What makes a good coursebook?

Robin Walker

This was the title of a recent webinar hosted by Oxford University Press and presented by Robin Walker.  What follows is a summary of what he had to say.




What makes a good coursebook?

According to Tomlinson and Masuhara in an article published in the ELT Journal (67/2), a good coursebook must:

• engage the learner effectively
• engage learners cognitively
• help learners to make discoveries about how English is typically used
• help learners to use English after the course has finished
• help learners to use English as a lingua franca

Four main criteria that make a good coursebook

• Input texts (reading and listening)
• Grammar syllabus
• Pronunciation
• Language as communication

1.  Input texts

Informative - a good coursebook tells you things that you don't know.  You are improving your general knowledge as well as learning English.

Engaging - good coursebooks have texts which are relevant to students.  Students are therefore engaged and want to listen and read.  Engagement should be way beyond a linguistic level.  Students must participate in the text and discuss the issues raised as they would do in their mother tongue.  Texts need to stimulate our students.

Authentically sourced - texts should be adapted from newspapers, magazines, etc.  Totally authentic texts, with no editing whatsoever, are often impenetrable for learners, so adapted texts are a perfect compromise.  They make the text accessible and introduce the quality learning we're looking for.

THINK ------------- READ -------------- (EXPLORE) -------------- REACT

 

2.  Grammar syllabus

 

Pedagogical - a good coursebook needs to bring existing grammar knowledge out.  Students need to be able to test themselves.  If the whole class already knows a particular aspect of grammar, the teacher doesn't need to waste time - he or she can go straight on to the output exercises.  If, on the other hand, students discover that they can't do the exercises, then the teacher can spend more time presenting the grammar.

 

Communicative - there need to be exercises that allow students to use the grammar in an engaging way - to generate genuine communication.  Learning grammar and using grammar need to go hand-in-hand.

 

3.  Pronunciation

 

Pronunciation should be integrated into a coursebook, so that students can communicate.  If students can't pronounce words correctly, they can't use them effectively.  The pronunciation part of a coursebook should lead on to a speaking activity.  It should be a facilitating tool to allow students to speak.  There should be good coverage of pronunciation in any coursebook.  From the lowest levels, we need to practise not just sounds, but linking, sentence stress, connected speech, etc.

The English File app

 

A good coursebook needs to deal with sounds in contrast.  For example, /ʊ/ versus /u:/.  Also, classifying sounds and associating sounds with different things - pictures, symbols, colours, etc. - are very useful ways of helping students to learn pronunciation.  New English File does these things very well.

 

A coursebook also needs software to help students practise pronunciation in their own time - particularly, in these days of mobile devices, an app.

 

 

 

 

 

4.  Language as communication

 

Personal - the output activities in coursebooks should be personal.  Students need to be able to talk about themselves and people they know.  Teachers need to be careful, though.  Some students, particularly teens or business people, may not want to talk openly about personal matters.  In these cases, teachers need to ensure that students work in pairs or small groups.

 

Possible - output tasks should be possible.  There needs to be enough structure so that students aren't intimidated about getting into the task - give them 'useful phrases' to use, for example.  There needs to be enough for them to say.  Don't give students a too open-ended task.

 

Purposeful - output tasks need to have an outcome.  If there's no end point, it's difficult to know when the task is finished!

 

Summary

• Input texts - informative, engaging and authentically sourced.
• Grammar - flexible, pedagogical, meaningful.
• Pronunciation - integrated, thorough, varied, mobile.
• Communication - personal, possible, purposeful.

 

Teaching online

Nicky Hockley

This is a summary of a video featuring Nicky Hockley, made in her capacity as consultant for the Cambridge English teacher website.

Blended learning can be:

• only a small part of the course online
• half online
• most online
• the whole course online

Whichever it is, there are five main things to bear in mind:

1.  Which platform?

The most important factor here is to establish the aims of your course because these will inform the method of delivery.  For example, if you're teaching writing online, it would make sense to use a blog, whereas if you're teaching speaking, you might want to use a synchronous tool such as Skype.  If you're offering the entire course online, you should probably use a VLE.

2.  The livewire

The livewire are the people.  As an online teacher, you need to be present and helpful online.  You need to respond to students' comments in a forum, or written work submitted, in a timely manner.  Twelve hours is a good target to aim for.  You need to praise and encourage students as you would in a face-to-face situation.  In the beginning, you need to respond to all forum posts by students, but as the course goes on, you can respond less and less as students begin to support and help each other.  Even then, though, you should still aim to reply to about one in three posts.  If you're not going to reply to posts, you need to tell students at the beginning, so that they're not waiting for you to do so.

3.  Socialisation

Here, we're talking about getting to know each other online.  This is vital for creating a group dynamic.  You need to have specific socialising activities early on - 'My top 5', for example, where each student posts their top 5 of something.  Such socialising activities need to continue throughout a course.  Also, make sure you include pairwork and groupwork in your online course.

4.  Variety

It's important to use a variety of media - images, audio, video, etc. - and a variety of activity types - quizzes, forum discussions, getting students to produce things, etc.

5.  Start small

Start with one class as a pilot course.  Get feedback from students and evaluate yourself as you go.

Planning for the future and how we deal with it

This was the title of the first in the series of 'Jeremy Harmer Lectures' hosted by Pearson.  What follows is a summary of what Jeremy had to say.

The planning pyramid

AIMS

 

CLASS DESCRIPTION

 

 

ADDITIONAL         TIMETABLE           OUTCOMES

                 POSSIBILITIES             FIT                                                    

         

            ACTIVITIES     TIMINGS         PROCEDURES      INTERACTIONS       

 

      LANGUAGE EXPONENTS    LANGUAGE SKILLS   PERSONAL AIMS     AIDS 

   

Aims 

What students will be better able to do.

 

Class description

It's important to know who you're teaching - the size of the class, age, level, type of learner, etc. in order to be better able to anticipate problems.  Think yourself into the mind of the student, be problem ready and have solutions available.

 

Additional possibilities

Extra staff - just in case!

 

Timetable fit

How your lesson fits into the scheme of work, curriculum and syllabus.

 

Outcomes

These are difficult to plan for as we don't know what's going on inside our students' heads, but it is important to have measurable outcomes.  When the students have done the activity, what will have changed for them?

 

Activities

What will you do?  You need to vary and balance the activities to engage and motivate students.

 

Timings

Very difficult to plan accurately, though it gets easier with experience and through knowing your students well.

 

Procedures

How are you going to do something?

 

Interactions

S-S, T-S, etc.  The best lessons have a variety of interactions.  Don't worry about having too much TTT - TTT is a rich source for students' listening comprehension.  It's the quality of the TTT which is important.

 

Language exponents

Grammar, etc. - what you plan to teach isn't necessarily what ends up emerging in the lesson.

 

Language skills

What do we want students to work on?  The best lessons are often those which integrate all the skills.

 

Personal aims

It's important that the teacher has aims for him/herself, as well as for the students - action research, for example.

 

Aids

Classroom technology - whiteboard, coursebook, computer, projector, pens, IWB, etc.  It's not what you've got that matters - it's what you do with it.  Think carefully in planning about what students will use, not just you as the teacher.  Think about BYOD - using mobiles in class, for example.

 

Planning for a series of lessons using topics and themes

 

Look at this example of a series of lessons for young learners, using the topic of bananas!

 

 

 

Planning

 

How we think about a lesson (what metaphor we use) affects how we plan for it.  For example, if we think of a lesson as a journey, we plan for how we're going to get to the destination.  If it's a meal, we think about how to combine the best ingredients for maximum enjoyment.

 

The planning paradox - if you plan too much, you stifle the creativity every classroom should have.  If you don't plan enough, you lose sight of the aims.

 

Teaching unplugged (dogme) - this is where you don't plan very much - rather, you use the emergent language from the students to teach with.

 

Some say a compromise would be to plan your door into the lesson and a door out and not to worry too much about what's going to happen in the middle.

 

The planning pyramid is vital, especially for trainee teachers, but perhaps the door analogy is best for experienced teachers.  Moreover, it could be argued that the door out is more important than the door in.  People always remember more what happens at the end of something.  A teacher needs to be able to summarise what has happened in the lesson so that students take away the right message.  We need to end our lessons in different ways in order to engage and amuse students and make them want to come back.



 

 



Let's go with the first ELT Blog Carnival of 2014!!

 

Everyone is welcome to join the next ELT Blog Carnival which will be hosted here on my blog.  The theme of the 38th carnival will be 'New Year Resolutions'.  It will be published during the first week of January, 2014.

Before you get too involved in all the lovely festivities which are coming up, please take the time to share your posts on anything and everything to do with new year resolutions - lesson plans, reflections on past resolutions (successful or otherwise!), or your teaching resolutions for 2014.  Let's make the first carnival of the year a huge success!!

If you want to participate, you can use the easy submission form and send me your blog list or you can contact me from here or twitter (I’m @worldteacher) if the form doesn’t work.  If you don’t blog, you can still join in. I’ll be happy to host your posts on my blog.  I look forward to reading all your submissions!

Please make sure you visit the 37th Blog Carnival hosted by the wonderful Eva Buyuksimkesyan.

I wish you all a very happy Christmas and I'll see you back here in the New Year!



Photo by hdwallpapersinn.com

 

Teachers as writers

Tessa Woodward

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

As teachers, we need to make sure that all of our writing is clear and accurate.  We need to proof-read everything we write and be strict about self-editing.  As good writers, we need to use lexical variation and avoid repetition.

These are some of the types of writing that teachers do:

Writing on the board

 

We can be creative even with the most basic writing we do, as in the example above where the lesson plan is displayed as a menu, with homework as a takeaway!  We can use colour to highlight information.

 

Comments on students' work

 

We need to vary our praise words and not use 'good' all the time!

 

Lesson plans

 

These are usually written just for ourselves (unless for observation purposes), so we tend to develop our own idiosyncratic ways of writing.

 

Logs, reflective diaries and journals

 

These are indubitable proof of your own CPD and should be written in such a way that they can be referred to by others.  You can use the Cambridge English Teacher website to keep your journal.  Critical Incidents in Teaching by David Tripp is a good reference source for this topic.

 

Writing with our students

 

Here, we are talking about interactive dialogue journals, where each student has a notebook in which the teacher writes a letter to him or her.  The student replies with a letter of their own written in the notebook.  This is an ongoing conversation and serves as a record of your learning relationship.  You can read more about this in Joy Peyton's book.

 

Materials creation

• Adapting coursebook exercises - making examples more relevant to your students, for example.
• Writing your own reading texts.
• Adapting authentic texts.

Check out eltteacher2writer.co.uk.

Writing for other teachers

• Get an idea first.
• Pilot it with your students.
• Think it through and read around the topic.
• Write it down as if you were explaining to a colleague (clear and informal).
• Read it out loud to yourself and others.
• Change any muddled parts and make them better.
• Spell check, grammar check, and note the word count.
• Look around at local, regional, national and international periodicals for language teachers - look at websites for teachers, too.
• Read their guidelines as to readership, length, style, format, etc.
• Edit your piece to make it fit the periodical you've chosen.
• Send it in with a pleasant cover note.
• Expect your idea to be edited!

Remember:

• Idea first
• Then write
• Then think about publishing

It's important that your motivation to write is clear.  You should be writing for you and for your students first and foremost.  Then, you want to share your ideas with colleagues and then the wider industry.  If this is the case, then rejection doesn't matter.

 

Conclusion

 

We write a lot as teachers and we learn incredibly useful writing skills by doing it.  We already are writers!

 

 

 

 

Principles of testing for the classroom

This was the title of a Cambridge English Teacher webinar presented by Shakeh Manassian and what follows is a summary of what she had to say.


What is a test?

Talking mainly about summative assessment, a test is/has:

• a tool or device
• an activity which helps to elicit certain types of performance
• a measure of learner performance - evidence of what a learner knows, understands and can do
• a defined duration
• a clear purpose
• a standard delivery format
• tasks which relate back to what was taught and learned
• a variety of task types to ensure fairness
• an evaluation of the evidence with reference to a set of criteria or a standard (this could be our own or an internationally recognised one, such as CEFR)
• marks which are indicative of the learners' underlying ability
• results which are used to make inferences about the ability of the learners
• these inferences must link back to the purpose for testing the learner, and the skills and abilities we thought we were eliciting

Purposes of testing

A clear purpose helps to identify:

• the kind of evidence we need
• the task types

The purpose also links to the way we:

• mark the learners' work
• interpret learners' performances
• make inferences about learners' abilities
• report our findings
• make decisions

The purposes of testing include:

• giving feedback
• checking progress
• analysing learning needs
• deciding what you're going to teach next
• selecting for a particular course
• assessing suitability for the next level

The purposes of international language tests will be different from those you use in the classroom.  In most cases, the purpose is generally to report on the performance of candidates in such a way that organisations that use the results can make decisions, for example, for selection.

