Gradually develop their language contributions into a story, prompting revisions as you go. Read and reread the story together. Depending on the language skills of your students, use “repeat after me” or “choral reading” approaches. You may want to extend the story by having the students illustrate it.

After it is complete, you can further exploit this exercise by preparing flash cards that give brief cues to the story. Then erase the board, and have each student tell the story using only these cues. You will probably want your learners to tell these stories in small groups, so they get maximum language practice.

Make student-generated material go a long way, by pointing out elements such as punctuation and repetitive grammatical forms. Point out parts of speech, and use readings as springboards for speaking, listening, and writing. Finally, post student-generated writings on the wall to remind students of what they have learned.

Also, after you isolate a word, phrase or sentence, put it back into context so you can re-establish “syntax.” Syntax is the teacher’s word for the rules we use to combine words into phrases and sentences.

Reading Skills: Of course, in reading lessons it is also important to present strategies for effective comprehension. Here are three key skills.

• Skimming is used to quickly identify the main ideas of a text. When you read the newspaper, you're probably not reading it word-by-word; instead you're skimming the text. Skimming is done at a speed three to four times faster than normal reading.
• Scanning is a technique you often use when looking up a word in the telephone book or dictionary. You search for key words or ideas. In most cases, you know what you're looking for, so you're concentrating on finding a particular answer. Scanning involves moving your eyes quickly down the page seeking specific words and phrases.
• Surveying a text involves beginning a reading by examining some of its parts. Read the headlines and sub-heads, the first and last paragraphs, captions, charts and tables and other graphic materials. These will give you the main ideas of an article or brochure before you begin more intensive reading.

Teaching these learning strategies can greatly improve your learner’s reading comprehension.You can learn about other strategies to improve reading in teachers’ books and on many Internet sites.

Teaching Writing: Writing reinforces general language development and helps develop language proficiency, but it is also a valuable form of self-expression. CLT gives listening and speaking skills a certain primacy, but students do not always have to speak before they can write. (Of course, when you are working with students who have not yet learned the Roman alphabet, writing is usually a long time coming!)

The well-known applied linguist Doug (H. Douglas) Brown lists six principles for designing good writing lessons.

First, he says we should teach our students what good writers do. What do good writers do? Well, they focus on the main idea. They consider their audience. They constantly revise their writing. They follow a general outline as they write. And they get feedback on their writing from others. Build these practices into your writing lessons.

Brown also talks about balancing process and product. When you work with your students on process, you are inwardly focused, on the writer. You help your learners understand what the writer must do to generate ideas and so on. A focus on the writing product is outwardly directed. Who are the audience and what are they willing to read? What form should the piece of writing take? You also need to explain why correctness is so vital.

Another of Brown’s principles is to show differences between writing in English and writing in the first language. The focus here is style rather than language. For overseas teachers who cannot speak the local language or read the local script, this is impossible, of course.

His fourth principle is to connect reading and writing activities. This follows the general principle that CL teachers should wring as much as they can from a given task, stopping well short of boredom.

Also, he says, make writing as realistic as possible. Have students write for a real purpose. There are many varieties of writing that you can teach, and they exist for just about every student level. A few writing schema your students will be familiar with include email, letters, postcards, stories and newspaper articles. Forms they may be less familiar with include essays, poetry and business letters. As you begin a writing exercise, you should be sure your students understand the form (schema) they will be working on. Once they understand the form, the rest will be easier.

Finally, Brown says, teach writing in three stages.

• Generating content is the first. He calls this prewriting, and it involves research, brainstorming and other techniques for idea formation.
• Planning, organizing and preparing the first draft make up the second stage. At higher levels, for example, common planning and organizing techniques include writing a thesis statement, preparing outlines and developing topic sentences.
• Revision and editing come last. Except in special cases (for example, advanced students), it is not helpful to correct all the mistakes you can find in your students’ writing assignments. Like the other aspects of language, the development of writing is a gradual process. However, you should encourage your students to get feedback on their writing from other students by peer review. Also, your students should have opportunities to rewrite their work after you (or their peers) have corrected it.

