I’m teaching a class of university freshmen, in an English Dept. Some of them learned absolutely no English in high school. Some seem to have learned nothing in JHS. Some do not recognize the word “young”. One boy said he doesn’t understand “does” (as in the written question “Does it take a long time?” and this is after 20 x 90-minute sessions of me circling and using TPRS! I think that student was pulling my leg, don’t you? Or is he mentally retarded?).

At the beginning of the semester, I started off circling with questions, but many did not understand the questions. I checked comprehension with my barometer students, but became bogged down: I had to translate and explain EVERYTHING! And write it down on the board.

There are also some wise guys in the class who ask questions just for fun.
There is also one boy who asks picky questions that require complex answers (he’s the one who said he didn’t understand the word “does”). That’s why he asks them. I think he asks questions out of nervousness. I don’t think he understands my answers. I’m not sure he’s paying attention to my answers.

So I stopped checking/explaining/translating “every little thing” (http://www.avexnet.or.jp/elt/ also [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5aUXAodv4Y])

This meant going back on my promise to make everything 100% comprehensible.

Tuff? Or have I taken a wrong turn here down the TPRS road?
Waddaya think?

This list is useful because it helps me answer a key question: what should I teach (first)

Thomas writes:

We can now look at the frequency dictionary to target which words [especially verbs] to use and then use the corpus to decide which forms of the verbs have the highest frequency.

The list of 5,000 most frequently used words includes “do”, coming in at #18. But

• how to teach this?
• Which form of “do” does this 18th-most-frequently-word-in-the-English-language refer to?
• Is it “do” as in
  • “How do you do?”
  • or in “What do you do?”
  • or “Do you understand?”
• And does that mean that do and does are equally frequent (i.e. is “do” in the list a lemma)?
• Or should you teach “does” separately?
• And which should you teach first, “do” or “does”?
• Does it matter?!
• What a di-lemma!

Screenshot2011-01-24 1-01-59

The importance of free reading in mental development as well as acquisition of knowledge might help explain the success of many home-schooled children.

http://voicethread.com/#q.b708367.i3748651

I’ll post more about specific points made in this presentation later., once I’ve had a chance to digest the contents.

Here’s a list of 12 “Brain Rules” which look interesting and of interest and relevance to EFL teachers. The link to this was given on the More TPRS mailing list. I’m generally leery of fake-science “theories” and “brain-based learning” seems a prime candidate for that category.

Also, I wonder about rule #11: doesn’t that sound suspiciously like polylogism? However I might learn something from this, so here goes. Plus I like that each rule has its own icon and is illustrated with video. A picture is worth a thousand words.

EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.
SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.
WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.
ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.
STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.
VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

The following article sums up some key ideas that form the basis of TPRS, an approach to teaching second/foreign languages that is largely based on, and supported by, Stephen Krashen’s theories of language acquisition. It was written by Jack Taylor, an AET in Japan,  and originally posted on the TPRS Japan Forum. It is reposted here, with his kind permission.

Are your language students silent? Do they never seem to improve? Do they learn words one day and forget them the next? If your answer to any of these is yes, then you may have unwittingly subscribed to one of the nine language-learning myths. A lot of these myths are counter-intuitive, and some seem so obvious that teachers can believe in them for years without ever suspecting they are false. Yet every day, in small and subtle ways, teachers who believe in these myths are damaging their students’ chances of success. This article is dedicated to teachers young and old who have managed to fall under the spell. Without further ado, I present to you the nine most common language learning myths.

Myth Number One: If students don’t know grammar, they won’t be able to speak.

Many teachers who are frustrated with their students’ inability to speak fluently point the finger at too much memorizing of grammar rules — and rightly so. But still, there are still a great many teachers who make grammar study the main part of their language programmes. The reason why teachers insist on grammar is the title of this myth: teachers think if their students don’t learn grammar rules, then they won’t have learned the language. There is a big problem with this viewpoint, and this goes to the core of the real nature of language learning.

