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The lesson begins with a challenging authentic listening from the BBC about smart phone addiction based around part 4 of the listening exam.

The lesson then moves on to quite a long text about ‘Digital detox’ which is based around part 1 of the reading exam.

To finish, my esteemed colleague Matt Ellman (@mattellman) has contributed a Use of English exercise focusing on word transformation, taken from a Telegraph article on the effects of Ipad use by toddlers.

Here is a quick overview of what I did in my class, but feel free to use the worksheets provided however you wish.

We had been talking about shopping addiction in the previous classes so the lead in was a simple recap of that. I asked the class how much they used their smartphones, what they used them for, what did they download the most, apps or songs and so on. I asked how much time they spent on their phones and whether they thought it was too much or acceptable. Finally, I asked if it was possible to become addicted to a phone.

I introduced the listening and played the recording twice as per the exam. I made the questions a little bit easier as the listening itself is perhaps a little bit harder than the class were used to, so if you want to change the questions on the provided work sheet, feel free to do so. The class found the listening challenging and commented on how the different accents and the speed at which the speakers talked made it more difficult than the normal course book listening.

FCE exam class Listening pt 4 Smartphones - Worksheet

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22397932 - Link for audio

After the listening I asked the students what they would do if I took their phones away from them? They said they wouldn’t be happy but they could use their home computers. I asked them what would happen if they couldn’t use the internet? They responded by saying they would use their home phones. The questions continued along the same lines, until eventually the students had no way of communicating or receiving information. I told them that they were in effect going ‘cold turkey’. We discussed the meaning and I gave examples and then boarded ‘digital detox’ and asked the students to discuss its meaning. This lead nicely into the next reading exercise. Again, feel free to change the questions as well as the pre reading vocabulary.

FCE exam class Reading pt 1 Digital detox - Worksheet

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19283726 - Link to article

To finish the class, I gave the students an article to read for homework about Ipad addiction in toddlers as young as 4yrs old, taken from the Telegraph. Matt found the article and prepared a Use of English exercise as a follow-up for the next lesson, to revise some of the vocabulary and to provide further discussion on the topic.

FCE exam class U of E word transformation Ipads - Worksheet

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/10008707/Toddlers-becoming-so-addicted-to-iPads-they-require-therapy.html - Link to article

FCE answer sheet - Answers for all parts

I hope you enjoy the materials and it would be nice to get your feedback on how it goes down in class.

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Working in a bigger school means I come in to contact with more teachers and inevitably leads to more discussion about lessons, students and what’s going right and wrong in the classroom.

Recently we had our mid-term exam period. Different classes going through all sorts of exams and then the inevitable marking period and report writing that teachers have to go through. It was during the exam marking part that I suddenly started to think about expectations. More importantly, teacher’s expectations and it was exasperated phrases such as the ones below that got me started.

We’ve just done this in class! Why aren´t they using it correctly!

We´ve covered the present perfect a million times and they are still using the past simple.

We covered all this in the revision lesson. Why can´t they just get it right!

This continued for the whole week. Teachers shaking their head´s, tutting loudly and furiously scribbling red pen over their student´s exams.

I remember being like this when I first started teaching. Constantly worrying as to why conditionals or the passive weren’t being produced by my student´s even though we had covered them several times that term. Getting worked up at every little mistake and then leaving the class blaming myself, then the students and at times the coursebook.

It wasn´t until I started teaching proficiency students last year that I realised I was looking at it all wrong. In every proficiency coursebook there is always a review of some of the most basic grammar building blocks. Past tense, future forms, conditionals, the passive and so on. Sometimes it´s really basic stuff, but the students still make mistakes with it. Even if they have been studying English for many years. It was then that I realised I needed to play the long game. I needed to lower my expectations. My expectations of what it is actually capable of teaching a student, who you only teach for an average of 2 or 3 hours a week. I needed to lower the expectations of the students, who had been sold a course that guaranteed improvement in the their English, without fail. I was being too hard on myself and on the students.

Let´s face it. It takes a native speaker until they are about 18 yrs old to be a truly proficient speaker of their own language. I´m basing this purely on my own thought process and experience by the way. No research or Google searches. This obviously depends on educational background and other varying factors. You then go on to university or into the working world and you are faced with a whole new world of language. Whether it is based around your studies or the area of work you have gone into. You grow older and pass through a multitude of different experiences that you have never encountered and you have to learn new functional language, lexical sets and ways of using all of this new language input correctly. In effect, you never truly stop learning language.

So, should we really expect our students to absorb a coursebook over a nine month period and then instantaneously regurgitate it perfectly, either through the medium of paper based exams or during pair work?