And this, of course, takes us back to the beginning. Good activities for teaching language skills comprise beginning, middle and end.

Aural and Oral Skills

 I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Please click to download a PDF of my book Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching. 

The two most basic language skills, listening and speaking, sound exactly alike when we describe them as oral and aural skills. “Aural” language, of course, refers to language as we hear it. “Oral” language is what we say.

These two words are “homophones” – words spelled differently that sound alike. There is no good reason why they should be homophones, but they are. Perhaps that accident of spelling can serve as a reminder that, while these two skills cannot be separated, they need to be developed in different ways.

Teaching Basic Skills: According to a hoary adage, “We are given two ears and one mouth so we can listen twice as much as we talk.” This is a maxim to remember when we plan our lessons – especially when we are dealing with a classroom of new learners.

Logically, listening should be the first skill you teach. In practice, however, most teachers get their students talking on the first day of class, and many make speech the major focus of their lessons. They tend to downplay the skill of listening, as do most foreign language textbooks. Yet listening is probably the more important skill involved in foreign language learning, as it certainly is in the acquisition of one’s native tongue.

Stephen Krashen and other thinkers have stressed that we acquire language best by using it in communicative ways. He was also one of the first to stress that language acquisition and language learning are not the same. Language learning (in the sense of making conscious discoveries about grammar, for instance) involves different mental processes, and those processes play distinctly secondary roles to those we use when we acquire language naturally. Language develops, he says, through exposure to and use of “comprehensible input” – target language the learner can understand and assimilate. All of this is textbook Krashen.

One reasonable conclusion from these observations is that language learners should understand what they are listening to before they begin to speak. Especially at the initial phase of language acquisition, teachers should avoid oral practice to some degree. Instead, they should have their students concentrate on comprehending what they hear. This idea parallels the experience of young children, who spend almost two years in linguistic silence before they begin to speak.

To use listening-focused learning, a communicative language teacher needs to incorporate active listening into their classes. This is done with activities in which the learners demonstrate that they understand, and receive gentle correction when they err. More advanced students must be explicitly taught to recognize reduced language forms heard in colloquial speech – as in “Whaddaya say?” Also, of course, part of aural comprehension is learning to decipher nonverbal clues.

Pure listening is rarely a good strategy for sustained language acquisition. Even if students are still in their silent period – a common phase for beginners, in which they speak very little if at all, – teachers should encourage active participation from them. This is the only way to confirm that they have understood. Participation can mean as little as a nod or a headshake, for example, or the words “yes” and “no” in English or their native language. Listening without speaking is important for foreign language learners, especially when their language learning has just begun, but at some level that listening should be participatory.

Listening activities do not always involve some other skill, but they generally do; the best classroom activities cross skill boundaries. Since the most typical pairing for a listening activity is to combine it with speech practice, a focus on listening can actually promote the effective development of speaking skills. To see how, let's turn to the activation of speech.

Focus on Conversation: Speaking activities best occur in classrooms in which learners feel comfortable and confident, free to take risks, and have plenty of opportunities to speak. While there are countless kinds of activities teachers use to develop speaking skills, they most commonly promote conversational speech. This, of course, requires the use of both listening and speaking skills.

Conversational language has four characteristics. It is interactive, in the sense that we talk back and forth in short bursts. Often, we do not even use complete sentences – “nice day, eh?” Conversation also has narrow time limits. We have to listen and respond without the luxury of thinking much about what we want to say. Conversation is also repetitive, in the sense that we tend to use a relatively small amount of vocabulary and a relatively small repertory of language structures.. And finally, of course, it is error-prone. Because of time limits, we may use the wrong word, pronounce something wrong or mangle structure. While we may hear the mistake and back up and correct ourselves, often we don’t.

Bearing in mind the earlier comments about listening, these characteristics of conversation illustrate an important difference between listening activities and speaking activities. Because listening is a learner’s primary source of comprehensible input, aural activities depend heavily on accuracy. To understand, learners must listen carefully, and their comprehension must be good. In many listening activities, we play a short recording of speech repeatedly until we think our learners understand it.