Conscious versus subconscious learning

Real speech is subconscious. There’s no getting around it. When you are chatting to your friends over a beer, apologising to your boss after missing the deadline, or whispering sweet nothings to your lover, you are not thinking about which particular adverb to use or about which verb ending matches the tense of your subject. And think about it; you were speaking perfectly fluently and correctly in your native language by the age of five, and how many grammar rules had you learned then? Do you even know all the grammar rules of your native language now? To be sure, second languages are not exactly the same as first languages. But there is a growing body of research that shows that the grammar patterns that show up in a persons speech are immune to the effects of direct instruction.

Immune to the effects of direct instruction.

That means that no matter how much time you spend teaching your students grammar, they won’t actually learn it so that they can use it in speech. Sure, they can learn the rules, and they might be able to remember them if they have enough time to think, and are relaxed enough that they can remember the rule. (This situation could arise in, for example, a grammar exam.) But this does not mean that they have actually learned it in the true sense of the word.

You may think that if they just practise one grammar rule until it has been internalized, then practise the next until it has been internalized, and so on, and so on, then at the end you will have a fluent speaker. Unfortunately, language is simply too complicated for this. For a start, no-one even knows all the grammar rules in English, or any other language, for that matter. We know a lot of them, sure, but linguists will be the first to admit that we don’t know everything. Just look at the grammar rule for the word “the”. In any decent grammar book the explanation will take up several pages. Are learners even able to learn this one rule well enough that they can use it in speech? If they are learning it from a teacher or a textbook, I have my doubts.

Another thing is that there is more that language learners need to worry about than simply grammar. Someone who is truly fluent needs to master not only grammar but also pronunciation, rhythm, intonation, stress, semantics, situational context, how to judge the other speaker’s mood, the culture of the people being spoken to, and more. Even if our students were all super-intelligent and never stopped studying, there is simply no way they could master all these things. That is, there would be no way if they tried to do it consciously. If they stop trying to learn grammar consciously, and teachers stopped basing the whole of their lessons on it, then students would progress in the language much faster.

There is some place for conscious learning in the study of language, true. But it should be kept to a minimum. Studies done with high school students in the USA show that the ratio should be 5% conscious learning to 95% subconscious learning.

Myth Number Two: Correcting students’ errors improves their language skills.

It seems so obvious. If a student makes a mistake, how will they know about it unless we correct them? Actually, there’s more to it than this. We’ve already learned that we don’t think about grammar while we speak. Guess what correcting students’ errors encourages them to think about? You guessed it, it makes them think about grammar! So what happens when you manage to get someone to think about grammar while they speak? They stop being able to speak, that’s what. Or at least, they stop being able to speak fluently. Here’s an example. If you don’t believe that, then try giving someone a new “grammar” rule. Ask a native English speaker to tell you what they did yesterday, with one catch – they aren’t allowed to use words containing the letter ‘e’. You’ll find that their fluency just vanishes.

If you keep correcting students grammar when they talk, or when they write, you will find they will get more and more concerned about grammar, and will be able to speak less and less fluently. This is not to mention the fact that having your speaking corrected just feels horrible. As students realise they aren’t getting fluent in their new language, their motivation decreases, until you have a class where the only students who care about learning the language are the straight A kids — and they only care because they don’t want your class to be the only one where they get a B. The rest of the students spend their time talking, daydreaming, sleeping… anything to keep their mind off the fact that they can’t speak the language you’re trying to teach them. Does this sound like a familiar situation to some people? The solution, or rather part of it, is to stop correcting your students’ errors.

By this point you may not be surprised to know that there is extensive research out there that shows that correcting student errors does not help them improve. Students improve just as fast, or faster, without any error correction at all. It turns out that just as the learning of language structures is immune to direct grammar instruction, it is also immune to error correction. There is another process at work here that explains how people get better at language. That doesn’t mean to say that error correction is absolutely useless. I recommend that you correct students if the meaning of what they say is wrong, or if a native speaker wouldn’t understand. Just do it gently. Do it indirectly, model the correct structure, do it with a smile, and make sure the student feels good about herself.
 

Myth Number Three: Students improve by speaking the language.

This is perhaps the biggest mistake that language teachers make, and probably the most counter-intuitive thing about language teaching. I can see the legions of teachers out there, urging students to Speak, Speak, SPEAK! Actually, speaking the language only helps students to improve indirectly. To see why, let us consider these facts:

• Speaking is the number one cause of anxiety for students learning a new language.
• Infants go through a period of silence before they start to speak, and when they do speak they only speak single words. This is the same for children under the age of ten or so who move to a country where they don’t speak the language. Both of these groups invariably gain native-like fluency.
• There are multiple cases of children who have never been able to speak due to brain damage or illness, but have developed perfect listening, reading, and writing abilities in their language.
• The vast majority of students studying foreign languages using speech-focused methods drop out or graduate without actually becoming able to speak.

If speaking made students better at language, then those students wouldn’t have dropped out, and those kids that couldn’t speak would never have developed their other language abilities. And yet we see this is not the case. So what is the common thread running through these points? The answer is input.

Input

Infants and migrant children both receive vast amounts of language input, first from listening and later through reading. Children with no speech still receive input, even though they can’t respond to it. On the other hand, most students learning foreign languages in school often don’t get a great deal of listening and reading in their classes – the focus is usually on grammar and speaking. If the focus was shifted to input, then the students would progress more and would be less anxious about learning.

This all comes back to the idea that language learning is subconscious. If we eliminate all conscious forms of learning language — learning grammar, having errors corrected, and practising rote speech — then we are left with understanding messages, or in other words, input. This is the real key to fluency. If students are in an environment where they are able to understand written and spoken messages in their new language every day, then they will naturally learn the language without ever being taught. If the conscious attention of the students is on the meaning of what is being said, then the subconscious mind is free to connect sound and meaning, and to build a map of the grammar of the new language. This is the kind of grammar learning that can be used in speech.

Myth Number Four: If students don’t study hard, they won’t learn the language.

With the answers to the first three myths, I’m sure you can begin to see that studying hard isn’t everything in language learning. To be sure, studying hard can be very useful, but the most important thing is how you study. You can study all the grammar rules you like, but you’ll never be able to speak fluently. You can practice rote speaking until the cows come home, but you’ll be at a loss when the time comes for real communication. On the other hand, if you concentrate very hard on getting lots and lots of comprehensible input, listening to interesting things in the language, and reading books you like and can understand, then you will fly ahead.

Driving this point home is the concept of the “affective filter“. This is the idea that negative emotions can interfere with learning languages, while positive emotions create the best learning environment. If you’re bored, anxious, or frustrated, as frequently happens when doing conscious study of hard subjects such as grammar, then it is harder for you to learn language structures subconsciously. If, however, you are happy, excited, amused, curious, or enthralled, as frequently happens when reading or listening to interesting content, then it is much easier to learn language structures subconsciously. So really the best advice for language learners looking for best results shouldn’t be to study hard, it should be to play hard.

Myth Number Five: Writing new words many times is the best way to remember new vocabulary.

It’s a scene common to language classes across the world. Students study a list of words, then write them down many times so that they won’t forget. Unfortunately, they do forget. With this kind of learning, the words are separated from their context. The more context you have, the easier it is to remember the words. If you can tie the words to an emotion, to a movement, to an image, or to a story, then it will be much easier to recognise it the next time it comes round. If you hear the word spoken and then see it again written down, then you have another thing for your memory to latch on to. If you hear it and read it enough times while concentrating on meaning, then you’ll find your subconscious just knows when to use it and where it should go.
 