Qualities of good coursebook learning tasks

• Focused
• May come before or after a presentation of new language
• Are part of a series of learning tasks
• Fit in with the curriculum
• May lead to freer activities
• Often have an example at the beginning
• Are repetitive
• Help learners understand what has been taught
• Give learners an opportunity to practise

All of these things make learning tasks very different to testing tasks.  Such activities are not suitable in a testing context, not least because they repeat the same piece of language many times.

What makes a good testing task?

• it has a clear purpose which is stated in writing (for example, in a syllabus or handout)
• it's linked to a given model of language teaching and learning
• it makes the best use of the time available
• it tries to be authentic
• it isn't focused on a single element of language
• it has a clear marking scheme

What makes a good reading learning task?

• it exploits the reading text
• it develops a variety of reading skills
• it takes account of the classroom context
• it tries to develop other learning skills
• it tries to develop other language skills

What makes a good reading testing task?

• it tests a variety of reading skills.
• questions are ordered in the same order as the information appears in the text - we are testing comprehension, not information location.
• questions are clearly worded and are appropriate to the level.  All students should be able to access the questions - we are testing their ability to find the answers.
• questions should be unbiased.
• questions shouldn't contain the same wording as the text - we should paraphrase so that students have to demonstrate their understanding of the language.
• each question should test only one reading skill.
• all options in multiple choice questions must relate back to something in the text.
• there needs to be a clear indication of the marks being allocated to each response.
• questions must have the right level of difficulty.
• texts should be interesting to our students and as authentic as possible.
• texts must allow us to test the kind of skills we're interested in.
• the selection of the topic and the sources should reflect the purposes of testing.
• the length of the texts should be appropriate for our purposes and for the time available.
• a variety of texts and question types should be used to be fairer to the students and to enable us to make broader inferences about what a learner can do.
• the test must allow the comparison of performance across huge cohorts of candidates.

Testing speaking

• there needs to be a clear purpose.
• we need to have a clear idea of the performance we want to elicit.
• there needs to be a clearly defined format.
• the testing tasks and questions must be clearly designed.

Conclusions - some principles of testing

We need to have:

• a clear purpose
• a clear understanding of how the results will be used
• a clear identification of the performance to be elicited
• designed tasks that elicit enough of this performance
• tasks that are fair to learners
• a set delivery format
• clear marking criteria and marking schemes
• a clear approach to the interpretation of the results

We also need to:

• know what each of the questions we've designed is testing
• make sure that we're testing key skills more than once, but that we're not overtaxing the learner
• be able to relate the results back to the skills we've tested
• be consistent in our approach each time we test our learners
• document decisions and actions

 

Helping your students to become effective writers

Julie Moore

This was the title of a recent webinar hosted by Oxford University Press and presented by Julie Moore.  What follows is a summary of what she had to say.

Writing in a digital age

What do we write?

• shopping lists
• greetings cards
• e-mails
• text messages
• Facebook updates and comments
• online reviews
• Tweets
• blogposts and comments
• personal profiles
• etc., etc.

Of this list, perhaps only the first two are handwritten.  Everything else is typed.  We are probably doing more writing than ever before, but not by hand.  Writing content isn't just by professionals anymore.  Everyone writes and publishes online.  Writing skills, therefore, should be an increasingly important part of what we teach, but they are often neglected.  Far too often, writing is moved to a homework task and then taken in and marked, but without any meaningful teacher input.

 Noticing features of texts

The first step in improving students' writing is getting them to understand how writers convey information and ideas effectively to their readers.

When speaking, you're usually face to face.  You're in the same place, you have a shared context.  You have gestures and facial expressions to help with communication.  You can ask for clarification.  Also, listeners tend to be sympathetic and forgive grammatical errors.  In writing, the situation is totally different.  You often don't know who is reading your work.  You need to be much clearer and pay much more attention to accuracy when you write.

How should we notice?

We should start with a reading text and work with it in the usual manner - lead-in, vocabulary analysis, comprehension questions, etc. - so that students become very familiar with it.  Then we can go back and analyse the features of the writing in order to understand what makes it readable.  It's important to integrate reading and writing skills.

What features should we notice?