By contrast, learners shift heavily in the direction of fluency during conversation practice, which combines both listening and speaking skills. At this portion of the language class, the teacher kisses student accuracy goodbye. During speaking activities, the focus is on interactive, time-limited, repetitive and error-prone conversation. As is often the case in the language classroom, as we move from skill to skill, or from language study to language activation, we willingly compromise accuracy in the interest of fluency.

The How and Why of Language: Language originated with the two linguistic skills we have just reviewed – listening and speaking. But why? What is the purpose of language? And how did it evolve to play this role in our lives?

Whether we hear it or voice it, the purpose of language is to do the things that speech can do. In no way is it abstract. Like an axe, language is a tool with which we do things.

According to linguistic philosopher J.R. Searle, we use language to perform five kinds of “speech act”. These are commissive, declarative, directive, expressive and representative. Commissive speech commits the speaker to do something – for example, “I promise to bring it tomorrow,” or “Watch out or I will report you.” Declarations change the state of things – “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” or “You’re fired!” Directive speech gets the listener to do something – “Please come in,” “Watch out!” or “Why don’t you take your medicine?” Expressive language explains feelings and attitudes: “Those roses are beautiful,” or “I hate broccoli.” Finally, representative speech describes states or events – “Rice is an important Thai export,” or “The United States is at war again.” All of our speech seems to do one or more of these five things.

Language is such an important part of our lives that we use it to meet virtually all of our daily needs. Consider psychologist Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, which is often illustrated as a pyramid. In Maslow’s model, we can only move to a higher level of need after we have scrambled up the lower levels.

In his view, people have five kinds of need. Our most basic needs are physiological – food and water, for example. The next level up is the need for safety and security, which we achieve, for example, by dealing with emergencies. Tier 3 involves needs for love, affection and belongingness. The need for esteem – self-respect and respect from others – comes next, but the highest level in this hierarchy is the need for self-actualization. According to Maslow, in this last level “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write.” The point of this discussion is that we meet virtually all those needs through speech acts.

The gradual evolution of language has profoundly affected the nature of our species. As Stephen Pinker observes,

Human practical intelligence may have evolved with language (which allows know-how to be shared at low cost) and with social cognition (which allows people to cooperate without being cheated), yielding a species that literally lives by the power of ideas.

It is impossible to overstate the value or complexity of language. It is perhaps the most fundamental feature of our lives.

The Structure of Language

I recently updated my book, Teach and Learn: Reflections on Communicative Language Teaching, and made it available on Kindle and as an inexpensive paperback. To enjoy a read, please click here.


By Peter McKenzie-Brown

You are studying a foreign language, you want to learn ten new words every day, and the mental task of managing your growing word list seems formidable. To put the job into context, consider the following from linguist Stephen Pinker.

“Children begin to learn words before their first birthday,” he says, “and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school graduate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number.”

Smaller than a toddler’s daily intake, your ten-word vocabulary list suddenly seems like a pauper in a palace. And the problem of properly learning vocabulary involves much more than remembering words. In the classroom, only a few words and a small part of what the learner needs to know about a word can be dealt with at any one time. For the common words, which often have multiple meanings and complex nuances, you can only teach a bit at a time. The more information you present, the more likely your learners are to misunderstand.

For both teacher and learner, vocabulary is a huge challenge. But help is at hand from vocabulary researcher Paul Nation, whose magisterial 480-page tome, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language, offers endless insights into the science and practice of teaching and learning vocabulary. He calls his preferred method of vocabulary teaching the direct approach.

Nation describes vocabulary learning as a “meeting” between the learner and the word, and he stresses that it only makes sense to have close encounters with common, useful words. Most teachers emphasize the most common 2000 English words. The most widely accepted list is available on the Internet by googling Michael West’s General Service List.

“Useful vocabulary needs to be met again and again to ensure it is learned,” Nation says. “In the early stages of learning the meetings need to be reasonably close together, preferably within a few days, so that too much forgetting does not occur. Later meetings can be very widely spaced with several weeks between each meeting.”