Myth Number Six: Students need a lot of time to practise writing before they can form correct sentences.

This is true only if you are teaching using explicit grammar rules and forcing your students to write. In this case, then certainly students will need a lot of time to practice before they can write. They will also have to think about every sentence, so the writing itself will also take a long time. In fact, it can be agonizing to watch.

Real writing ability, on the other hand, is subconscious, just like speech is. There is more time when writing than when speaking, true, but the best authors don’t think about grammar, they think about content. Can you imagine Shakespeare struggling over whether to use “the” or “a” on every page while penning Macbeth; or Dan Brown trying desperately to remember whether his nouns are countable or non-countable as he writes the scene where Robert Langdon escapes his pursuers and finally cracks the Da Vinci Code? I think not.

Of course, we can’t expect our students to write masterpieces straight away. So how can they learn to write subconsciously if they don’t practice writing? We have already learned the answer. They have to get input, and this time it has to be reading input – and lots of it. The research on reading is very strong. In controlled studies students who only read consistently do better than students who have language lessons. They get better vocabulary, better grammar, and especially, better writing ability. If you want your students to write well, forget writing practice. Get them to read.

Myth Number Seven: The best way to teach reading is to do it in class.

First off, I want to congratulate you if you are teaching reading in class. You are already a cut above the rest. Students who learn to read in class will perform much, much, better than students who don’t. Reading in class should be a core part of any language programme. However, if that’s all you’re doing to teach reading then you’re missing out on the very best way. The best way is one that catches teachers out. Again, this has been proven time and time again by the research. The one method that trumps all others, that produces the best gains in vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and writing, is one that doesn’t need to be done in a classroom at all. It’s the best method of teaching languages on the planet, and it doesn’t even need a teacher. I’m talking about free voluntary reading.

Think about it. All you need to do to get that all-important subconscious learning is to read messages and understand them. All you need to do this is read a book. That’s it. Any teaching, any comprehension checks, any summaries, and any other of the many things teachers like to do just get in the way. If you’re free to just read, and you’re free to choose something you like, then the whole of your time will be spent understanding messages. There is no method that is more efficient. And it doesn’t even have to be done in the classroom. As long as you can get students interested in reading, and give them interesting books to read, then they will teach themselves. If you don’t have a free voluntary reading programme in your school, you are doing your students and yourself a disfavour.

Myth Number Eight: Teachers should save difficult grammar rules until students have mastered the easier ones.

This is another one that is found in a great many language classrooms. It sounds great – no-one likes to learn difficult things before they’ve learned the easy ones, right? Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply when learning foreign languages. You will recall that grammar patterns that people use in spontaneous speech are immune from the effect of direct grammar instruction. You will also recall that with lots and lots of comprehensible input people will learn grammar rules subconsciously and without any instruction. These are not the only things; it also turns out that everybody learns these subconscious grammar rules in roughly the same order. No matter what grammar rules are taught, no matter what the learner’s native language is, and no matter what input the learner gets, this order will not change.

This order is based in large part on how much that particular grammar feature affects the meaning of what is said. For example, in English the “-ing” form is learned fairly early, whereas the 3rd person “-s” on the end of verbs is learned a lot later. They both seem simple, but the “-ing” form affects the meaning of what is being said much more. So actually, a lot of the “easy” grammar structures that are taught in the first year of language courses, are in reality anything but.

So how can you know what is the right input to help your students progress? The answer is, you can’t. But as long as you give the students a wide range of comprehensible input, using all tenses, all cases, and both “easy” and “hard” grammatical features, then the right input will be included somewhere in it. Learning each grammatical feature is a complex process, and second-guessing by the teacher will not help. So what will happen if you deny the students a chance at hearing more “advanced” grammar? When the time they should have learned it actually comes, they will get stuck, that’s what. Rather than helping them acquire the “easy” grammar, this will stop the learning process altogether. What’s more, the strange input they have been receiving might lead to fossilization, meaning the students will develop permanent errors in their subconscious map of the language.

So please, when you give students input, keep it natural, use all the tenses, and limit the vocabulary you use. That way, you have the best of both worlds: language that is natural, rich, and that is easy to understand. You will find you have created an ideal environment for learning grammar subconsciously.

Myth Number Nine: Total immersion in the language is the fastest way to become fluent.

Many teachers see that their students aren’t fluent, and they see that children who go to other countries become fluent with no lessons, and they think that total immersion is the only way anyone could possibly learn a language. It is true that total immersion can be very good for learners, but for beginners it is almost never the best way. This is because the best input is that which is comprehensible. With total immersion, you are avoiding learning grammar rules and you are getting a great deal of input, but much of this input is incomprehensible. Incomprehensible input cannot become subconscious learning, and to make things worse it is the second biggest cause of language anxiety after speaking. So any time you hear incomprehensible input, you might actually be damaging your chances of success. What’s more, there are plenty of situations in total immersion where you might be forced to speak. We have seen the effects of speaking on language anxiety before; when coupled with lots of incomprehensible input, the effects can be severe.

This may go a good way to explaining why children often succeed in immersion environments and adults often do not. Children are not often pressured to speak, and the input they receive is usually quite simple and focused on the here and now. Adults, on the other hand, are often pressured to speak, and they often receive complex input which is separated in time and space from their situation. So for older children and adults in particular, it is important to get them beyond the beginner stage before letting them loose in an immersion setting. The language classroom can be an excellent place to do this if the right methods are used.

So what’s the best thing to do?

The best way to ensure you don’t run foul of these language-teaching myths is to use a method that is based on comprehension of the language. My favourite is TPR Storytelling, but you are welcome to look at the alternatives and see what you can find. Comprehension-based language teaching is very flexible – it is perfectly all right to adapt methods and maybe even make your own. Whatever you end up doing, please post about it here. We would all love to know.

I learned a couple of lessons today.

1. Don’t use the same movie and lesson-plan with both an advanced class and a dummies class.
2. When playing a DVD in the classroom, don’t start up the projector until just 5 minutes before you plan to actually show the movie.
3. The other lesson was more of a realization: I need to get students to produce language in order to know what they are, and are not, capable of doing in the language.

You  know the movie “Pursuit of Happyness“? I saw it again recently, and decided to use it in class,  for the cultural background.

I started the class with a short discussion and a song. While they were filling in the blanks, I put the DVD into the player, cued it and paused it. Mistake.

  Before showing the next part of the movie, I engaged them in a simple discussion of the first part of “Pursuit of Happiness” which we had seen the previous week. The conversation flowed smoothly until I was down to just 20 minutes of class-time left. Time to show the movie.

Except that this sucker “powers down” if you don’t use it for a while. While I’d been chatting away with students, the projector just shut itself off (it flashes a 5- minute warning message on the screen, but I was looking the other way and didn’t see it).  We got sound, but no picture. Erm. Switch off and wait a minute then re-boot.  Give ‘em a short dictation while that’s happening. Sound comes up, but still no picture. Try again. More dictation… Sound comes up, but still no picture. By this time, there’s just 10 minutes left. I apologise, and one student at the back pipes up, “Thank you and goodbye!”  And on that note, I call it a day.

The afternoon class. I’d shown the same beginning 15-minutes of the same movie last week to my lower-level class, and had them write a few sentences about what they saw.  Here’s a sample of what they wrote:

He don’t pay a taxi. And his wife leave to the house. He lost a his machine. He colored [=painted] his rent appart.

Chris is don’t have money. Chris’s wife don’t have money too. So He [sic] looking for a job. The job is find. The job is stockbroker. But the wife is leave the house. So He hard for the wife back the house.

He hasn’t work. He lost wife. He was stolen a medical machine.