Of course not! Take the pressure off yourself, enjoy the process of learning and stop worrying about learning the past simple in two weeks so that you can then move onto the next unit and start worrying about the past continuous.

Teachers must be patient, unafraid of contrasting “difficult” examples, and not expect too much too soon. (Michael Lewis, The English Verb, 2002)

Your worry and stress will only carry over into your classroom and the student´s will pick up on it. Although, this is easier said than done when you have pressure from other sources.

The fact that we have to test/assess/evaluate our students every term doesn´t help us in this matter. Targets. It´s all about hitting bloody targets! Showing results, showing progress, getting return on investment. The culture we live in breeds this kind of need/want. The constant strive to get ahead, be the best and get the top job. It´s putting teachers in a pressure cooker and who only knows what pressure the kids are under.

Parents have expectations of both the child and the teacher. Unfortunately, it is the teacher that takes the brunt of things when the child isn’t performing well. I’m sure we have all had to deal with the angry parent laying blame at your door because the report you wrote was actually an honest portrayal of their child rather than the standard “make it sound good, so we can get more money out of them next term” rhetoric. Yet, I also feel that the schools themselves help to feed these expectations by assuring students and parents alike, that after one year of hard study at a particular level, they will be ready to move up to the next level. Of course this depends on whether they pass the exams they have each term. The exams that are based exactly on the work covered in the book, heavily grammar based and have a low pass mark that basically ensures even the weakest student can scrape through and feel as though they are progressing.

I appreciate that the above is a generalisation and not all schools work like this but I imagine there are a few people thinking they work in a school/business that does operate in this way.

What I’d like to see is ‘Slow Teaching’. You’ve heard of ‘Slow food’, right? Anyone who has taught from a B1 coursebook and above, must have come across it!

Slow Food is an international movement founded by Carlo Petrini in 1986. Promoted as an alternative to fast food, it strives to preserve traditional and regional cuisine and

encourages farming of plants, seeds and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem. (wikipedia, 2013)

I would love teaching to adapt this thinking. Away with the rush and tear of pacing schedules, making sure you complete 75% of the coursebook and ensuring you give homework every lesson so that the students use the activity book and we can justify asking the parents to fork out an extra £20 for it. Instead of welcoming the students on the first day and telling them that by the end of the course they would have covered x,y and z. Tell them that what ever happens, happens. What comes up in class is what’s taught.        (Promoted as an alternative to fast food) Don’t lie to them by saying if they do all the exercises and homework they will instantly become a better student and speaker of English. Be honest! Tell them that learning a language can be a long, hard road. It’s not easy. It can be fun, it can be rewarding and is worth the effort, but that effort must come from within.(encourages farming of plants, seeds) Step away from the coursebook, do something different, try a new approach and make it relevant to the students.                          (characteristic of the local ecosystem) 

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It’s just a thought. It might just work. At the very least it might make your life a little less stressful.

It been nearly a year since Emily Bell and I presented at IATEFL 2012. I have managed to get all the videos working on the Prezi presentation that we did, so I thought it would be nice to get it on here, what with IATEFL 2013 just around the corner. Enjoy.

http://prezi.com/mezyjzmu6vp-/dogging-blogging/

The lesson is based around an interactive computer game called ‘Spent’

http://playspent.org/

The site was first brought to my attention by Graham Stanley (@grahamstanley), who talked about using the game at a small British Council conference, last year. Graham is one half of the team behind the site, digitalplay, so I knew it would be worth checking it out.

http://www.digitalplay.info/blog/

The game was designed to raise awareness of about poverty. The basic premise is that you have $1000 to see you through until the end of the month and you have to make a variety of different choices based on a range of different situations that crop up, along with finding a job, keeping a roof over your head and looking after your young child.

The game itself is very simple to play and you don’t need to be a gaming geek to play along. It’s just a matter of clicking on the option you want and reading what happens next. To help, some very kind people have developed a walk-through guide to teach you about the game, how to play it and what to expect.

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2011/02/spent.php

The game deals with lots of issues from homelessness, workers unions, obesity and doing the weekly shop to name a few. This means there are ample opportunities to use authentic materials to expand on the areas that come up in the game. Obviously, you need to play the game and see what comes up frequently, depending on the option that is taken, but it is easy to plan ahead and prepare the materials before the lesson and bring them up when the time is right.

Authentic materials – Google images

I think that the lesson would be suitable for upper intermediate and above and mature teens at FCE.