There are essentially four ways to learn and teach high-frequency words.
• One is direct teaching, mentioned earlier. For the language teacher, explaining vocabulary is a critical part of classroom duties.
• Also, encourage your students to participate in direct learning, which involves study from word cards and dictionary use.
• A third method, incidental learning, can involve guessing from context in extensive reading or through word use in communicative activities.
• The fourth method Nation calls “planned encounters.” These encounters include vocabulary exercises and graded reading – that is, using reading materials like shortened novels with reduced vocabulary for language learners.(Graded readers are available in many language teaching bookstores.)

Nation’s direct approach to vocabulary teaching is built upon three main ideas. First, vocabulary teaching should focus on high-frequency words that will be of continuing importance for the learners. As a teacher, you have a duty to pass over low-frequency words completely or with little comment. Also, you have to make sure the learners come back to the word frequently, to diminish the power of forgetfulness.

Also, when you teach a word you should focus on its “learning burden” – that is, the features of the word that actually need to be taught. These can differ quite dramatically from word to word. Take the word “think.” You need to explain that it is an irregular verb; that it includes the irregular spelling “thought”; and that “thought” can also be a noun.

Finally, direct teaching should be clear and simple. To learn a word in all its complexity, learners need to meet it many times. Don’t try to teach a complex word – for example, the many meanings of the word “right” – in one sitting. That kind of intensive vocabulary teaching takes place in boring classrooms, and it frequently leads to perplexed students.

Living and Teaching in Thailand

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

This week it was a coup d'état. What next?!!!

My wife Bernie and I moved to Thailand from Canada several years ago just for the adventure. Well, adventure it has been, and we have enjoyed almost all of it! It’s a beautiful country, and we love living here.

We have observed the extraordinary economic development of the cities, and the growth of the middle class. However, we have also watched predations by government on the lives of Thai people. (We hope the peaceful coup will bring that to an end, but we have our doubts.) We have witnessed the desperate poverty of many people in hills and slums. And delightfully, we have also experienced the great kindness and gentleness of the Thai people.

Underlying all of this was my job as a teacher. I began teaching English, but today I teach visitors to Thailand how to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL). My work has brought stability into our lives, and it has brought us in touch with the Thai people. In Thai society, teachers are held in high esteem, and Thai students are a pleasure to have in class.

In this commentary I want to talk about living and teaching here, but also to offer a perspective on the country’s culture and politics. If the latter isn’t your thing, you can always stop reading!

Working in Thailand. I enjoyed a long corporate career before coming here. However, to get a job and a work permit in Thailand, before leaving Canada I took a one-year fulltime university program to get certification as a teacher of English as a second or other language (CERTESOL). That was a lot more than I needed, but it made it quite easy for me to get a job at Chiang Mai University (CMU) when I arrived. A year ago, I moved from the English Department to CMU’s Language Institute.

If you want to work in Thailand, TEFL accreditation is now required. You can get this from a number of places, although I personally think the TEFL course my colleague Karla M. Portch and I have developed is first rate. You will find many references to it on this blog.

Effective October 1 of this year, Thailand is putting severe restrictions on the right of foreigners to stay here indefinitely on tourist visas. As a result, becoming a long-term resident is now much more problematic. So, the other thing you need when you come here is a non-tourist visa – preferably a B (business) visa. If you can arrange that, it will be much easier to get a work permit.

If you have a TEFL certificate, you will be able to find work. Jobs are usually available at language schools, but they do not pay particularly well as long as you are a part-time teacher. Even small pay checks go a long way in this country, however, unless you want to enjoy a Western lifestyle.

As you gain experience, full-time opportunities can open up at language schools. They are also available in the public and private school systems, especially beginning at the end of May when the academic year begins. Chiang Mai alone is home to five universities, and many technical schools besides.

Also, many of our TEFL graduates find themselves teaching individuals or small groups of private clients. Most Thai people know the advantages of having English language skills, particularly because this country relies so heavily on the tourist trade. The demand for better English is great.