1. Genre - When writing, it's very useful to start with a model to learn about the genre; the appropriate style of writing, the type of vocabulary to use, etc. 
2. Structure - We can focus on a particular aspect of structure, topic sentences for example, and get students to recognise it and understand what makes it effective.
3. Coherence and cohesion - Get students to look for the language and mechanisms that link ideas together.

Follow the noticing with a writing activity.  Ask students to transfer the principles of what they have seen to their own writing.  You must set them an easier task to write than the text they've just read.  For example, you could get students just to write effective topic sentences.  When they've written them, swap with a partner who has to guess what's to come in the rest of the paragraph.  This will tell them if they have written a good topic sentence.  Alternatively, when a complete writing task is done, ask students to highlight or underline their topic sentences and check that they're clear and that all of the supporting sentences are relevant.

The important thing is to get students thinking about how they write and how they convey their meaning to the reader.

Stretching students' writing

The key here is to focus on a specific skill.  For example:

Summarising

• this is a useful skill in many contexts (profile writing, review writing, etc.)
• it's about expressing key information concisely
• it's paraphrasing and reusing language from the text - very important to prevent plagiarising, especially in the 'cut and paste' age.
• it's ideal for pairwork and groupwork

If you've been working with a text for a while and the students are very familiar with it, it's a valid exercise to ask them to turn it over and summarise it from memory.  For longer and more complex texts, get students to extract some keywords from which they then have to write a summary.

Single sentence summaries are fun and quick to do.  Give students news stories and ask them to summarise them in just one sentence.  For example, a newspaper article might elicit:

Gareth Bale moved to Real Madrid for £85 million.

 

You then ask students to elaborate, for example, by asking, 'Who's Gareth Bale?'  This could lead to:

 

Welsh footballer, Gareth Bale moved to Real Madrid for £85 million.

 

'What is Real Madrid?'  'Where did he move from?'

 

Welsh footballer, Gareth Bale moved from Tottenham to top Spanish team, Real Madrid for £85 million.

 

'When did he move?'  'Is £85 million a lot for a footballer?'

 



In September, Welsh footballer, Gareth Bale broke the world transfer record when he moved from Tottenham to top Spanish team, Real Madrid for £85 million.

 

Now, we have a very good summary sentence!  We have stretched the students so they have written more, but still limited them to one sentence.  This encourages students to use prepositions, reduced relative clauses, etc., and moves their writing from the simple sentence to a much more complex one without ever having to talk about grammar!  We are gently pushing our students to do better.

 

Stretching students' writing - a summary

• Focus on specific micro-skills: summarising, describing a sequence or process, persuading, making suggestions, etc.
• Give short, classroom activities which involve pair and group work.
• Gradually build and stretch language skills
• Reading/listening/speaking into writing - you could get students to listen and then summarise what they heard - the summary doesn't have to be based on a reading.  You could even get students to summarise a group discussion.

Drafts and feedback

 

How do we give feedback on students' writing?

 

Some traditional ways:

• Correct everything.
• Underline or highlight where mistakes are and ask students to correct their own work.
• Use a writing correction code.
• Write comments (both positive and negative) on students' work.

 

Some alternatives:

• Give focused feedback - don't try to give feedback on everything at the same time because students are overwhelmed, put the work away and forget about it.  It's better to focus on one area - structure, content, grammar or language.
• Write questions and prompts that students have to respond to.
• Get students to rewrite parts of their work, based on the feedback you've given, rather than all of it.
• Get students to evaluate, check and edit before they hand in their work.  Ask students to bring their work to class and give them clear guidelines on how to check it - perhaps in groups.
• Teach editing an proofreading skills.

Develop a personal proofreading checklist

 

1. Get students to make their own proofreading checklist of common language issues, based on feedback on previous writing assignments.  They could include:

• general language areas - spelling, punctuation
• areas of grammar - subject-verb agreement, articles, etc.
• areas of vocabulary - uncountable nouns, collocations, etc.

If you are going to do this in class, get students to bring in lots of examples of their work from past lessons.

 

2.  It can be very difficult to spot errors in your own writing, so get students to work in groups and discuss how they can use the tools and techniques below to systematically check their writing.  Get them to come up with other ideas of their own.

• computer spell-check
• computer 'find' facility
• dictionary
• peer feedback
• reading aloud

Teaching writing skills - a summary

• Noticing features of texts: reading into writing.
• Understanding and applying key principles.
• Focusing on specific writing skills.
• Stretching students' writing skills.
• Varying feedback.
• Teaching editing and proofreading skills.