He doen’t [sic] have a job. His wife divorce him. His son iu [sic] very sad. They are nuhappy [sic].

The man is no maney, But he has a sun. I want to they will be happy.

I then handed out an “extended reading” – a summary in short, easy English sentences, of what we had watched the previous week.  (Part of my difficulty teaching this class is that I don’t know the extent of their knowledge. What I know is taught in junior and senior high schools in Japan does not give me much of a clue to their actual level of passive and active knowledge of English.)

“Read and translate into Japanese the extended reading, sentence by sentence.” We go briskly round the class. It goes well. One girl reads “He must pay the daycare centre”. We’d just agreed that daycare centre is “ho-iku-en” in Japanese, but she had to ask her neighbour what “must” means. These students never fail to astonish me.

Next activity: a short discussion of the Declaration of Independence and some of the key wording, for which purpose I’d printed out the Japanese Wikipedia entry on said Declaration, and put it up on the screen and had students read the key sections aloud. Interest was flagging, so I kept this short and moved on to showing the next part of the movie.

No technical problems this time. Ha! I’d learned my lesson. Unfortunately, all that hard work had tired my poor little darlings out, and one by one they slumped across their desks, till only half the class was still paying attention. And all within the space of 10 minutes. And the heating wasn’t even on!

What lessons do you think are to be learned from this? Here’s what I concluded.

Lesson: Comprehensible input. Showing an English movie with Japanese subtitles does not constitute comprehensible input.

Lesson: what an advanced class finds interesting (American history, the Constitution, concepts of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, etc) is not necessarily what a less advanced class will find interesting.

Related articles

• Lesson Plan of The Day – Us Government – Revolution and Independence (socyberty.com)

My university has developed its own Learning Management System (called T.I.E.S., similar to Moodle, but – in my opinion at least – not so user-friendly). They offer a video service – they’ll record your class then put it up online, on T.I.E.S. It’s quite a hassle, they won’t provide a cameraman, setup takes around 10-15 minutes, but once set up it is relatively unobtrusive. They give me a radio lapel mike, so I can roam the room. The camera is set at the back, on wide-angle. I have a remote control which I use to turn it on and off. As one purpose is to create videos of potential interest to online English-language learners, I stop the video when we get to the “boring bits” – like a vocab test, or when the students are doing writing activities. Sometimes I forget.

Last year, I tried editing the videos, but it took forever and I eventually gave up.

I have posted three of the videos on “Open T.I.E.S.” which anyone can sign up for.  I welcome feedback from TPRS teachers.

If you wish to view the videos, you first must register. Register for “OpenTIES”, that’s the pink part of the homepage, not the blue part.

Click here to go the English-language OpenTIES registration page. (It asks for an affiliated school or university or business: just type in anything, fictional is fine, no-one’s going to check. Obviously the TIES folks can’t imagine that anyone might want to use TIES who is NOT affiliated with a unviersity, school or business. That grinding sound you can hear is me gnashing my teeth.) Sorry, but T.I.E.S. only works with Windows, and only with Internet Explorer.  (Can you hear my teeth grinding again?) Once you are signed in, type the URL directly into the address bar of your browser. These videos are not edited in any way. 

Basics B – a freshmen English class, 4 skills, 2 x 90-min. periods a week (both with me). They also get “Reading and Writing” 2x / week, and “Listening & Pron.” 2x / week (not with me).

Session #2 September 30th, 2010
http://www.tiesnet.jp/open/open.php?id=j0010229

Session #4 October 7th, 2010
http://www.tiesnet.jp/open/open.php?id=e0008232

Session #6 October 14th, 2010
http://www.tiesnet.jp/open/open.php?id=e0008262

I’m losing student interest. I’m using stories (Blaine Ray’s Look I Can Talk 1 & 2). Book 2 is more engaging for the university students I teach than book 1 (and I’m using the textbook, not the mini-stories or extended readings).

My most difficult class is the lowest level class I teach – the writing class. Last week, knowing that my usual trick of using the story as the focus would not work (I would lose interest faster than a Hindenburgh losing gas), I followed a suggestion on the moretprs yahoo group and asked questions to find out information from the students, so I could use that.

That worked. But! It meant I went in a completely different direction from the one planned. I cannot, for the moment, see how to both follow a syllabus/lesson plan AND keep the students engaged by talking about them.

(Ben Slavic has written a great deal of useful advice on this topic, e.g. the splendidly unforgettably titled Don’t Be an Asshole, and also here Creativity.)

With the 3 classes I teach today, I have a syllabus I’m supposed to follow. It is topic-based. Today’s topic is “Describing people”.  I couldn’t think of lots of interesting PQA to do using “long hair, bald, black hair, short, fat, thin” etc., and what I did do was not all that interesting for students, judging by their responses.  So I compromised by mixing PQA with questions about the pictures from Look I Can Talk 2 (chapter 1).

It worked. Sort of. Not great, tho. This personalization thing is much, much harder than I thought. Talking about students works, no doubt about that. And the lower the motivation level of students, the more time needs to be spent talking about them (the lowest level class I have can tolerate about 2 minutes of talking about something else, max). But, man! It’s hard to keep up for 90 minutes.

In fact, I don’t even try to do this for 90 minnutes. I switch activities after about 10-15 minutes. I try to alternate oral/aural with reading/writing, and mainly listening with more productive activities.

While I’m on the topic, I came across this sentiment again recently. I’m sure you have, too: “Teach students, not a curriculum.”

Is this one of those touch-feely phrases that seem to be profound but actually are meaningless? My first reaction was, come again? Then WHAT am I supposed to teach TO students?

As mentioned above, I think there are levels of ability, intelligence, studying competence, call it what you will: students who are lower down the scale need a proportional increase in the amount of time spent talking about THEM (and that is how I interpret “teach students, not a curriculum”). More intelligent/academic/whatever students can tolerate, even enjoy, 90 minutes talking about past events unrelated to them, about a movie we watched recently, or even (further up the scale) about abstract concepts such as justice, private property, individual freedom, etc.

On the other hand, if you don’t have a curriculum, a syllabus, a plan, you’re going to run out of things to talk about pretty soon, in my experience. You have to have something to turn to when you or the students dry up. A lesson plan, a story, a syllabus, something.

Yet on another other hand (who’s counting?), if you don’t stick to your syllabus and instead ask questions and talk to students about whatever comes up, you are very quickly going to exhaust students’ vocabulary. Then the conversation either dries up, or slows down while you write everything on the board (and quickly run out of space!), or the whole conversation lapses into the students’ native language.

Back to my topic-based classes. The topic for period 3 was “Health”. Somehow, I was not in the mood. What can we talk about? “Are you healthy?” Have you ever broken a bone? Did you go to hospital this year?” It actually went something like this:

“When the washbasin fell on his foot, did his foot break? Have you ever broken your foot?” (Nobody had except me, so…) “I have. I broke my foot 20 years ago. I broke my left foot. I broke it running for a train” (running for a plane was coming up in the next story). Nobody has broken their foot in this class except me. (Took about 5 minutes for them to understand what that meant).  Has anybody caught a cold this year? Been to the hospital? OK, that’s enough. Dictation: 5 students in this class have caught a cold this year. Mr. Ochiai caught swine flu (that was a joke).”

Do you teach a foreign or second language at university? Is fluency a key goal of yours? Are you using TPRS, or some similar approach? If so, you might be interested in what I’ve written below, and I’d be interested in reading your comments.

Every teacher who attempts to use TPRS must adapt it to his or her circumstances. However, I believe there is something rather unique about using TPRS to teach EFL at university. Here’s my list.

1. Our students are not complete beginners. The TPRS approach is to first write the target structures on the board with the translation into the students’ native language (L1).  Of course. It is assumed that it is the first time that these students have come across these structures. You can’t assume this with 18/19 year-olds who have been learning English since junior high school at least.
2. Our students are not children. Many of the TPRS books are aimed at junior-high students or younger. Lots of talking animals and mini-plastic elephants. Our students are adults. That means
   1. they learn differently from young children
      1. (according to Susie Gross) adults need only come across a word or phrase 70 times in order to learn it, whereas children need 200-300 repetitions
      2. as a result, they may become bored more quickly with excessive repetition
      3. as a result of 2, teachers of adult learners will need to use a different rhythm and pace from the ones appropriate to younger children
   2. they are likely to get bored quickly with stories of talking animals and mini-plastic elephants
3. There is large gap between receptive and passive skills. Sometimes this gap is huge.  Most students have passed university entrance exams which involve reading and understanding quite difficult written texts (there is no listening, writing or speaking sections to the entrance exams, except for a few questions in English in the interviews and those who take written exams do not have interviews). Yet many of these same students are unable to write complete sentences, and most cannot recognize the words and phrases when they are spoken. In terms of fluency, they are beginners. They need reviews of the English they “learned” in junior high school, i.e. when they first began their formal study of English.
4. Students do not understand the concept of fluency. Way back when, I taught a few classes in junior high schools. The first-year students were bright, cheerful, had bags of energy and curiosity, and the one thing I remember about all of them was that they were not confused about the purpose of learning English: the purpose of learning English was to be able to communicate with English-speaking people. Duh! What else could it be? The confusion starts to set in in the 2nd year and by the 3rd year confusion has yielded to certainty – the certainty that their teachers have no intention of teaching them English to communicate with people. As this certainty and understanding grows, it produces a kind of slow-motion shock, a dulling of the mind. This dulling goes hand in hand with a drop in energy until the zestful 1st-years have turned into 3rd-year zombies (and the process is repeated in high school).

Students have learned, but not acquired, English. They cannot speak it, and cannot understand anything but the most basic of utterances and those only when they are spoken at very low speed.

BUT, they have their pride: if the teacher goes back to junior-high-school level materials, they will resist. I have told my students almost every class that to improve their English they must read and listen a lot, and what should they read and listen to? Not BBC news, but simple stories or texts that they can understand 95% of without a dictionary. I can see the disbelief in their faces, in some cases flat rejection: “The guy cannot know what he’s talking about! Where’s the exit? I gotta get outta here!” “But… but… but… what about vocab? What about grammar? How am I going to learn these?” My colleagues listen politely, then go back to teaching the way they’ve always taught – mostly in L1, and with loads of explanations. Explaining. That’s what they think language teaching is. It’s the same on TV and on radio. The “5-minute English lesson”, which involves a short dialogue focusing on  a single structure: the dialogue is repeated twice, the target structure is repeated slowly several times – total time about 1 minute – leaving 3-4 minutes for the explanation blah-di-blah in Japanese.

5. Teachers see their students only once a week. University classes are 90 minutes. Some classes are twice a week, but most are just once a week. Teachers see their students once or twice a week, but students have more than one English class. Take my students as examples. They have a Basic English (4-skills) class twice a week. That’s 3 hours. They also have a twice-a-week listening class and a twice-a-week Reading/Writing class. We’re now up to 9 hours a week. What if all those teachers used TPRS, or at least a C.I. approach, and were all aiming at developing fluency in all 4 skills?

Having written the above, I now think it would be simpler to show rather than tell. I’ve started videoing some of my classes. I’m still ironing out the bugs (no cameraman, for one thing, and I have to do all my own editing – it took me 2 days just to figure out how to transfer the recording from my digital camera to my computer), but once I have some decent footage, I plan to upload it. Perhaps some more experienced TPRS teachers will view it and leave comments. This will be a form of coaching without the need to travel.

To be continued.

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