I introduced the topic by getting the students to think about what they would spend £1000 on in a month if they had no real responsibilities and no bills to pay. After feedback, I asked them how they would spend the money if they were a single parent with no job and nowhere to live. This worked well as a lead in and got the groups discussing from the very beginning.

One of the first options is to decide where to live. This is determined by distance to where you work, cost of housing depending on distance from the city and how much you spend on petrol to get to work. This in itself promotes lots of debate, but usually results in the students choosing to live quite a way out of the city and this then leads to some information about the rate of homelessness in the US. This lead me to ask the students about homelessness in Spain, if it has got worse, has the crisis made it worse and if they had known anyone affected by it. I then introduced this article, which i found in the NY times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/world/europe/spain-evictions-create-an-austerity-homeless-crisis.html?_r=0

The article also had a slide show of photos to accompany it and I used these too. Below are some files, showing how I used the article and photos. They are designed to fit with parts of the Cambridge exam but can be easily adapted.

Homelessness reading article and U of E exercise

Homeless pictures CAE part 2 speaking

Homeless pictures CAE part 2 speaking Homeless CAE speaking part 3

Another part of the game involves the students deciding how much to spend on the weekly shopping trip and the exact items to put in the trolley. This again gets the student talking and leads nicely into the next article, which I found on the Guardian website.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/nov/18/families-rising-food-prices-budgets?INTCMP=SRCH

This was one of a dozen articles on the subject and this is what is so good about this lesson. You can pick and choose your authentic materials depending on level and age and there is bound to be something related to the issue you are searching for. Below is what I did with the article.

Shopping is expensive Reading CAE

Another one of the scenarios that came up in the game was whether to buy a $5 salad or save money and get a burger from the dollar menu. This topic was actually touched upon when we talked about the shopping article above so it was another good place to introduce another text. This was an article about obesity in Spain, caused by the psychological effects of the crisis.

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/health/2012/11/12/obesity-rises-among-spanish-women-due-to-unemployment/

Obesity reading gapfill

Obesity reading complete

I think the above is just scratching the surface and that the lesson is full of possibilities for a variety of different activities and resources to be exploited. It provided a lot of speaking practice and opportunities for correction and highlighting of emergent language.

If you use the lesson or any of the ideas, I would love to hear how it goes.

We are currently in-between books, so I am trying to use authentic texts and other supplementary material before we crack on with the exam preparation.

In the previous lesson, I introduced my students to TED talks - http://www.ted.com/talks and showed them one of my favourite talks –  Birth of a word by Deb Roy. A must for anyone who is interested in linguistics or general language learning/acquisition.

I went through the website and its functions and also pointed out the subtitle feature and generally praised it as a very useful learning tool.

I left them with a piece of homework. They had to explore the site, find a video of interest and then plan a 2 minute introduction and summary of the talk itself. This would work as good practice for part 3 of the CPE speaking exam. I asked the students to email the videos before the class so I could watch them and be prepared with any related materials and follow-up questions.

Of the three students present (class of four) one of them emailed me their chosen video. It was a short presentation on how You Tube works together with copyright holders to create a win win situation for all involved.

After watching the video I searched for some articles that were related to the same theme or in a similar vein. I got lucky and found an article in the Guardian newspaper that pretty much went hand in hand with what the video was talking about but further extended the example of music videos. -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/jan/04/record-labels-making-money-youtube?INTCMP=SRCH

I then went on to find another article in the Guardian related to Youtube, but this article went in an altogether different direction. It spoke about the dangers facing children who used Youtube and how they were just “3 clicks from explicit material.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/feb/05/youtube-study-explicit-material?INTCMP=SRCH

I went into the class with just the video, two articles and a vague idea of where I wanted the class to go. Luckily, one of the other students had found a TED talk he wanted to watch and by chance it was loosely related to the You Tube talk. It was entitled, Tracking the trackers.

I asked the student to introduce the video and we then spoke briefly about internet security and how one search on the internet can lead to a multitude of advertisements for related websites and offers popping up on your websites.

We watched the video and spoke about what was said, whether the programme was a good idea and the pros and cons of the internet as a whole. This built up some nice vocabulary and worked well as a warmer, getting the students focused on thinking about the internet and so on.

I asked the next student to introduce her video. She did this by practising part 3 of the CPE speaking exam. A two-minute talk to introduce and summarise what we were about to watch. I asked a few questions about YouTube, how often they use it, what do they normally watch and we spoke about how videos can go viral and I showed them the latest craze, the Harlem shake.

After the video, we discussed some of the language that came up and talked about the general theme of the video and who was affected by it. We then moved on to the first text.

