ELTeach

This Spring, why not begin your English journey again with the free online classes from ELTeach?

Our centre is based in Nottingham, UK and our trainee teachers are keen to practice their teaching skills. Lessons are friendly and welcoming. You’ll practise conversation, grammar and new vocabulary, as well as other skills, together with other English learners from across the world.

Our new intensive classes (A2, B2 levels) on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings at 09:30 have started; please join us!

Our new part-time course (A1 plus, B1) begins on Wednesday April 29th, 17:30 - 19:45 (UK time). Classes are on Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings.

Please write to us for more details: [email protected]

You can also register with us here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScr0OrY2qK4nTvT9eLz0Xfn4l8c0jgFNwaPwuxzWlVVK8A5Gw/viewform to stay informed about all our classes, all year round.

CREATE MORE SPACE

In this short series, I’ve outlined some of the advantages of fluency-led (or usage-based) approaches to lesson design, such as TBL, Dogme, and CLL.

To make the case for fluency-led teaching, the contrast between PPP is often made; and this often leads to coursebooks being (I think) caricatured.

Modern coursebooks typically offer a whole variety of material to be exploited in various ways: video, images, texts, kickstarter discussion questions, fluency-focused activities. They are, in effect, packed with meaning. Some even leave the more repetitive grammar practice activities till the end.

The problematic synthetic syllabus is still there, but it’s been sidelined.

Further, times have moved on from where teachers slavishly follow course books, or indeed teacher’s books. In courses like CELTA, part of the training is about how to select and adapt activities.

Dave & Jane Willis (2018) offer these criteria for evaluating coursebook activities
👉 Does the activity engage learners’ interest?
👉 Is there a primary focus on meaning?
👉 Is there an outcome?
👉 Is success judged in terms of outcome? Is completion a priority?
👉 Does the activity relate to real world activities?

The best tip for busy teachers may be: more time for fluency.
🧑‍🎓 Exploit the freer practice activities; move them forward in the plan
👩‍🏫 Exploit the ideas for lead-ins and pictures; these can be expanded into discussions.
👨‍⚖️ Slow down the lesson for more thorough and engaging feedback on content and language; involve the students more in this process.

These opportunities for fluency have been variously described as going “off-piste” and part of the “dark matter” of teaching. They can be planned for by leaving space in the plan.

These “golden moments” are opportunities not only for language development but for real personal involvement in lessons.

EMERGENT LANGUAGE - CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK

Providing feedback on students’ language use is potentially one of our most important roles.

Students benefit most when corrective feedback is given within a meaningful context, and when they are developmentally ready.

In fluency-led lessons, teachers can cast their net wide and focus on a whole range of emergent language.

Among kind of grammatical errors most worth paying attention to are systematic ones, “structures that learners appear to be newly producing with some frequency” (Diane Larsen-Freeman, 2003).

In this context, so-called recasts have been shown to be particularly effective (as long as students are paying attention!) because:

👉 They can be part of natural discourse; they’re a kind of input
👉 They are “hot” (in the moment)
👉 The student is invested in the exchange / message / task
👉 They don’t need to interrupt the communicative flow
👉 They don’t have the affective force of a correction
👉 Students’ attention may be “freed up” to focus on language form.

Do you use recasts? What other feedback techniques do you find most effective with your students?

A Task-Based approach to language learning repositions the focus on specific grammar (and vocabulary) items as the subsidiary aim of lessons. The main aim is that students are better able to perform something in the real world – to do something *with* language.

Bill Van Patten (2017) tries to find some common ground between various authors' definitions of a task:
👉 Tasks involve the expression and interpretation of meaning
👉 Tasks have a purpose that is *not* language practice.

Meaningful tasks:
- create a kind of “learning pressure”;
- allow learners to become aware of the gaps in their knowledge;
- make language learning more salient as a result.

Grammar becomes the "midwife", as it were, rather than the main event of lessons. And if you’re at all interested in emergent language, TBL offers a valuable lesson structure which makes room both for students to focus on their own language, and for teachers to respond to their language.

Further, students are not simply chatting. Because success is evaluated by *task achievement* rather than just participation, the framework compels learners to (a) hone their own language to be precise about meanings and (b) rigorously attend to their interlocutors' language as they work together to reach a concrete outcome such as solving a problem, reaching a decision, or creating something. This non-linguistic purpose provides the incentive for the L2 speaker to convey information with genuine precision.

It is this "need to mean" that ultimately drives interlanguage development.

In short, TBL (TBLT) guarantees a purposeful environment where learners must flex their communicative muscles i.e. “push” themselves both in terms of linguistic accuracy and complexity.

What do you do in fluency-focused lesson sequences to ensure the learners are precise with their language?

Language is a complex dynamic system. It can’t just be installed; it grows, emerging untidily and piecemeal as learners process input and attempt communication. Research into learners’ interlanguage shows that grammatical development tends to follow predictable sequences, a kind of internal syllabus.

As Bill Van Patten writes, “The role of communicatively embedded and comprehensible input is not a hypothesis in L2 acquisition… it’s a fact.”

That understanding messages is absolutely essential for building the language system is an idea that goes back to Stephen Krashen’s heyday.

We can further ask – how do we make that input compelling? What will learners do with the information they receive? Comprehensible input helps build the system, but opportunities for meaningful output help learners access that system, revealing gaps, and creating the need for them to hone and negotiate their meanings in interaction with each other.

Fluency-led approaches such as task-based learning (TBL/TBLT), by putting communication at the heart of lessons, are designed to co-opt and work *with* these processes.

The teacher’s role, rather than pre-selecting language to teach, then becomes something different:
👉 determining learners’ needs
👉 selecting and designing materials
👉 providing motivating activities in an encouraging environment
👉 responding to the learners’ developing language.

Teaching becomes less about controlling language development — and more about supporting it.

How does it change our practice if we lose this illusion of being able to control a learner’s interlanguage development?

*FREE online English classes* from ELTeach, UK! Our centre is based in Nottingham, UK.

With our friendly teachers, you’ll be able to practise conversation, grammar and new vocabulary, with English learners from across the world.

Weekday morning classes at A2 & B2 levels begin at 10:30 on Monday 23rd March (09:30 on other days).

We have part time classes at A1 and B1 level on Saturday mornings (09:30) and Wednesday evenings (17:30)

Evening classes – at A2, B1 and B2 levels - are on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 17:30 – 19:45.

All times are UK times.

There’s no need to attend every class – come when you are free. All we ask is that you try to attend regularly. You'll need a laptop to participate.

Write to us today: [email protected]

Register with ELTeach here and we'll keep you informed about all our free classes all year round: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScr0OrY2qK4nTvT9eLz0Xfn4l8c0jgFNwaPwuxzWlVVK8A5Gw/viewform

Worried your language awareness isn’t strong enough for CELTA?

You’re not alone.

A lot of preparation courses are just content behind a paywall. This one is different: six live online sessions with experienced CELTA tutors, designed to help you understand English grammar and language awareness with real guidance and real interaction.

Join us on March 25th, April 1st and April 8th for our next pre-CELTA Language Awareness course.

£170

Apply at [email protected]

🤭

Fluency-led English Language Teaching covers a rich history of humanistic approaches; ones that prioritise the students’ meanings as opposed to following a structural syllabus. These approaches definitely have something to offer us if we’re interested in the communicative part of communicative language teaching.

Three key movements:

Community language learning
Charles Curran, early 1970s
👉 Based on a counselling model, with the teacher as facilitator
👉 Begins with the clients’ (students’) meanings

Dogme
Scott Thornbury, 2000 until now
👉 Conversation-driven and stripped down
👉 Unmediated by the clutter of materials

Task-based learning (TBL/TBLT)
N.S. Prabhu, Dave & Jane Willis, Mike Long, Rod Ellis, 1980s until now
👉 The aim of the lesson is based on students’ succeeding in real or pedagogical tasks
👉 Information gaps and communicative goals (outcomes) optimise the chance for students to negotiate meaning

These approaches have in common that they are radically student-centred. In each case, the idea is the same, and very simple: start with language use. The lesson focus is then firmly on the students, and the language is derived from what the students want to say – possibly with other sources of input, such as the teacher themselves and other immediately relevant and available materials.

The language focus in all three approaches usually comes later in the lesson, and is contextualised and reactive; the teacher can use techniques such as oral reformulation and “upgrades”. Many teachers find this liberating, because instead of repeating familiar presentation routines, they respond to language as it emerges.

Making his case for TBL, Mike Long (2015) described its radical roots in an educational tradition that rejects authoritarian structures and instead follows an alternative and progressive tradition which takes learners’ agency as its starting point.

To begin like this, with the students (*their* contexts, *their* meanings, *their* language) is still probably the boldest and most radical step a language teacher can make with lesson design. The results can be transformative. The language focus is kept personal and relevant; and teachers are kept on their toes.

At IATEFL this April, I’ll argue that too often we sequence learning in the wrong direction, putting the cart before the horse.

This “upside down” sequence is baked into many of the published materials we use, and of course is a format associated with teacher training courses – because it’s trainable!

It’s even apparent in the way that lesson aims are described.

Many lessons are like this:
1. presentation of language, often from a text
2. pattern practice
3. the culminating fluency stage, hopefully incorporating the target structure (or vocabulary).

But we know acquisition doesn’t work this way.
What happens if we flip lessons and prioritise fluency?
—
Part 1 of a short series leading up to my IATEFL talk.

Neil