Living Here. Now settled, our lives seem normal. We think of Chiang Mai as just the place we live. Oddly, the ways we spend our days sometimes do not seem terribly different from when we lived in Canada -- different landscape, different language, different climate, different food and, yes, definitely a different pace of life! We have the occasional twinge of yearning for things more familiar, but that generally passes quickly.

Since we arrived here, we have witnessed all of life's rites of passage among our friends: marriage and divorce, birth and death. When a friend died a painful and lingering death from cancer a few months ago, it oddly created for us a special closeness to this city.

We are nearing the end of the rainy season, and we have had quite a bit of the wet stuff this year. In this part of Thailand the rains generally come for brief periods (often at night, when we are asleep), and are not at all disturbing. The rains are warm, and they keep the air clean and the vegetation lush and green. However, we don't travel a great deal during these months. But the dry, cool season begins in October. That's a great time for road trips.

A Recent Diary. A few weeks ago, Bernie and I went to a refugee camp at the Myanmar (Burma) border as part of my Rotary work. It was extraordinary to see again how different the two countries are. At one point we went to a temple whose landholdings were now, by international agreement, half on the Myanmar side of the border.

Once the border dispute was settled, the Myanmar authorities destroyed the village on their side and forced the Shan villagers to flee to Thailand. The army took over the concrete temple buildings and filled them with soldiers. The border now bristles with these people, who have also laid land mines just inside the border.

It's hard to believe the cruelty of the Burmese government to its ethnic (for example, Shan) minorities. This kind of thing is routine. On the positive side, a sort of "normal" life has been created in the refugee camp compliments of the Buddhist temple and an NGO.

The refugees now live in single-family bamboo huts. The kids receive a basic education at the temple, many of the women receive vocational training like dressmaking and crafts, and the men and some of the younger women go off to the fields to pick chillies or whatever else happens to be in season, for 10 baht (25 cents) per kilo. These people do not have Thai citizenship, so their movements are at the discretion of the Thai officials.

Who knows what the future holds for them? Well, at least for now they don't have to live in fear.

East Asian and Western World Views. While Thailand now has much of the feeling of home, the cultural differences are many, with Thais seeing the world quite differently from the way we view it in the West. Here are our quick summary and general observations: Westerners see things as rather black and white, while East Asians see them as heavily nuanced by relationships. Beliefs in the equality of man and in human rights are very real in the West. In East Asia, patron-client relationships are more important. And the immediate family is an incredibly powerful social unit.

In Thailand, one of the most extraordinary institutions is that of the monarchy. His Majesty King Bhumipol has been on the throne for 60 years, and the celebrations here have been great. It is quite hard for westerners to appreciate the reverence Thais have for their king. He's seen as simultaneously the embodiment of the Hindu god Vishnu (the preserver) and the incarnation of the Buddhist ideal of a king inspired by Dhamma (cosmic law). Thais believe without question that he can guide his people toward greater goodness, and his support of the recent coup was essential for it to succeed.

It is impossible to imagine how this country will ultimately respond to his death. Long may he reign!

The Coup. Like other westerners steeped in the traditions of democracy, I believe coups d'état are terrible. However, until the recent one occurred, the political situation here was an incredible mess. The country was running smoothly because of its efficient civil service. However, Thailand had not had a functioning government since February. That's when the prime minister and his cronies finally reached a level of corruption even Thailand couldn't handle. Although popular in rural Thailand, Thaksin Shinawatra was mostly despised by the middle class, intellectuals and the country’s elite.

There were weeks of mass protests and a rigged snap election that the opposition parties boycotted. The king called for the courts to settle the political controversy, and the results say a lot about the state of corruption at that time. The courts overturned the election and demanded a new one. The key members of the country's Election Commission were thrown in jail for their part in the travesty. It is unfortunate that the country did not have the political maturity to continue to rely on the courts to solve its problems. But perhaps the coup was the only viable solution. Who knows?

Final comment. There is still a great deal of blood being spilled in this country, but it is mostly limited to the three (Muslim) southernmost provinces. A tragic, shadowy insurgency began there nearly three years ago, and the previous government mishandled it from the start. People were being killed by both the terrorism of the insurgents and nastiness of the government, who waltzed over western concepts of human rights.

The recent coup offers some encouragement. The general in charge of the coup is a Muslim (such a thing has never happened before in this Buddhist country!) and he is known to be conciliatory. Perhaps the mess in Thailand’s Deep South can finally be resolved.

To my mind one of the biggest mysteries of this affair is how completely Thais seem to have accepted it. An extremely popular leader (at least, in rural areas) has been overthrown, yet the people have said nothing. Those I have spoken to seem to believe democracy is alive and well. Another common theme is that the king is safe and healthy, so why worry? Perhaps this just reflects how Thais view the world: after all, Buddhism teaches us to accept whatever happens.

Or perhaps they are afraid to express what they feel. The soldiers are serious about having taken power, and they will brook no interference.

Confessions of a Language School Junkie

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

Many people in Thailand’s expat community teach English, and many more are learning Thai. Combined, they have more than a passing familiarity with the frustrations of language learning. But help may be at hand: “If you follow a few basic rules, you can take the ordeal out of language learning,” says Dr. Lynn Morris. The occasion was a presentation at Chiang Mai University (CMU), and Lynn called his talk “The Confessions of a Language School Junkie.”

An economist by training, during the last 12 years Lynn has studied five languages in seven countries at 15 different language schools. He only moved to Chiang Mai three years ago, but has already developed conversational fluency in Thai.

In his seminar, he offered ideas about language study from a learner’s perspective – and in his case, a learner with a bad memory. His audience included foreign students training to be English teachers in Thailand, and English instructors from CMU. Lynn’s presentation offered suggestions for learners based on his own experience and research. Noting that the great majority of language school students give up long before they reach conversational fluency, he stressed motivation above all. “Motivation matters.”

But suppose you are motivated. What can you do to speed up your language learning? You need to begin by understanding that most students study too little and try to learn too much. No one can realistically learn more than ten new words a day, for example, but learn new words you must. Says Lynn, “Vocabulary is king in language learning, and verbs are the queen. Ninety-nine percent of the time that I can’t do something in language, it’s because I don’t know the right word.” As a personal aid to his language study, he has created a system of vocabulary cards and voice recordings for pronunciation practice. Technically speaking, this system uses a principle known as anticipated graduated interval recall.

Lynn’s language regimen has five deceptively simple rules. First, “Repetition is the mother of mastery.” Use it. Another imperative is this: learn the most common words in your early days of language learning and move progressively on to those less frequently used. Third, get the pronunciation right. “If you can’t pronounce a word,” Lynn says, “you can’t memorize it.” Vowels are the biggest pronunciation problem for most people, so make this an area of special effort. Fourth, learn the vocabulary before you begin a reading practice. After all, reading exercises are about developing reading fluency rather than acquiring new words. Finally, spend 80 percent of your study time reviewing what you have already learned.

A vocabulary fetishist in every way, Lynn suggests that you can actually define the stages of language learning by word count. For example, a learner who has only mastered 500-1,000 English words can have no more than functional proficiency. By contrast, fluent conversation in social settings requires 3,000-8,000 words. And to understand TV news, read newspapers or participate in group conversation, you need 5,000-10,000 words. To put all this in context, an adult native speaker can typically use or recognize more than 20,000 words.

A rare few schools can teach languages quickly. America’s government-run Foreign Service Institute, for example, has supremely motivated students (career diplomats, military officers); highly expert instructors; and vast financial and training resources. Even with these enormous advantages, the FSI needs at least ten months to train an adult to work effectively in Thai.

By contrast, most language learners have limited resources and average teachers, so the period of mastery is much longer. Unlikely though it may seem after your first Thai lesson, however, there is no reason why a serious adult learner can’t become conversationally fluent. It just takes time and dedication.

Peter McKenzie-Brown is head TEFL instructor at Chiang Mai University’s Language Institute. This column is the first in a monthly series.

March 2003