Before the class, I took the first article and cut the paragraphs out and made a simple text jumble exercise. This simulated part 6 of the new Reading and Use of English exam for the CPE. If I had had time, I would have written an extra paragraph that didn´t fit into the text, but seeing as the text was quite long anyway, I focussed on getting the students to concentrate on the reference words and ordering the information.

This proved to be quite difficult but it got the students working and they were pointing out why each paragraph went where and giving reasons, and it proved to be a good workout for them. I gave them the original article and they checked their work and then I asked them to read the article, highlighting collocations and any language they wanted to ask about. At the end of the reading I asked them to discuss who they thought really benefitted from the copyright agreement.

After feedback we moved onto the next text. I had written the title of the text on the board and left out the last two words and asked the students to discuss what they thought the article might be referring to. Eventually they worked it out and we talked about the dangers of the internet and who was most at risk and how this could be prevented.

Before the class, I had gone through the text and tippexed out some of the phrasal verbs and important collocations (part 2 of the Reading and U of E exam) and asked the students to read through, complete the gaps and then discuss who was responsible for what children can and cannot see on the internet.

We now had two texts, which were kind of connected. I split the class into pairs and gave each pair one of the texts. I asked them to look for the main points of each article, no more than three, and then to summarise the article into one paragraph. The results are below;

With the arrival of the internet and websites such as YouTube, the music business has changed. Streaming accounts for a bigger slice of the cake than buying records through downloading . Therefore, labels and musicians need to rely on advertising. This is a new relationship between the music industry, advertising agencies and streaming providers. the ultimate aim is to generate revenue for all the stakeholders involved.

Children surfing on the internet are surprisingly close to explicit material. For instance, on YouTube a child can easily end up watching pornographic or violent content from the innocent act of watching a sesame street video due to the “suggested videos” feature. Even though these platforms have their own systems to prevent these baleful consequences they admit they´re defenceless against this situation.

However, the bright side of the story is that great strides have been taken during the last year in order to provide children with a safer internet experience.

We now had two summary paragraphs and all we needed was a question to tie them both together and complete the writing task and the students homework.

I asked them to look in a copy of the new course book and see how the authors had written out the part 3 speaking exam questions and then to work together to come up with their own question. After some debate as to what the focus of the question and corresponding exam response should be, they finally came up with this;

“Which is more important? Our children’s safety or the interests of the You Tube stakeholders?”

I was really happy with this lesson and the way that it developed, as well as the way the students responded to working without the course book. I made sure that they were aware we were still working towards the exam and continuously referred to the part of the exam that each task was testing or going to test.

If I had the chance, I think I would exploit both of the texts more and perhaps have a few more structured speaking activities to really milk the topic, but the lesson flowed well and it was very natural. The timing worked well too, as the 3hr class finished just after the exam question was put on the board.

Now I’m just waiting for the student’s responses and I will be interested to see if the fact that they themselves created the task will have any bearing on the quality of their writing and the answer they provide in their essay’s.

I had chosen a film to watch with my girlfriend. My Blue Valentine, starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams. See the trailer here - 

It´s a brilliant film. A great portrayal of how even the best relationships, no matter how much in love the couple are, can suffer from the slow erosion of daily life. A great script, combined with great acting allowed the film to have the appropriate effect on the viewer. My girlfriend was in tears and I was left feeling angry at the two main characters, for not being able to see the problems and deal with it in an adult way.

Don´t worry, I haven´t hijacked this blog to start writing film reviews. I wanted to write about one of the scenes that really stuck with me after the film had ended, which was a short piece of dialogue between the two main characters, Cindy and Dean.

Okay. I´m not about to admit that I´m drinking at work, but I instantly associated this way of thinking/feeling to my current teaching year. At first, I was going to say that you should replace the drinking for a coursebook and that would be that. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that I was being unfair towards coursebooks. Undoubtedly, the drinking/coursebook takes the edge of. It makes life easier and keeps you cocooned in your comfort zone.

It was this part that hit home;

Okay, nearly 4 weeks in and I had a bad day. I shouldn’t complain really, but I had prepared, I had planned, I had made notes, yet for all three lessons I seemed to be scrambling to keep my head above water, for one reason or another.

I was wondering whether it was how I had planned. Did I give myself enough time? Did I think about their needs? Did I write my lesson plan out in such a way that I could easy snatch a glance and see exactly what was coming next? Should I be more explicit with my timing? The questions are endless. I know more or less what went wrong and what I need to do and I’m sure that some of it comes down to how I plan, but the idea of how we plan and how much time we spend planning has been something I have been thinking about for a while. So, I’m going to throw the question out there; How do you plan? Is there a special place you go to? Is there a set amount of time? Is there a specific set of procedures you work through?

