Fossilisation - an #eltchat summary

This is a summary of the second chat on Wednesday 11th September.  The full title of the chat was:

How can we tell if fossilization has set in and how do we prevent it or get out of such a state?

 

The chat was expertly moderated, as ever, by @Marisa_C, @Shaunwilden and @theteacherjames.  There were very few participants in the chat and this was definitely the shortest transcript I've ever had to summarise (only five pages!).  Let's think of it as quality over quantity and perhaps this summary can provoke further discussion on the #eltchat Facebook page.

 

The suggestion for the topic was prompted by Scott Thornbury's new blog, The (de-) fozzilization diaries, where he discusses his problems with acquiring Spanish as a second language.  I re-produce a definition of fossilisation from Scott's blog here:

 

Selinker (1972) noted that most L2 learners fail to reach target-language competence. That is, they stop learning while their internalized rule system contains rules different from those of the target system. This is referred to as ‘fossilization’. It can also be viewed as a cognitive process, whereby new learning is blocked by existing learning. It remains a controversial construct with some researchers arguing that there is never a complete cessation of learning.

(Ellis, R. 2008. The Study of Second Language Acquisition [2nd edition]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 963)

@Shaunwilden commented that it's not just an L2 thing - he has fossilised errors in his L1 from too much exposure to students' errors!!  I think most of us could relate to that!

 

What are the causes of fossilisation?

• Poor instruction - whilst poor teaching can not generally be blamed for fossilisation, and is clearly not the only cause, in my context in Vietnam where there is a very non-communicative approach to language learning, it was certainly a major factor.  Students came to university having had 10+ years of poor teaching and had errors so fossilised that they were very difficult to correct.
• Students reach a stumbling block in their interlanguage.
• Lack of exposure to authentic English - this is a particular cause of fossilised pronunciation errors.
• When students feel they can be understood, they stop learning.
• Lack of student motivation.

How do we know fossilisation has set in?

• @Shaunwilden suggested that, as teachers, we instinctively know.
• @theteacherjames said that he looks for inappropriate errors for the level - confusing he and she or unvoiced word endings, for example.
• For me, it's when usual error correction is totally ineffective.

Does fossilisation matter?

 

The consensus here was that if it prevents effective communication, then it does matter; otherwise, perhaps not.

 

How do we get out of the fossilisation stage?

 

As @naomishema pointed out, it's much more difficult to 'unlearn' something than it is to learn something new.  Students often realise their mistake immediately after they make it, but they still make it because it's so ingrained.  They can be aware of their own fossilisation, but unable to self-correct or fix the errors.  So, how can teachers help:

• Talk about the problem openly and honestly.
• Be strict with your students (in a nice way!) - via @theteacherjames.
• Drill your students, especially if the errors are with pronunciation.
• Display 'Our favourite errors' posters in the classroom - these should be created by the students with some teacher input if they don't recognise all their errors.  @Marisa_C suggested using post-it notes which could then be removed when the error was fixed.
• Encourage peer correction.
• Record activities and play them back a couple of months later to track progress and uncover fossilised errors.
• Make a checklist of common errors and have some students monitor and keep count of how many times they are made in order to raise awareness.
• Use a writing correction code to encourage students to find their own errors.
• Have students keep a portfolio of their work which can then be used in a one-to-one tutorial.

So there you have it, a short but sweet #eltchat which I sincerely hope will prompt further discussion.

 

Links

• Wikipedia definitions via @Marisa_C

 

Staying happy and getting ahead in ELT

This was the title of a recent webinar hosted by Cambridge English Teacher and presented by Colm Downes.  What follows is a summary of what he had to say.

Colm presented us with ten tips which could be applied equally well to helping you to secure a better job or ensuring that you remain happy and secure in your current one.





1.  Research yourself

Understanding yourself better will help you make employment decisions which are more likely to lead to a successful, satisfying career.  Ask yourself:

• What makes you happy?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?

The process of analysing yourself will help you identify the skills, experience and knowledge you have that employers are looking for.  With the results of your research, you can make a career plan:

Diversify, go up, or get out

Diversify:

• ELT author
• Teacher trainer
• Examiner
• Expert (EAP/ESP)
• Academic
• Editor

Go up:

• Teacher centre manager
• DOS
• Senior teacher

Get out:

• Self-employed
• Government
• Photographer
• Artist
• Journalist, etc.

2. Improve your qualifications

• Pre-service - for example, CELTA
• In-service - for example, DELTA
• Post-grad - for example, MA in Applied Linguistics
• Other - for example, CELTA YL, IDLTM, CertICT (certificate in teaching languages with technology

3. Get involved

Teaching can be a solitary profession, so:

• observe other teachers
• invite feedback from other teachers observing you
• take advantage of training opportunities
• volunteer to give training sessions yourself
• join online communities
• watch webinars
• get to know your colleagues better
• share your experience and get noticed

4. Diversify

• Teach a wide range of classes - all ages/levels, etc.
• Teach a variety of specialised classes - BE, EAP. ESP, etc.
• Actively seek out more work in the areas you enjoy teaching.  
• Join a SIG.
• Become more of a subject expert in the areas that interest you most - for example, blended learning, CLIL, etc.
• Do more than just teach.  Develop your hobbies and interests to a professional standard.
• Go freelance and develop a 'portfolio career' - short-term consultancy work, article writing, summer school teaching, pre-sessional instructor, etc.

5. Be honest, be real, be authentic

• Be honest with yourself and in interviews - it'll make you sound more credible.
• Admit your knowledge-based limitations in an interview and explain what you're doing about them.  Don't admit behavioural flaws.
• Remember your students are real people and are often the best resource you have in the classroom.
• Ask real questions, discuss real issues, and share real opinions.
• Keep your lessons fresh with real, relevant, recent authentic material.
• Go beyond traditional ELT materials, especially if you are teaching skills as well as the language.

6. Become an examiner

• It's an extra string to your bow
• It can supplement your teaching salary
• It adds variety to your work
• Look at Trinity ESOL, Cambridge English Language Assessment and IELTS

7. Attend a conference

• Keep up-to-date with the latest developments in the field
• Show your commitment to professional development
• Network and sell yourself to prospective employers
• Get an insight into career options you haven't considered before
• Present yourself to gain confidence and recognition

8. Make better use of technology

• Create your own website to give yourself an online presence
• Read blogs or write your own
• Network via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Cambridge English Teacher, etc.
• Build a professional Facebook page
• Keep up with the latest teaching and learning trends
• Complete a CertICT online
• Participate in webinars
• Read ELT journals
• Keep an eye on the job market
• Register for conferences
• Apply for scholarships
• Search for resources

9. Demonstrate your competency

Competencies are a combination of the knowledge, skills and behaviour needed to do a specific job.  Examples of interview questions you might be asked to demonstrate your competency are:

• Tell me about a time when you had to make a difficult decision
• Tell me about a time when you demonstrated good customer service
• Tell me about a time when you showed strong leadership skills
• Tell me about a time when you played an important role in a team
• Tell me about a time when you experienced pressure at work

A common technique for planning answers for such questions is to use the STAR method:

You should prepare short memorable stories which demonstrate how you employed these competencies in action.  You should also measure your impact - you should use impressive facts and figures in CVs, cover letters and interviews.  For example, stating that you have prepared over 200 students for an IELTS exam is much more memorable than saying that you have experience preparing students for IELTS exams.

10. Develop a plan

Write a personal PD plan to help you to identify the specific tasks and goals you need to complete to achieve progress in your career. Aim to identify both short-term and long-term goals with time scales included.

Creative pedagogy, language learning and technology

This was the title of a recent Cambridge English Teacher webinar presented by Graham Stanley and what follows is a summary of what he had to say.

Creative pedagogy

The idea of creative pedagogy was introduced by Andrei Aleinikov in 1989.  He said:

'Creativity should be a central part of what you do with learners to motivate them and better promote lifelong learning.'

Creative pedagogy is:

• Helping learners how to learn creatively.
• Transforming the classroom into a creative and flexible learning environment.
• Allowing learners to innovate, to create.
• Taking risks and thinking imaginatively.

Role of the learner

Help learners to develop:

• self-motivation
• confidence
• curiosity
• flexibility

Components of creative pedagogy

• FLUENCY - generating new ideas
• FLEXIBILITY - shifting perspectives
• ORIGINALITY - doing something new
• ELABORATION - building on existing ideas

How do we link creative pedagogy with language learning?

Here are some ideas for activities:

1. Island project

• Put students in small groups and get them to design an island, using the lexis of geographical features and places.
• Put the islands together to form a group of islands where students can be creative.
• The island in the middle can be an unknown island - the teacher's island for students to explore.
• This activity can be combined with the coursebook, with the island in the centre being used as a kind of narrative to what is going on in the core text.
• The islands can be revisited throughout the course and added to - places, currency, social issues, government, crime, etc.

2. Werewolf

This is a roleplay game based on 'Mafia'.  You can read the rules here.  The teacher acts as the narrator or storyteller.  The students are 'werewolves' who have to eat the villagers, or 'villagers' who have to eliminate the werewolves. Each night, one villager is devoured by the werewolves.  During the day, the werewolves try to hide their identities and the villagers try to discover who they are. 

The aim is to promote fluency and encourage the students to speak a lot.  It is an exciting game which really engages the students.  You could personalise it by getting students to write themselves a role - baker, teacher, etc. - so that they have more to talk about.

3. Creative writing prompts

Writing prompts can come from a variety of sources, but a favourite would be storycubes.com.  Here, students have a set of dice with images on them and they have to make up a story from the images.

Scamper

In his book on creative thinking techniques, 'Thinkertoys', Michael Michaelko came up with this acrostic:

Substitute it

Combine it

Adapt it

Modify/magnify it

Put it to some other use

Eliminate it

Reverse/rearrange it

In our teaching, we can use this to look at activities we've always used and change them in some way.

Gamification

We can take some of the ideas embedded in games and adapt them for ELT.

Graham gave us the example of a questionnaire carried out at the beginning of a school year which showed that students felt that writing was boring and they didn't like it.  To overcome this, he gave writing an element of gamification by introducing speed writing.  Not only does this engage students, it also improves quantity and fluency.

• Give students ten minutes in every class in which to write (it's a good idea to use a special notebook for this).
• Set a timer.
• Students have to write as much as possible on a given topic.
• Students have a table in the back of their notebooks giving the date and the word count (you can also have a chart on the classroom wall giving the results for the whole class).
• Students count the number of words they've written.
• The teacher circles the errors.
• The score is recorded as word count minus the mistakes.
• Students self-correct afterwards and can ask the teacher questions if they don't know what the errors are.
• This is a competitive activity, with students competing both against themselves (to do better than their previous score) and against each other.
• Introduce different levels that students have to reach.
• Give extra points for special achievements - most original writing, fewest mistakes, most creativity, best introduction, etc.
• Display the leader board prominently and award small prizes - badges, stickers or 'class money', for example.

Promoting speaking with an online game

Using computer games can be very engaging for students, but we must keep in mind a clear language aim every time we do so.  Here is a good idea for an activity to promote speaking:

• Use screenshots of images from a computer game.  Students will be immediately engaged by the content of the pictures.
• Show them to the students and ask them to remember as much detail about them as possible.
• In pairs, get students to describe what they saw, using full sentences.
• Ask one pair to share their ideas with the group.
• Ask the group to improve on what they have heard.  It's important to push the students to be the best they can be.
• Get the students to look at the pictures again and describe them again. What can be added to the original descriptions?
• These activities generate lots of vocabulary.
• You can extend by showing follow-up pictures and ask students to describe what has happened, what has changed, thus forcing the use of present perfect.
• As homework, you could get students to write about what happened in the game.

Examples of screenshots you could use:

These are from the computer game, 'Droppy'.

30 Goals Challenge - 4. Revisit an idea

Goal number four of Shelly Terrell's fourth cycle of her 30 Goals Challenge is to revisit an idea.

After being full of enthusiasm when Shelly launched this year's challenge, I'm ashamed to say that I haven't posted about a goal for several weeks now. When I decided to take part, I was managing a busy English department in a new university and fully intending to be there until my contract ended in September 2014.  After that, Mark (my husband) and I were planning to take a year out to travel around India, doing some volunteer teaching and living off our savings accumulated between now and then.  This was my plan when I wrote my responses to the first three goals and even when I posted this initial response to goal number 4 on the mural Shelly set up for the purpose:

Introduce the British Council's CPD framework as the basis of a PD programme tailored to the needs of individual teachers.

How things change in a few short weeks!!  Perhaps, I will get to revisit this particular idea at some time in the future, but, for now, everything is different!  I am currently working my notice and will leave my present job this Friday (September 6th).  I have never not completed a contract before, but a combination of personal and professional matters conspired to make my position untenable.  There's no need for me to elaborate at this time.

Needless to say, since my best laid plans were thrown into disarray, I have revisited many old ideas whilst trying to decide what my next move should be! I can now announce, though, that I have decided to go back into the classroom whilst, at the same time, completing my Diploma in ELT Management with a view to returning to a managerial role later.  And the idea that I finally settled on to revisit?  Teaching in Russia.  I almost went there a few years ago but it didn't quite work out.  This time, I'm sure it will.  We've never been to Russia before, so we're both looking forward to exploring a new country.  Also, by going back in the classroom, I will have the opportunity to try out all the ideas I've been collecting over the past couple of years myself, rather than doing it by proxy (getting my teachers to try them out and report back).  On both counts, I'm very excited by what lies ahead!

Coaching and Mentoring in ELT

This was the title of the sixth in a series of monthly CPD webinars hosted by the British Council.  You can read more about the programme here.

This webinar was presented by Loraine Kennedy and what follows is a summary of what she had to say.

Loraine began by giving us some definitions:

Coaching

'Coaching is a developmental process by which an individual gets support while learning to achieve a specific personal or professional result or goal.'

Mentoring

'Mentoring is a means of providing support, challenge and extension of the learning of one person through the guidance of another, who is more skilled, knowledgeable and experienced, particularly in relation to the context in which the learning is taking place.'
                                                          Andrew Pollard, Reflective Teaching

Distinction between coaching and mentoring

• Coaches use questioning and listening techniques to bring out the full potential of the individual, whereas mentors act as advisors, suggesting new paths for the individual to take.
• To mentor effectively, you must possess an in-depth appreciation and knowledge of the subject on which you are advising.
• Often the relational positions of mentor and individual being mentored are equivalent to that of teacher and student.
• In a coaching event, the positional relationship is on a par as the coach's role is to create an environment for the individual to learn for themselves.
• A mentor is often an expert working with a novice.
• A coach is more for experienced people - they explore ideas together, but the individual comes to a realisation themselves.

Spectrum of coaching styles

A mentor is more likely to be at the directive end of the coaching spectrum, but non-directive styles are much more powerful and the learning gained is much more likely to stick.

Questions to ask

• Does your organisational culture support coaching?
• Are you part of a learning organisation?
• To what extent does your organisation support the growth of individuals?
• Does your organisation believe in collaboration?
• Does your organisation allow enough time for coaching to take place?
• What needs to change to allow the process of coaching and mentoring to thrive?

If you have the right environment, then coaching and mentoring can happen.

Coaching and mentoring situations in ELT

• Professional development plans
• Giving feedback on an observation
• Resolving work problems - fostering team spirit and maintaining individual morale
• Managing change
• Enhancing team effectiveness
• Counselling students on their progress and learning objectives

Qualities of an effective coach

• Patience
• Enthusiasm
• Honesty and integrity, including confidentiality and trust
• Friendliness
• Genuine concern for others
• Self confidence
• Fairness
• Consistency
• Flexibility
• Resourcefulness

Skills and abilities

• Communicating, especially listening
• Questioning
• Analysing
• Summarising
• Setting goals and objectives
• Establishing appropriate priorities
• Giving and receiving feedback
• Relating to people at all levels
• Planning and organising

Underlying principles of being a coach

1. Ensure you fully understand what coaching is - What is coaching as opposed to mentoring?  What is coaching as opposed to managing?  Be clear about when and why you're coaching.
2. Check your perspective on people - you always have to see the potential in people.  If you're dwelling on their past mistakes, or thinking that they're 'no-hopers', then you're not in the right frame of mind to be that person's coach.  You have to always be thinking about the coachee's strengths and how best to move him or her forward.
3. Learn and practise an effective coaching model - start out with a coaching model, but don't feel restricted by it.
4. Engage your boss - everyone in the organisation has to have bought in to the coaching idea.
5. Understand and value personality differences - we know that everyone's different and has different motivations.  We know that everyone is at a different stage of their career development.  We must value this and take each coachee from their own starting point.
6. Prioritise your time and stay focussed - time allocated for a coaching situation needs to be used for coaching!
7. Stop putting out fires - don't do things for your coachee!  Create a consciousness about being responsible for yourself.  A coach helps, but doesn't do!
8. Seek regular feedback - feedback should be given and received!
9. Listen, listen, listen!
10. Keep growing and developing - when you are a coach, you need a coach!! You'll be a better coach when you are being coached.  Things are constantly changing.  You never reach the finish line.
11. Be fully prepared - you always need to know where you got to in the last coaching session and how you're going to move forward.
12. Focus on progression, not punishment - what about the ones who don't want to progress?  What about the ones who've lost motivation?  If handled well, coaching can appeal to everyone.  It's about moving forward, not looking back.
13. Use the right questions
14. Remember that the coachee knows the answer already - if you keep quiet or explore the options with the coachee, it's amazing how many times they will come up with the answers themselves.
15. Break down big goals into little steps
16. There is no right and wrong - there are many rights!  My right may be different to yours, but both are equally valid.
17. Maintain forward momentum - keep focussed on solving problems.
18. Be a good coachee!

Ground rules for being a coach within a coaching relationship

• Clarify the purpose of the coaching relationship from the start.
• Set and agree the objectives for each 'coaching conversation'.
• Be honest.
• Build your understanding of the coachee's world - what stage of their career are they at?  How is their home situation?
• Build your understanding of the coachee's relationships - how do they fit into the team?  Do they get support from their family/their friends/their colleagues?
• Insist on action.
• Insist on accountability.

Peer coaching

• Identify a partner you trust and who trusts you.
• Ensure that both of you want to learn.
• Set a schedule for conversations.
• Each identify their learning objectives.
• Divide the time between coaching and being coached equally.
• Strive for objectivity, not empathy - empathy is important, but you need to be frank and honest.
• Avoid moaning and grumbling.
• Focus on positive action.
• Agree to hold each other accountable.

Tools and models

1. ADKAR change management model

It is important that the steps are carried out in the order shown.

 

2. GROW model of coaching

 

This is a good model to start with.

 

3.  Achieve coaching model

 

4. Reflective practice

5. High level listening skills

• Intend to understand
• Pay close attention
• Defer judgement
• Explore for deeper meaning and understanding
• Concentrate
• Don't interrupt inappropriately
• Get inside the other person's frame of reference
• Listen with your eyes and mind, not just your ears
• Listen for meaning and feelings
• Beware of your body language signals

Avoid being patronising

• Find out what the other person knows and feels, don't presume.
• Understand the person's character and style of working and respond appropriately.
• Be careful with words and expressions that can be interpreted negatively and watch the tone of your voice.
• Don't insult someone's intelligence even if they don't know something you know - don't make them feel small.
• Avoid using suggestion questions - e.g. don't you think you should answer the phone?
• Withhold unsolicited advice - wait to be asked or ask if you can make a suggestion.

Courses

• Coaching Academy
• Centre for Coaching
• Coaching.com

Books

• 'Coaching Questions: a Coach's Guide to Powerful Asking Skills' by Tony Stoltzfus available here.
• '101 Coaching Strategies and Techniques' edited by Gladeana McMahon and Anne Archer (Routledge)
• 'The Manager's Coaching Toolkit' by David Allamby (Pearson Business)
• 'Coaching for Performance: Growing Human Potential and Purpose' by John Whitmore (Nicholas Brealey Publishing)
• 'Reflective Teaching' by Andrew Pollard

Websites

• National framework for mentoring and coaching 
• Excel group development

Oxford Big Read - an introduction to setting up a class library and using readers

This was the title of a recent webinar hosted by Oxford University Press and presented by Verissimo Toste.  He based his talk on his experience of setting up a class library for 25 - 30 teenage students.  The idea was that students chose the books they wanted to read and did so at their own pace. They were encouraged to use readers as a tool to learn the language; the scheme was supposed to appeal to them as language learners, not as readers.  What follows is a summary of what Verissimo had to say.

The importance of reading to learn English

• Remember to tell your students regularly how important reading is.
• If you go to the gym and do exercise, you will get fitter.  You don't need to know what the muscles are or what anatomy means.  In the same way, if you read, you will learn - you don't necessarily need to know how every grammatical structure works.

Reading needs to be:

• voluntary
• routine - i.e. 15 minutes a day, not one hour once a week.
• beyond the classroom

Comfort leads to routine

• Stories must interest students from the beginning - they must choose the book.
• Stories must be appropriate for the level - that is, knowledge minus one. No more than 2 or 3 words per page should be new or difficult.  The student shouldn't need to use a dictionary.
• Establish a reading routine of 15 minutes per day.

Selecting stories

• There is a huge amount of choice out there!
• A library needs about 1.5 books per student.
• Get catalogues from publishers and use them as a reading comprehension exercise.
• Allow the students to choose the books.  Tell them to:
• look at the cover
• consider the title
• read the back cover
• look through the illustrations
• sit and read a page comfortably
• Use the 'find your level' page of the OUP website.

Reading in class

• Create a social environment.
• Use reading as a five-minute activity at the beginning of a class whilst you're setting up the room.
• Encourage students to pick up their readers if they finish an activity early
• Have ten or fifteen minutes of reading at the end of every class.
• Build a habit where reading becomes a part of every class - this routine may take up to three months to establish.
• Encourage students to talk about their books and share ideas - because everyone is reading a different book, they will want to talk to each other about them.
• Make students aware that these books have been written for them.
• Talk to students about where and when they read outside of class.
• Focus on the students who are reading and build the numbers up month by month.

Enthusiasm leads to involvement

 

Here are some reading related activities aimed at generatingi students' enthusiasm which will get them involved and lead to more language learning.

 

1. Posters

 

This is a good first activity.  Students make a poster of the book they are reading, to include the title, an illustration and a sentence or some key words. The posters are displayed in the classroom in order to help other class members decide which book to read next.

 

The posters don't have to be done on paper - they could be digital (using Glogster, for example) or they could be powerpoint slides.

 

2. Make a film poster from the book

• Give the book a new title?
• Who would be the stars - celebrities? classmates?
• What images could be used to best illustrate the book?
• How about making a trailer?

This is a very engaging activity which allows students to use their imagination.

 

3. Wordle

 

Make a word cloud from a text from the book.

 

4. Snap

• Students choose ten sentences from the story and copy them into their notebooks.
• Students decide which is the keyword in each sentence and underline it.
• Students write each sentence on a card without the keyword (like a gapfill).
• They write the keywords on different coloured cards.
• They play the game of 'snap' in pairs.
• The games relating to each book can be kept and re-used.

5. Speaking and interviewing a character

• Students choose a character from the book they are reading.
• They write questions to ask that character.
• They role-play interviewer and interviewee with a partner who has read the same book.
• Students can make up answers if all the information they need is not in the book.

6. Write a postcard to a character in the book

• Students read and reply to each other's postcards.

These activities create enthusiasm.

To conclude

Why should students read a lot?

• To extend their contact with the language
• To reinforce classroom language
• To contextualise language
• To increase motivation
• To expose students to new experiences
• To give them a feeling of achievement

Corpora and the advanced level: problems and prospects

Michael McCarthy

This was the title of a recent Cambridge English Teacher webinar presented by Michael McCarthy. What follows is a summary of what he had to say.

Key issues at the advanced level

Beginner level English is easy.  Students need to know basic vocabulary and grammar.  Once you get up to upper-intermediate and advanced levels (B2 - C1 - C2), though, it gets difficult!  There really isn't much consensus about what we should teach at advanced level, but evidence from corpus can help us decide.

Once you get beyond the 2000 or so most common words, vocabulary becomes a vast catalogue of low-frequency items, so how do we know which words to teach?  Grammar loses its sense of progression and tends to be a rag-bag of difficult and arcane items.  How do we bring a sense of usefulness to the grammar at this level?

Assessment targets become more difficult to distinguish at higher levels.  For example, fluency:

• B2 - fluent
• C1 - very fluent
• C2 - extremely fluent

What does this mean?  How do we judge it?  Lower level learners get lots of opportunities to show their level in exams.  Higher level students perhaps don't.

Vocabulary

The English Profile programme uses corpora to answer questions about vocabulary and grammar.  It is available online here.

The main problem is, if we just teach and learn new words as they come up, we find that these words give back less and less.  The first words we learn give great text coverage, but as we learn more words, the return reduces as they are less common.

At more advanced levels, collocations and language chunks become much more prominent.  The same words appear in more and different combinations. Register, connotation and style become more important.  There is more specialised vocabulary and subtle, evaluative nuances of adjectives, for example, need to be explained.  There is also a growth in domain-specificity - vocabulary particular to specific disciplines.

There is evidence of possible slowdown and attrition at higher levels, too. The pace of learning slows and students may even reach a plateau and stop developing completely.

The English Vocabulary Profile gives labels for words and phrases and can be browsed by CEFR level or by the vocabulary item itself.  This helps teachers to know what vocabulary is most useful for students to learn at a particular level. It also gives students a progression if they focus on the words they need to know at each level.

Grammatical issues

At higher levels we can focus on:

• New or not typically taught functions for known forms.  For example, we can teach the uses of present perfect that we haven't had time to cover at lower levels.
• Low-frequency patterns - structures that are still used by native or proficient speakers, but not often.
• Patterns that underlie academic success - grammatical structures that help students to score well in exams.

Example - Future Perfect (Continuous)

The common usage which we teach at intermediate level is - At the end of this year, I will have been living in Vietnam for three years.  However, if we look at corpus, we can find another common use for this tense:

You'll have heard about the terrible earthquake.

You'll have been given a handout.

Here, future perfect is used to make assumptions about the present - things that have already happened!

Look at these examples from the corpus of present perfect continuous being used in the same way:

At higher levels, we should find and teach examples like this.  We need to show our students different functions of grammar which is already known. They will be able to use them in their speaking and writing, and recognise the meaning when they hear or read them.

Example - Subjunctive Patterns

Here, we are talking about instances where the verb is always in the base form.  For example,

They insist that he wear his uniform at all times.

......their insistence that he wear his uniform ......

......is important that he wear his uniform .......

verb/noun/adjective + that + subject + base form of the verb

We can look at a corpus and see how the subjunctive is used.  Although it's not so common, it's useful and students think they're making progress when they learn about it.

Look at these examples taken from English Profile:

We can teach these structures as a piece of grammar and link it with vocabulary by using English Profile.

The power of the corpus is that it can give coherence and purpose to syllabi at higher levels.

Example - Nominalisation

Here, we are talking about the process of turning a verb into a noun.  

We fly at seven.    >        Our flight is at seven. 

Mr X donated Y.    >        Mr X made a donation of Y.

It is seen as a sign of good academic writing.  This can be confirmed by looking at the Cambridge Learner Corpus which takes examples from students' work and researches what grammar structures and vocabulary attract the highest marks.

Example - Modality

Analysis of success at higher levels indicates that the use of adverbs after modal verbs is good!

Conclusion

The corpus is relevant and current - results from it can be put straight into teaching materials.

Ask:

• What is it that remains to be learned at higher levels?
• How can the corpus help us to decide what must be taught and how to teach it?

Students can't learn every word in the English language, so tell them to concentrate on the words that interest them.  By reading texts that interest them, their general vocabulary will improve and they will make progress - FACT!!