All thoughts welcome.

My shelf. Image by me.

So, a new school, a new start and a new teaching year. Also, a new topic to write about this year. Coursebooks. After a year of teaching without one, it seems like the obvious choice, right?

Well, my new school has issued me with coursebooks for all levels, pacing schedules and exam deadlines. There feels like very little freedom and space for experimentation. I don’t particularly want to rock the boat, well not just yet, so I am going to tow the line and confine my ramblings on the blog for my experience with the coursebooks.

I hope you will find it of interest.

(image taken from google images)

It’s been nearly 2 and a half months since my unplugged project came to an end. I would like to say I have been on a long, sun drenched, relaxing holiday and completely disconnected my overworked brain, but instead I threw myself into summer work and have only just come up for air.

Throughout that time, my reflection of the last teaching year has been on slow burn and after a recent conversation about what ‘emergent language’ was, I felt it time to bring an end to this chapter of my teaching life.

For those of you who have followed this blog from the beginning, skip to the next paragraph. For those that are new, a very quick recap of the project. One intermediate class, one fairly inexperienced teacher, a blog to record everything that happened in the class and the chance to teach in the unplugged approach for an entire academic year. There were ups and downs, crisis’ of confidence, euphoria, breakthroughs and blogging block.

All that’s left to do now is summarise my thoughts on the whole thing. Which is easier said than done.

I will start with the good news. The four students that took the PET exam and were part of the project group from the beginning, all passed. You wouldn’t believe how happy this made me. The class was never really exam orientated, although with the exam fast approaching toward the end of the year I did base lessons around the PET exam and the final classes were devoted to exam technique and making sure the students were aware of the format.

Looking back at the year, I realise how incredibly lucky I was to carry out such a project. This couldn’t have been done without the support of my D.o.S, Emily Bell (@emilyvbell), my fellow teachers at IH Santander and my ever-expanding and awesome PLN. The magnitude of what I was actually attempting didn’t hit me until people like Anthony Gaughn, Jemma Gardner, Chiew Pang, Mike Harrison and Scott Thornbury, and many others, began to take an interest in what I was trying to do. In all honesty, it was completely bonkers. A second year teacher, with a hare-brained idea of teaching without a coursebook, with minimum materials and then taking on the added pressure of blogging about it and then presenting at two conferences. Madness. But you know what, I wouldn’t have changed it for the world. I took a journey that many people would never even have imagined, a journey that many other teachers would have shied away from, teachers with years of experience that have continued to follow the same well trodden path and never ventured from their comfort zone. I proved to myself that I could teach and that I was making a difference and I hope that people who have followed this blog, have been inspired or provoked to look at their own teaching and what happens in their classroom.

I also feel honored to have championed teaching unplugged as a legitimate teaching practice. While I am well aware that there needs to be a lot more research and debate rages as to whether it is ‘just good teaching’. I genuinely feel that it is an authentic way of teaching and can help a teacher to strip down everything around them and get back to basics.

I feel like a more rounded teacher, a more confident teacher and more importantly I am unafraid to experiment in my classes and push the boundaries. I’m convinced that this can only benefit my students and help to push English language teaching into the 21st century. Even if I don’t get it right the first time,  the amount of reflection and learning that happens is unprecedented, which I think project unplugged demonstrates.

To finish, I just want to add my thoughts on emergent language. Which I think is the cause of much debate and is quite hard to define and even harder to extract and then work with. I think emergent language exists. It is an indicator that the students are pushing themselves to experiment and produce an utterance that they are not quite sure of or perhaps haven’t studied properly but is appropriate to say at that moment. The slightly garbled and mixed up second conditional, which is then pounced upon by the teacher, exploited, clarified, practised and reinforced so that it become a part of that students language armory.

Just as important as emergent language is the language gaps our students have. The things they aren’t saying. The structures they aren’t using, when in fact the situation is screaming out for it. Some people might argue that the coursebook caters for this. Ploughing through from unit 1 to unit 12 will cover all the bases and fill those gaps, but unless we actually listen to our students and allow ourselves the opportunity to notice these gaps through conversation driven activities, we may just end up papering over those gaps and not filling them correctly.

Output (emergent language) + Input (filling the gaps) =   Results

On that note, I will draw a line under my unplugged experience. It’s been emotional and my Dogme days are not over. I have ideas and motivation for future projects but they will have to wait.

Reblogged from Teacher Training Unplugged: