ENGLISH Issue 75

July
2011

Tprofessional
EACHING
The Leading Practical Magazine For English Language Teachers Worldwide

Open learning
Laura Bergmann and Gemma Ruffino

Front-wheel drive
Chris Roland

Swearing in class
Simon Dunton

John Potts
Language log

• practical methodology

• fresh ideas & innovations

• classroom resources

• new technology

• teacher development

• tips & techniques

• photocopiable materials

• competitions & reviews

w w w . e t p r o f e s s i o n a l . c o m
Contents MAIN FEATURE TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

OPEN LEARNING 4 FACTORS FOR FAILURE 46

Laura Bergmann and Gemma Ruffino Simon Neale introduces changes to make classes
offer their students the freedom to choose more communicative

INITIAL TEACHER TRAINING 1 50

FEATURES Steve Hirschhorn is critical of the academic
tendencies of teacher training courses
FRONT-WHEEL DRIVE 8
Chris Roland finds that pumping up the tyres LEARNING COACH 5 53
makes for a more comfortable journey Duncan Foord and Daniel Barber get their students
to manage and maintain their own motivation
HOLISTIC GRAMMAR TEACHING 3 12
Rod Bolitho explores choice of voice
TECHNOLOGY
DIFFERENT LEARNERS, 16
DIFFERENT LEARNING WEBWATCHER 57
Marjorie Rosenberg rejects a one-method-fits-all Russell Stannard revisits a favourite site
approach to learning lexis
FIVE THINGS YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO 58
STUDENT TALKING TIME 19 KNOW ABOUT: BLENDED LEARNING
Marianne Raynaud promotes a programme that Nicky Hockly blends technology with traditional teaching
gives her students more speaking opportunities

LANGUAGE PATTERNS 24 REGULAR FEATURES

Phillip Brown puts the case for pattern practice
LANGUAGE LOG 40
SETTING A GOOD EXAMPLE 28 John Potts
Peter Viney finds a place for sample sentences
that make a point PERSONALISATION 59
Rose Senior
HOT SEAT PLUS 30
Sasan Baleghizadeh and Hadi Barzegar IT WORKS IN PRACTICE 36
tell their students to team up

SCRAPBOOK 42
OVER THE WALL 34
Alan Maley is amused
REVIEWS 44
AN ALL-ROUND CHALLENGE 7 38
Sarah Brewer helps her students reference correctly COMPETITIONS 41, 60

SWEARING IN CLASS 55
Simon Dunton has a sensible strategy INTERNATIONAL 32
for a sensitive topic SUBSCRIPTION
FORM

TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS

ROUTINE, ROUTINE 23
Laura Gamble’s students respond well if they
know what’s coming next Includes materials designed
to photocopy

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 1

 Editorial
I
n this issue, several contributors report on their
efforts to introduce changes or innovations into their
classroom teaching which will improve the learning
environment, provide more opportunities for the
students to practise the language and encourage them
to become stakeholders in their own learning.
Laura Gamble starts at the very beginning with learners
of only four or five years old. By establishing routines
and putting on the board a list of things to be covered in
the lesson which can be understood even by those who
can’t yet read, she keeps her learners focused,
enthusiastic and on track.
In our main feature, Laura Bergmann and Gemma
Ruffino report on successful moves to give school
students more autonomy and encourage them to take
responsibility for their own learning by introducing a
system of open learning, which offers students more
choice in what they do – and even when and where they
do it. There will be more from them on the practicalities
of this in future issues.
Daniel Barber and Duncan Foord continue their series
on teachers as learning coaches by examining how we
can make students aware of the different factors that
make up their motivation and, having identified these,
encourage them to take charge of their own motivation,
boosting and maintaining it.
Simon Neale relates how he made changes to his
teaching routine, overcame the limitations of the
required textbook and bravely entered the world of the
Korean teenage girl to ensure that his students were
genuinely communicating in English rather than just
repeating by rote.
Marianne Raynaud also discovered that her students
didn't know how to communicate in English, so she
found a way to increase speaking opportunities for them
in class by instituting a combined language lab and
tutorial programme.
Helena Gomm
Editor
helena.gomm@pavpub.com

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2 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 M A I N F E AT U R E
Open
learning
M
Laura Bergmann aria Montessori thought
that ‘the greatest sign of
and Gemma Ruffino success for a teacher ... is
to be able to say, “The
pass the power to learn to children are now working as if I did not
exist”’. Many pedagogues, including
their learners. Montessori, have developed open
learning methods that give learners
more freedom and demand more
independence. Research suggests that
these methods have benefits. However,
we do not all work in environments that
are open to new and radical approaches.
Ministries and education inspectors, or
language school directors and our
paying customers may have very
different expectations. So what is open
learning, and can we bring any aspects
of it into our conventional classrooms?
What?
Open learning approaches are
characterised by self-determination,
independence and the following of the
learners’ own interests. They give the
learners some degree of choice in what,
when, where, with whom and how they
learn. These are decisions we are used
to taking for our students, and the idea
of letting go is, in most situations,
impossible. However, one approach to
open learning, known as ‘materials-
centred’, can be easier to integrate into
4 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
a standard classroom situation. In this
approach, the learners are given a pre-
planned menu of materials to choose
from, and they work their way through
whichever of them they choose.
Wherever possible, the materials allow
them to check their own answers.
Why?
So, open learning may be possible, but
is it useful? We would argue that it is,
for several reasons. Most teachers will
recognise that each and every classroom
contains a mixed-ability group. Even in
streamed classes, students learn at
different paces. Open learning can give
members of heterogeneous groups what
they need when they need it by offering
different learning paths, with activities
for different learner types and levels. It
can help learners to take an active role
in their studies by putting them in
control, whilst still giving them a plan to
navigate by and feedback in the form of
answer keys. The private nature of this
feedback allows the learners to make
mistakes without embarrassment, and
we know how important it is for learners
to feel able to risk making mistakes.
However, the main advantage can be
seen by looking through the door of any
open learning classroom. The teacher is
no longer standing at the front talking,
but moving through the room,
addressing the learners individually and
responsively and coaching and
supporting them. A weaker pupil gets
extra help, a stronger one gets a more
interesting and complex task, but neither
is singled out. The lesson proceeds not
at the pace set by the teacher, but at the
pace of every individual.
‘It is important that the students
decide on their learning path on their own,
but without being left alone,’ a colleague,
Jay, explains. ‘Teachers are still important,
but their roles change. They are not only
the providers of material but also
mentors.’ Jay feels it is important for
teachers to learn to take a back seat in
the process: ‘When pupils hand in their
work, it is important to give them time for
reflection first, and only then to give them
feedback and make suggestions for the
future. This way they can develop meta-
knowledge about how they learn.’
Meta-knowledge is not the only lesson
that open learning can teach, alongside
the main topic of the lesson. It also
teaches learners how to organise
themselves, and makes them feel the
consequences if they don’t. If it is well-
planned, open learning allows students to
experience the fact that their studying
behaviour can make a difference to their
learning outcomes. This fosters beliefs that
are very productive for language learning
and, in fact, for their studies in general:
the belief that their actions can make a
difference – which is vital for motivation
– and a belief in their own agency.
Together, these reasons form a
powerful argument in favour of open
learning, leading to the next question of
how to start.
How?
The choice of approach is important: as
with any other teaching style, open
learning can lead to disappointing
results if teachers don’t understand the
reasons they have been asked to teach in
a certain way. ‘We had a lot to learn,’
says a teacher from a school that has
been implementing open learning for the
last few years. ‘Some colleagues tried it
for a few months and stopped, saying it
didn’t work, while others were exhilarated
by the successes they had. We found out
that these colleagues had completely
different understandings of open learning.’
Non-optional exercises
One common approach is to provide a
set of non-optional exercises, with the
freedom to choose the order in which
the tasks are completed. This usually
works well at first, but soon the
students realise how little freedom they
have and become frustrated. If they are
under time pressure, they may start to
simply tick off lists, seeing no meaning
in what they’re doing and perhaps even
copying from one another or from the
answer key, as the point of the work
becomes the ticking off of the exercise.
One colleague comments, ‘It’s just like
doing the housework. I can decide
whether I do the ironing or the
vacuuming first, but in the end I still have
to do the whole lot, so having a choice
doesn’t improve my mood much.’ It could
also be argued that this way of teaching
is, in reality, still completely teacher-
centred as the teacher is still deciding
exactly what the student has to do.
‘Can do’ statements
A way of avoiding this problem can be to
write ‘can do’ statements, similar to those
in the Common European Framework of
Reference, which define the goals for the
session. The teacher then prepares or
finds a selection of exercises for each ‘can
do’ statement. At least one exercise for
each ‘can do’ must be done, but there are
no extra points for tackling additional
exercises. Students have to do as many
exercises as they feel they need. They
then ask the teacher to test them on the
‘can do’. The students soon come to
realise that it is useful to do more
exercises in order to master the ‘can do’
and perform better in the test. Teachers
from one school reported, ‘We knew
that this approach worked when students
came to us and asked us to provide them
with more material for a certain “can do”
because they felt they needed more
practice. They took responsibility – and
this is ten year olds we’re talking about!’
Skills training
Another successful approach, especially
with 13–15 year olds, is skills training.
The teacher prepares or chooses several
exercises for each skill and for focusing
on particular language structures. The
students have to do a number of
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
exercises from each section, but they can
choose which they want to do. This
allows them to choose tasks that reflect
their own intelligences and learning
styles. It also improves cooperation as
the teacher does not tell the students
what to do – they can choose the topics
they are most interested in. ‘If I want to
train the students in writing magazine
articles, I don’t really care what they write
about. I can easily give them three or four
topics to choose from,’ says a colleague.
Ways to prepare
Teachers already hard-pressed for time
will have taken notice of the recurring
phrase the teacher prepares … in the
preceding paragraphs. Changing to a
form of teaching that increases the
preparation burden is a difficult move for
a full-time teacher to make. However,
there is no reason why open learning
should not involve choosing rather than
making. As long as the teacher defines
beforehand what the learning goals are
and then finds materials to fit, rather
than letting the availability influence the
materials, using already-existing
materials can be a valid approach.
Coursebooks or workbooks that teachers
already use make a perfectly good source
of tasks to meet learning goals. If these
books do not provide enough material,
or if schools do not use a book, other
books or the internet can provide
activities. Language learning magazines
can also be a good source of extra tasks.
Teachers are, of course, well-used to this
magpie approach.
As the learners perform the
activities one after the other, rather than
all at the same time, it is possible to
prepare more complex and playful
materials than you would usually make 
5

Open
learning
 for a whole class, as you don’t need 25
sets of cards for 25 students, but only
two or three. Matching and gap-fill
exercises can use cut-out cards so that
the learners physically manipulate the
words to complete the tasks; this is
popular with younger learners and
useful for kinaesthetic learner types.
One simple trick to make very
ordinary activities exciting is to
laminate the worksheet. Students can
then complete the task with a wipe-off
marker, check their answers and then
wash them off. This can be done for any
kind of cloze or tick-box activity. ‘I
don’t know why it’s so much more fun to
write on laminates,’ a colleague
comments. ‘A little novelty can go a long
way. Maybe it’s because it’s fun to wipe
off your answers afterwards. Perhaps it
reminds them of those wipe-off drawing
games. I don’t understand it but it
definitely makes my students enjoy the
exercises more.’ Although making
laminated sheets sounds like more work,
it actually reduces the teacher’s
workload. Remember that you only
need two or three laminated sheets,
instead of 25, and these are ready to be
reused in the years to follow.
Finally, the students will enjoy
anything that seems real: authentic board
games, for example, or ‘real’ blank playing
cards, which can be bought cheaply and
turned into simple games, either by the
teacher or the students themselves.
Ways to share
Many hands make light work, and
introducing such an approach for a
whole school rather than for just one
class can spread the workload across
several teachers. Using a Moodle course
or online file store to save all the
material online can be helpful: nothing
can get lost, everything is always in the
right place, and students can also
download worksheets they have missed
out on or lost. Resources can also be
shared across more than one school.
If using the internet is not a
possibility, a file of resources can be
started in the staffroom. In the initial
phases, giving colleagues feedback is very
6 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
important so that they can avoid any
pitfalls that you have experienced and
so that a particular exercise, or perhaps
only the instructions, can be improved.
Finally, attention should be paid to
building up a long-lasting stock of
exercises. By laminating items or using
card instead of paper, you can ensure
that the materials remain useful for
years to come.
However, it can’t be denied that
producing attractive materials for young
learners means extra work for the
teacher. One head teacher reports: ‘In
our school we told teachers to start open
learning in only one of their classes. If
you start to produce material for four
different levels at the same time, you
might not be able to cope. If you do one
level a year, it’s fun and within a few
years you’ve got a full set of materials
ready for all the levels. Once the basic
material is done, it’s easy to add a few
exercises here and there if need be.’
Ways to continue
As the students get older, open learning
works without any material provided by
the teacher and, as the time taken to
complete tasks gets longer, the number of
tasks that are needed is reduced. ‘I got
astonishing results when I sent the students
off in groups to produce a radio report
about a historic event,’ reports a colleague.
‘All the students needed was a place to
work and something to record with. When
they presented their work I was amazed
and the students were really proud. They
can’t wait for the next radio report.’
Another way to engage your
students in longer open activities is to let
them put together a magazine featuring
interviews that they perform themselves,
or reviews they have written of stories or
learner literature that they have read.

Thinking about your own school
situation, you might imagine that things
can get difficult if some students are
working on roleplays and dialogues
while the rest try to concentrate on
silent work. Open learning also means
open classrooms. There’s no reason why
your students can’t use the corridor, the
library, the canteen or the playground to
work. If you really can’t send them
outside, it’s a good idea to set up a
speaking corner in the classroom, where
speaking activities are done, and make
sure the noise stays at an acceptable
level. If it is impossible to cope with the
level of noise, you might have to refrain
from using roleplays in open learning.
However, even if the environment
does not actively encourage open
learning, it is still possible to implement
it in your teaching. ‘When I started with
open learning, I was the only teacher in
my school,’ reports one teacher. ‘Within
a few years we were a small guerrilla
force that had conquered the library and
the computer room. At the moment we’re
fighting for the corridors – some
colleagues still look annoyed when they
see students wandering around, but as
long as they don’t disturb the other
students in other classes, people don’t
complain – and recently we even got
permanent desks in the corridors.’
So you see that a small change in
how lessons are organised can change
the atmosphere of the whole school. In
the next issue, we will look at how open
learning works in practice, including
external observation and feedback from
the students. ETp
Laura Bergmann has
been working as a
teacher and coursebook
writer for 11 years. She
teaches English in a
secondary school in
Graz, Austria, and has
written coursebooks and
digital materials for the
10–14 age group. She has
also conducted seminars
on open learning
throughout Austria.
laura@futurefactory-software.com
Gemma Ruffino is a
freelance editor and
materials writer based
in Vienna. She is
currently completing
research in ELT
materials development
at the University of
Cambridge, UK, and
also teaches at the
University Language
Centre.
gemma@ruffino.co.uk
 IN THE CLASSROOM It all took no more than three minutes.
Then we got on with the lesson. Later, I
gave them the following exercise from

Front-
our coursebook:

Fill each of the gaps with one word

from the box to complete the
common expressions in bold.

all lot none any

one few little most
each every either

wheel
1 We’ve got an awful ______ to do
and precious ______ time to do it
in, so let’s get started now.
2 The service in the restaurant is
first class and the quality of the
food second to ______.
3 He gave five concerts in London
and I went to ______ single one

drive
Chris Roland primes
his students for success by
oiling the wheels in advance.
I stood in front of my
advanced group and said:
‘Right, chaps, we’ve got an awful lot
to do and precious little time to do it in.
As a class, I rate you guys as second to
none.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Mar.
‘If you come second, then someone’s
better than you, yeah? If you come second
to none, then who’s better than you?’
‘No one.’
‘So, yeah, as a group you guys are
second to ... (I had one of my customary
vague moments and the class obligingly
completed the phrase for me) ... but
today I want us to work mega-hard so
that every single one of you goes home
having learnt more English than ever
before in a class. Now we’ve got a good
few hours – four hours, it’s quite a long
time, yeah? – so let’s make each and
every activity count. You with me?’
One class member asked me if I had
a second job as a football coach and
then another turned up late, giving me
an excuse to repeat my little pep talk.
of them.
4 You can get there by bus or train.
______ way, it’ll cost you a lot of
money.
5 ______ too often students fail to
read the instructions properly and
few, if ______, get full marks.
6 We had to queue a good ______
hours to get the tickets, but we
made the ______ of our time,
reading, talking and playing cards.
7 She turned the pages ______ by
one, carefully studying the
information on each one.
8 I’d like to thank ______ and every
one of you for all your hard work.
(from Norris and French)
A few seconds into the exercise, a round
of little tutts, ahs, nods and smiles
rolled around the room – the sort of
noises and smiles that tell me that my
students are aware that they are making
connections and that something good is
happening in the class.
‘But that’s cheating,’ said Mar (who
is, in fact, a real person and who will be
receiving one of my contributor’s copies
of the magazine). She later commented
that she would never forget second to
none and proceeded to prove it by using
the phrase regularly throughout the rest
of the term.

Later in the week, I wiggled my feet

about quite ostentatiously in a business

8 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

English class. As I generally try to avoid
drawing attention to the state of my
own footwear, this blatant flaunting was
received as a novel curiosity.
‘Do you like my new trainers?’ I asked.
Of course my students did.
‘Solomons, Salamans, something like
that (I peered down at the trainers
themselves and finally got it right). I
hadn’t ever heard of the brand before I
got them.’
‘A good mark,’ said one of my
students.
‘Brand. Brand. Brand ...’
‘Brand.’
‘Really?’
They told me that Salomons were
quite big in Spain a few years back.
‘Really? I don’t think they were so big
in the UK at the same time. Maybe they
needed to boost brand awareness there a
bit.’
I was asked to explain boost, which I
did, before going on:
‘My previous trainers were Chirucas.
Do you know them? I don’t think they
had been launched in the UK before I left
for Spain. Anyway, they were good, but I
fancied a change. I suppose I’m not a
very loyal customer really. Anyway, that’s
enough about my feet. Have a look at
page 46.’
Page 46 was this:
Complete these reasons for
advertising, using the words in the
box.
awareness boost
building customer
launch market
As a brand- 1 .............. activity
To increase 2 .............. of the brand
To 3 .............. a new product onto
the market
To 4 .............. sales and to increase
5 .............. share
To maintain 6 .............. loyalty
(from Brook-Hart)
Again, more of the same smiles, tutts
and nodding.
The next day, my class of advanced
teenagers were late (yes, all of them)
and I found myself sitting in an empty
classroom, contemplating our
coursebook. When the first student
came in, the conversation went like this:
‘How are you, Blanca?’
‘I’m fine thanks, and you?’
(That’s what I was looking for ...)
‘I’m tired. I was up till four am last
night.’
‘Four?’
‘Yeah, just watching YouTube clips.
Silly, really. I’m old enough to know
better. I used to be able to stay up all
night but these days I’m starting to feel
my age. Still young at heart, though.
Young at heart – d’you get that?’
Blanca nodded.
‘So what about you, as a
representative of the youth of today, do
you do four am jobs?’
She told me that she normally tries
to get to bed by 11 pm, which we both
agreed was more sensible than my own
schedule.
‘Very mature – obviously an old head
on young shoulders.’
She understood that as well.
Now the last bit of the conversation
was a little more forced than I might
have liked and Blanca could tell I was
up to something ‘teacher-ish’, but I had
no reason to hide this and she was
happy to play along. A later exercise
contained, amongst others, these
expressions to match:
a My 90-year-old grandfather has
only recently begun to feel his age.
b The children shouldn’t have acted
so irresponsibly. They are old
enough to know better.
c Some people say that the secret
of staying young is to remain
young at heart.
d The youth of today seem so
different from when I was a
youngster.
e Tim’s only 14 but very mature. He
has an old head on young
shoulders.
1 be mature enough to act in a
more sensible way
2 young people
3 be more mature than is expected
for someone so young
4 still feeling and behaving as you
did when you were younger
5 be physically aware of your real
age
(from Gude and Stephens)
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
This time, the input had been provided
to one learner only, so any questions I
received, I redirected to Blanca and she
was able to help the others.
The driving force
So you can see what I’m doing here. If
you like it, then my job is basically over.
If you’re still not sure, here’s my rationale
in a little more detail – and in answer to
a number of possible objections:
But, Chris, it’s actually quite difficult to
engineer sentences with target
language in it. That’s what we have
coursebook writers for. This would
take too much preparation time.
The examples above are all real ones;
none of them took more than a couple
of minutes and that was without writing
anything down. All this involves is a
quick glance at an exercise five minutes
before class and, if nothing springs to
mind, you leave it for another day.
Nothing’s lost. You don’t have to try to
include all the items, either: a handful is
good, and even just a couple will help
the exercise go more smoothly. In the
first example above, I’d wanted to
include make the most of in my little pep
talk, too, but realised later that I’d left it
out. It didn’t matter, though – nobody
was any the worse off. I could also have
included brand building in the second
example – but no problem.
We consciously work words and
phrases into our conversation on a daily
basis. In fact, we work whole
quotations, opinions and arguments
into it, let alone a few items of lexis.
With respect to coursebook writing,
this might even be an interesting
training exercise if you are thinking
about trying your hand at materials
writing yourself.
This is nothing new. I’ve been telling my
classes ‘primer’ anecdotes with target
structures embedded in them for years.
That’s great; me, too. I tell students what
I’ve been doing all day, ask them to share
some of their own experiences and then
hit them with a present perfect board
presentation or exercises. The difference
with what I’ve outlined above is that here
we are shamelessly taking the answers
straight from the exercises in question
and strategically inserting them into a
little monologue or steered conversation
to radically improve success rates later.
An anecdote involving the present
perfect may show students the 
9

Front-
wheel
drive
 grammatical formula they need for
production, but not necessarily the
exact verbs that they need in subsequent
exercises. Here, our embedded language
corresponds with the exercise answers
completely. It is the answers.
Gapping is also used particularly
often with vocabulary items and idioms,
so you’ll notice that the examples given
are not actually grammar exercises
themselves (although the first one does
have the grammatical focus of
determiners).
Aren’t you just reinventing the wheel
here? The students are basically doing
the exercise twice.
I wouldn’t really claim to be either
inventing or reinventing anything. The
students are doing the exercise once, but
they are receiving the target language as
an additional form of input once as well
– prior to the exercise.
Let’s think about the actual design
of many exercises and about what
happens in our classes for a moment.
Coursebook exercises often don’t
provide the target language itself as
input. They gap the target language and
provide a ‘vacuum in context’ into
which the target language is sucked,
hopefully, by inference and deduction.
It’s a kind of ‘anti-input’ that, in my
experience at least, works for between
about 50 and 70 percent of the target
language per exercise. For the remaining
uninferred and undeduced target items,
the teacher normally ends up giving the
target language as additional input at
some point in any case. If it’s not prior
to the exercise, then it will often be
during the exercise when students get
stuck and start asking for meanings; or
it might be after the exercise, when the
students have already got the answers
wrong and the teacher is trying to
explain what the correct answers are
and why.
Language exercises are meant to be
a vehicle for language learning. So I ask
you now to imagine your typical gapped
10 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
exercise as a vehicle, let’s say a delivery
van, loaded with wonderful language.
Normally, the cognitive strain comes at
the end of the exercise when the students
have got a bit bogged down and you’re
trying to dig the rear wheels of that
vehicle out of a lexical quagmire of all-
possibles. With the little trick discussed
here, we can spread the strain more
evenly, loading some of the weight over
the front axle of our metaphorical van.
The van metaphor is completely
superfluous.
Yes, but it links in nicely with the title.
Grant me a little artistic licence, please.
The type of dialogues you are creating
here are forced and unnatural. You are
manipulating discourse and to some
extent your students, too. They will
feel cheated when they discover that
what they were partaking in was not
genuine communication but an
instrumental device.
What is an English class if it isn’t a
manipulated set of conditions to
enhance language learning? The mere
fact that we’re all together at the same
time means that the students have had
to manipulate their own schedules to be
there. In the language classroom we
manipulate roles, turn taking, language
tasks and a hundred other parameters to
try to speed up our students’ language
acquisition, give them quality instruction
and a chance to practise their English.
This is fairly much understood when a
student walks in the door – better
perhaps by the students than by us.
Most of them are not there primarily to
meet other people and feel good about
themselves. The students have just paid
at reception or the course office for us
to help them learn a language. Within
reason, I don’t think they mind too
much how we do it. I must also say that
all the reactions I have had to this sort
of strategy have been positive.
I notice that all of the examples given
come from advanced-level
coursebooks. Is this only for high-level
learners and, if so, what about me? The
highest level I have is intermediate.
These just happen to be the classes I
was teaching when I tried the technique.
There is absolutely no reason you can’t
do it with lower-level students. Please let
me know how it goes!
Obviously, this is one small technique
amongst dozens, hundreds even, that a
language teacher might use. I’ve spent
time writing this one up, and hoped that
you might spend time reading about it,
because I think that the deliberate style
and focus involved warrants covering in
its own right.
To end, I shall give you four more
reasons why I am in favour of the
occasional front-wheel driven exercise.
Four-wheel drive
Students seem to enjoy the
surprise they get when they find
the items in the exercise familiar.
They are ‘tickled’ and this
contributes a more enriching
emotional contour to the class.
Students enjoy being able to
tackle the exercise in question
with greater success than they
might otherwise have done.
Students realise that the teacher
has actually looked at the
exercise before class and has
an idea, in language terms,
about where the lesson is going.
It helps to lessen the distance
between teacher and students
on one side and the exercises in
the book on the other, lending
mutual credibility to both
teacher talk and to the exercise,
and strengthening the lesson
holistically.
Brook-Hart, G Business Benchmark
Advanced Student’s Book BEC Edition
CUP 2007
Gude, K and Stephens, M CAE Result
OUP 2008
Norris, R with French, A Ready for CAE
Macmillan 2008
Chris Roland is based
at the British Council,
Barcelona, Spain, and
throughout the year is
involved with as much
teacher training and
conference speaking as
is possible on top of his
regular teaching schedule.
He writes primary,
secondary and business
material for several
publishers and is also
involved in projects such
as Inanimate Alice and his
own PowerPoint stories
for very young learners at
www.regandlellow.com.
chris.roland@gmail.com
 G R A M M A R
Holistic
grammar
teaching 3
Rod Bolitho views the What do our learners need to know
about voice? Why do so many
importance of voice. coursebooks and teachers make such a
big issue of the passive as a structure?
Are we making it more difficult for
learners than it really is?
T
here is nothing structurally
difficult about the passive voice
in English. Once learners have
a command of the parts of the
verb to be and the form of the past
participle (V3), they have the means at
their disposal to construct passive
forms. And yet, for decades, structural
syllabuses insisted dogmatically on
providing for teaching the passive tense
by tense, and for practising it by asking
learners to transform active sentences
into the passive. Recent coursebooks
have begun to focus much more on the
uses of the passive in English, and this
is an important step forward as some
languages use the passive less than
English does, making use of other
options such as impersonal constructions
(German man and French on, for
example, and third person plural or a
reflexive, as in Russian). However, very
few coursebooks explore reasons for the
choices of voice that writers and speakers
make as a text unfolds and, still less, the
wider notions of ‘activeness’ and
‘passiveness’, which have their
equivalents in all languages. Here on
pages 13 and 14 is a straightforward
sequence of activities (plus keys) at
upper-intermediate level designed to
12 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
explore this area in greater depth and to
get learners thinking about it instead of
responding mechanistically.

Each of these activities is designed to
push learners far beyond the immediate
comfort zone of formulaic transformation
exercises and simple rules of usage. They
are designed to be mulled over and
discussed in pairs or groups in order to
help the learners to work towards a ‘feel’
for how English speakers make decisions
about active and passive use. To do this,
they need to work on whole texts like
those in Activities 1 and 2, where the
writer has made considered choices, but
they will also benefit from becoming
aware of how ‘activeness’ and
‘passiveness’ underlie aspects of the lexical
system, as in the third activity. All this
implies thinking and talking about
English, and if this means that some of
the discussion takes place in the mother
tongue, that should not be a problem. It
is the quality of the thinking and talk
that counts in cases like this.
Rod Bolitho is Academic
Director at Norwich
Institute for Language
Education, UK.
Previously, he spent 17
years at the University
College of St Mark and
St John in Plymouth. His
most recent book is
Trainer Development,
co-authored with Tony
Wright.
rodbol44@yahoo.co.uk
 Activity 1
Look at the following text and answer the questions alongside it.

What happens when you 1 Why does the writer address the reader
press the ‘Start’ button on a photocopier? directly here?
Inside a copier there is a special drum. The drum acts a lot like a balloon – it
can be charged with a form of static electricity. 2 Why does the writer choose the
Inside the copier there is also a very fine black powder known as toner. The passive in these two cases?
drum, once it is charged with static electricity, can attract the toner particles.
3 Who made it? Is it important to know?
The drum, or belt, is made out of photoconductive material.

Here are the actual steps involved in making a photocopy: 4 Why ‘becomes charged’ and not just
‘is charged’ here?
1 The surface of the drum becomes charged.
2 An intense beam of light moves across the paper that you have placed 5 Why the active voice again here?
on the copier’s glass surface. Light is reflected from white areas of the
paper and strikes the drum below. 6 Look at the three verbs in this
3 Wherever a photon hits, electrons are emitted from the photoconductive sentence. Why does the writer switch
from active to passive and then back?
atoms in the drum and they neutralise the positive charges above. Dark
areas on the original (such as pictures or text) do not reflect light onto
7 Do these adjectives imply that the
the drum, leaving regions of positive charges on the drum’s surface.
toner and the paper are charged
4 The negatively charged, dry, black pigment called toner is then spread during or before the process? Can you
over the surface of the drum, and the pigment particles adhere to the see the ‘hidden passive’ in them?
positive charges that remain.
5 A positively charged sheet of paper then passes over the surface 8 Can you see why this is sometimes
of the drum, attracting the beads of toner away from it. called a ‘telescoped passive’? Can you
find two more examples in the text?
6 The paper is then heated and pressed to fuse the image formed
by the toner to the paper’s surface. 9 Why is the passive used so often in
this kind of text?
And your photocopy is ready – all in a few seconds!

Activity 2
Look at this short newspaper extract and answer the questions alongside it.

1 Why is the passive used in the
Tiger murdered in Arunachal Pradesh headline and in the first sentence
On January 7, a tiger was poisoned and bled to death of the report?
by inhabitants of Namuk, a village 30 km from 2 What does the first sentence tell
Siang district in Arunachal Pradesh. On January 8, us that is not in the headline?
the tiger was brought to the village, where an 3 Who brought the tiger to the
environmental activist caught it on camera before its village on January 8? Who
coat was removed and presumably sold. removed its coat and sold it?
There is rumoured to be a flourishing trade in Why doesn’t the journalist name
tiger skins and other body parts in the area, but these people?
villagers refused to confirm this. They claim that the
4 Why does the journalist start the
tiger was killed to protect their farm animals from second paragraph with a passive
attack. The local police superintendent promised a construction: ‘There is rumoured
full investigation into this illegal activity, saying ‘If to be ...’? Would a writer in your
smugglers are involved, they will be severely language use the passive here?
punished under the Forest Act.’
5 Why the switch to the active
Over 200 tigers are believed to have been killed in
voice with ‘They claim ...’ at the
India in the last twelve months. Activists are trying
start of the next sentence?
to help local people to understand that this rate of
slaughter cannot be maintained if the tiger is to 6 Who will punish the smugglers
survive. Far too many cases never even get reported. (second paragraph)? Do we need
to know?
7 ‘... are believed to have been
killed ...’ Is this vague or
precise? Why does the
journalist choose a passive
construction here? Would a
writer in your language use
the passive here?
8 ‘... never even get reported.’
Why not just ‘... are never
reported’? What does ‘get’
add here?
9 Who do you think the journalist
actually spoke to at first hand,
and which parts of his report
seem to be based on hearsay?
How can you identify this
difference?
10 Why do you think journalists
find the passive so useful?


• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 13


Holistic grammar teaching
Which of the nouns and adjectives in
the list opposite have a ‘passive
flavour’ about them? Try to use a
passive construction to define each
of them and an active construction
to define the others. When you have
finished, think about words like these
in your own language, and how they
are expressed and defined. Do you
notice any differences?
Please note that in many of these cases there may be no absolutely right answer. The process of thinking and discussion
that learners go through is far more important than the final answers they come up with.
Activity 1
1 To attract the reader’s interest. To
provide an informal and personal way
into the description of a technical
process.
2 Probably because the ‘agent’, or
doer of the action, simply isn’t important
here.
3 We don’t know and it’s not important
to know.
4 It emphasises a change of state
(very common in scientific and technical
contexts).
5 To re-engage the readers and to
remind them that this is something they
do regularly.
6 The choice here seems to be mainly
stylistic; it allows a ready sequencing of
three interconnected phases in the
process, with the electrons as the subject
of the second and third main verbs and
therefore the main focus for a reader.
7 They were charged before this
stage. You can spot the ‘hidden’ or
underlying passive if you extend the
noun phrase into a clause in each case:
‘The toner which has been negatively
charged ...’ and ‘The sheet of paper
which has been positively charged ...’.
8 Sometimes also called a ‘telescoped
relative’, it can be readily expanded to
‘the image which has been formed by the
toner’. The other examples are: ‘a very
fine black powder known as toner’ and
‘the actual steps involved’.
(Note: Learners often find it difficult to
build this ‘telescoping’ into their own
14 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Activity 3
a) loot b) drinkable
e) incredible f) manager
i) travel agent j) addressee
m) payee n) manageable
(It may be best to do a couple of examples with the whole class to get them started.)
Key to activities
writing as it is not an option in many
other languages. This is why it is good to
take every opportunity to raise their
awareness of it in texts like this.)
9 Because it is a description of a
process in which the doer of an action,
or agent, is usually irrelevant to
understanding.
Activity 2
1 To keep the focus on the main
‘character’ in the story, in this case the
tiger.
2 More detail on the way the tiger died
and who was responsible.
3 We don’t know and the journalist
doesn’t name those responsible, for any
of the following reasons: a) he doesn’t
actually know exactly who did these
things; b) he believes the names to be
unimportant and irrelevant to the story;
c) he knows, but he is protecting himself
from legal action or revenge by not
revealing the names.
4 Possibly because he doesn’t know,
or wants to protect, the source of these
rumours.
5 Possibly because he is reporting
exactly what the villagers said to him. He
seems to be sure of his ground here.
6 There is no need to include an agent
here – there is an assumption that every
reader will be familiar with the way the
law works.
7 It is deliberately imprecise. The
writer doesn’t have access to exact
statistics but still wants to make the
3
c) trainer d) employee
g) patient h) unrepeatable
k) soluble l) trainee
o) victim p) tolerable
point, and so covers himself by using
the passive ‘are believed to have been
killed ...’.
8 A difficult one to answer, but the
use of ‘get’ seems to make the passive
more ‘dynamic’ here, almost as if he is
accusing his fellow journalists of
ignoring an important issue on the
grounds that killing tigers has become
so common as to be uninteresting.
9 He seems to have spoken to some
villagers and to the police, and has used
the active voice to report what they said,
even quoting the police superintendent’s
exact words. Much of the rest of the
report seems to be based on second-
hand information and, here, he uses the
passive to protect himself and to
indicate a greater degree of uncertainty.
10 For many of the reasons stated
above. It can be used to protect
sources, to protect the writer or to focus
on the main character or incident in the
story, especially where the doer of an
action is unknown or not relevant.
Activity 3
Some examples will suffice here:
● A trainee is someone who is being
trained.
● If a substance is soluble, it can be
dissolved.
● A victim is someone who has been
attacked, hurt or killed.
● A travel agent arranges journeys and
holidays.
 V O C A B U L A R Y
Different
learners,
different
learning
L
Marjorie Rosenberg earners are often overwhelmed
by the amount of vocabulary
maintains there are as many they are expected to learn.
However, they are rarely given
ways of learning lexis as tips on methods to help them with this
task. Many of us who teach English
there are learners. around the world have learnt a second
language ourselves and, if we take the
time to think about the methods we
used, we can incorporate them into our
lesson planning to help our students
learn, recall and use vocabulary in an
appropriate manner.
Knowing vocabulary
It is helpful to spend some time having
learners think about what goes into the
learning of vocabulary. Ricky Lowes
and Francesca Target recommend that a
good place to start is to discuss what it
really means to ‘know’ a word. Does it
mean that we can translate it into our
mother tongue, give a definition of the
word in English, identify the context in
which it is used, its origin, what it
collocates with or which part of speech
it is? These are some of the criteria
which can determine ‘knowledge’ of a
16 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
word. For one group of learners, a
number of these criteria may hold true,
while others may feel comfortable simply
knowing the meaning or translation of
a word. As teachers, we hope that our
learners will go beyond the simple
meaning of a word in order to be able
to use it correctly and to understand its
further implications. Discussing these
points with learners can be a first step
towards learner autonomy. When
learners feel bombarded by new
information, they often don’t take the
time to delve further into meaning,
context, collocation, origin, etc. By
discussing these points with them, we
can offer them more opportunities to
‘own’ words, a first step towards helping
them to discover their own strategies.
Learning vocabulary
The next step can be to look at the
specific methods we used to learn
vocabulary. Some people feel the need
to use highlighters or underline words,
others create vocabulary lists with
translations or meanings; some write
words on file cards to carry around with
As teachers,
we hope that our
learners will go
beyond the simple
meaning of a word in
order to be able to
use it correctly
them, others create sentences using the
words and hold conversations with
imaginary people. Brainstorming ideas
with your learners and asking them if
they have favourite methods for learning
can lead to a lively discussion and give
them the chance to think about how to
learn and not just what to learn.
Learners often feel that they have to use
methods suggested to them by teachers
or parents, even though these methods
may not be suitable for them. By
discussing possibilities, we can open up
the dialogue to include a wide variety of
ideas and demonstrate to learners that
other possibilities exist. It may be that
the most unusual methods are the most
helpful and can inspire other learners to
try them out. In addition, explaining
methods we ourselves have used can be
a rapport-building exercise in the
classroom. By sharing this information
with our learners, we set up an
atmosphere of trust and can act as the
living proof that a method can work.
There is every possibility that wide
differences will occur in these discussion
sessions. The reason for this may
depend on the learning style of each
individual learner and the way they
prefer to process information. One
model for looking at different styles is
to take into account cognitive, physical
and affective approaches to learning.
Cognitive learners
Cognitive learners are often quite
analytical. They frequently demand very
specific explanations and may be
interested in word origins. Simply
memorising words rarely works for
them if they don’t feel that they truly
understand where the word came from,
how it is used, etc. These learners like
making decisions about words and
enjoy analysing the fine differences
between words of similar meaning.
They learn by categorising and making
word charts. They seek structure and
like to break down sentences into the
various parts of speech.
So, what types of activities can we
offer these learners?
New words
One effective activity is finding new
words and having the learners work out
their meanings. When we choose words
which have recently come into the
English language, like biphonal, we give
them the opportunity to use their
analytical skills. Learners of at least
intermediate level will certainly know
that the prefix bi means two and that
phonal refers to the telephone. When
they then see the definition ‘speaking on
two phones at the same time’, this
makes sense to them. New words come
up in texts from newspapers, magazines
and the internet. Learners can also be
encouraged to look for their own words
to bring to class to see if the others can
figure out what they mean.
Odd one out
‘Odd one out’ is a standard vocabulary
exercise in which the learners have to
say which word in a list of words is
different from the others. I find that
cognitive learners, in particular, enjoy
Learners can
also be encouraged
to look for their
own words to bring
to class to see if the
others can figure out
what they mean
this game with a new twist. Inspired by
an activity by Felicity O’Dell and Katie
Head, I have begun giving my learners
lists of words and having them come up
with the reason why each of the words
could be the odd one out. For example,
I might give them a list of school
supplies, such as stapler, glue, paper clip
and hole punch, and ask them to come
up with reasons why each of these
individual items could be the odd one
out. Suggestions from learners have
included: the stapler attaches items
together permanently with metal, the
glue is sticky, the paper clip can be
easily removed and the hole punch does
not attach items. As there is no one
correct answer, analytical learners enjoy
searching for logical explanations and
often come up with a number of ideas.
Logic puzzles
Cognitive learners also enjoy logic
puzzles. There are a number of
deduction puzzles written specifically for
language learners in which they are given
information and have to solve the puzzle
by using logical thinking. They often get
so involved in working out the solution
that they don’t think about the fact that
they are doing it in a foreign language.
Physical learners
Physical learners exhibit different
characteristics. In order to learn, they
need to connect words to concrete
objects or physical movement. They
often remember a word better when they
have actually done something connected
with it, such as miming it or using the
object it represents. They may also need
to learn a word by physically feeling the
shape of their mouths and the position
of their tongues when pronouncing it.
Realia and things that they can touch
and use are useful resources for working
with these learners.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
Roleplays
Roleplays and simulations are extremely
effective with physical learners as these
types of students tend to remember
situations in which they have used a
word and use these as a hook to recall
the word itself.
Realia
Working with realistic materials, such as
train schedules, hotel brochures, menus,
instruction manuals and objects, is
needed to help physical learners to
imprint the new vocabulary. Activities I
have used include feeling items in a bag
and guessing what they are, miming
putting on and taking off articles of
clothing, labelling a colleague in the
classroom by using small pieces of tape
on which they have written different
parts of the body, or playing dominoes
or matching games by giving each
learner a card and having them
physically find the person or people
whose cards match theirs.
Snowball activities
Snowball activities in which learners ask
each other questions and get answers
and then exchange cards before moving
on to the next learner are also enjoyable
for physical learners. In general, any
activity which requires some sort of
physical movement combined with
language work is helpful for them.
Affective learners
Affective learners are those who need to
make personal associations to new
material. They may look for ways in
which the words are important to them
personally or connect them to other
familiar material. They enjoy words
which deal with feelings, although the
intrapersonal among them will not
readily discuss their own feelings. These
learners may enjoy choosing their
favourite word in a sentence, deciding
that they like a word because of the way
it sounds or looks. In addition, they
may be interested in using words to
reach emotional goals.
Experience
Suitable activities for these learners
include those in which they can write
about personal experiences. One
successful essay topic I have used is to
write about an important ‘first’ in their
lives. As most people have some first 
17

Different
learners,
different
learning
 experience that they remember well, I
rarely hear anyone complain that they
can’t think of anything to write about.
For those who need help, a short
brainstorming session can come first
and the learners can be prompted by
being asked if they remember the first
time they rode a bicycle, went abroad,
spoke to a native speaker of English,
etc. As these stories are personal, I read
and correct them but do not share them
with the class unless the writers give
their permission. Some learners who
have held back in class produce
wonderful material as they get involved
in writing their own stories.
Collaboration
Cooperative activities which create an
atmosphere of positive interdependence
are also good for affective learners.
When learners feel they are an essential
part of a team, they will generally try to
do their best so as not to let the team
down. Cooperative activities, such as
crossword puzzles where each learner
has a set of clues and must contribute
to help the group solve the puzzle,
jigsaw reading or information-gap
activities where partners are dependent
ENGLISH
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18 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
on each other, as well as joint projects
where participation from each member
of the team is necessary to reach a goal,
will appeal to these learners.
Developing autonomy
Outside the classroom, learners need to
take charge of their learning processes
and discover both their own strengths
and weaknesses and what to do about
them. By examining their preferences
and truly thinking about learning rather
than just learning by rote, they can
begin to find out for themselves what
works and what does not.
Outside the classroom,
learners need to take
charge of their learning
processes and discover
their own strengths
and weaknesses
The ultimate goal of encouraging
learners to understand how vocabulary
is acquired, remembered and recalled is
to help them on the road to learner
autonomy. When they begin to think
about what words mean to them and
discover strategies they can use to
improve their vocabulary, they can
begin to make decisions for themselves
on how to learn. Our role is to
introduce a number of methods, theirs
is to discover for themselves which
technique works best for them.
IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
Do you have ideas you’d like to share
with colleagues around the world?
Tips, techniques and activities; simple or
sophisticated; well-tried or innovative;
something that has worked well for you?
All published contributions receive
a prize! Write to us or email:
editor@etprofessional.com
Writing for ETp
Would you like to write for ETp?
We are always interested in new writers
and fresh ideas. For guidelines and
advice, write to us or email:
editor@etprofessional.com

As we often teach in the way we
ourselves learn best, we often forget that
those sitting in front of or across from
us may not share our preferences. When
we recognise that people have different
needs and different learning styles, we
become more tolerant and open to the
diversity in our classrooms. By
expanding our repertoire and looking
for new ideas to reach our learners, we
not only become more successful
teachers but we help our students to
become more successful learners. It is,
therefore, essential to remember that
there are as many methods to learn
vocabulary as there are learners.
Helping our learners to find the one
which works best is the key to setting
them on the road to success. ETp
Lowers, R and Target, F Helping Students
to Learn: A Guide to Learner Autonomy
Richmond Publishing 1998
O’Dell, F and Head, K Games for
Vocabulary Practice CUP 2003
Marjorie Rosenberg
teaches at the University
of Graz, Austria. She is
also a teacher trainer
and Cambridge ESOL
examiner, presenter and
materials writer. Her
publications include
In Business (CUP),
Communication Business
Activities (now available
at www.English 360.com)
and two sets of
textbooks for Austrian
schools. Currently she is
joint-coordinator of the
Business English Special
Interest Group of IATEFL.
Marjorie.Rosenberg@aon.at
TALKBACK!
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 S P E A K I N G miracle activity that they would enjoy. I
didn’t give much homework – in fact I
didn’t require much of them at all.

Student
What I really needed to do was to
come to grips with the students’ real
requirements in order to understand
what would make them speak. So I
talked with the students out of class
and started working in a team with my
teaching colleagues. Suddenly, it dawned
on me that the students didn’t speak

talking
simply because they couldn’t express
themselves orally in real time. Above all,
they needed training, just as they would
in order to participate in a sport. So I
had to find a way to increase STT
(Student Talking Time) dramatically –
especially individual STT.

time
The deconstruction of
class time
When a teacher asks all the questions
and only one student at a time replies,
the average amount of talking time for
each student is very limited, even with
enthusiastic students. Imagine a class of
20 students. You spend ten minutes per

Marianne Raynaud
is pleased when she gets the
most out of her students.
A
sk dedicated language
teachers what their most
frustrating task is and they
will invariably say it is getting
the students to speak. No matter how
good students are at reading or writing,
they often fall silent when teachers start
asking questions. This silence can be
very nerve-wracking for teachers, as I
learnt when I started teaching at a
technological university in France. Like
most teachers, I sensed something was
wrong. I tried very hard to do what I
had been taught in the official teacher-
training programme, ie find the most
interesting texts and ask the most
judicious questions. I chose ESP texts,
current events texts, cultural texts, but
nothing seemed to work. Of course, a
few students would participate if I
called on them, but with the rest it was
like pulling teeth. Moreover, we had a
language lab and I almost had to beg the
students to go in. The director of the
engineering school had warned me at our
first meeting that the students wouldn’t
be interested and, after a few months, I
had to concede that he was right.
The disease to please
I soon realised that I was afflicted by
‘the disease to please’. I desperately
wanted the students to like me, so I kept
searching for the miracle text or the
hour giving explanations and an
I really needed
to come to grips with
the students’ real
requirements in order to
understand what would
make them speak
additional five minutes distributing
documents or asking students to take
out materials, so you have 45 minutes left
for oral production. If you use questions
to elicit answers, you will be sharing this
remaining time with your students.
Undoubtedly, you will have to repeat
certain questions, make comments or
explain incorrect answers. Most probably
you will use up at least 25 minutes doing
this, leaving only 20 minutes for the
members of the class. And if the
students have to raise their hands and
speak one after another, the average
amount of STT will be one minute per
student per hour. With larger classes it
will be even less! Six years of traditional
instruction – 60 hours per year – will
give students a maximum of six hours
of oral production: hardly enough to
make them operational in English! 

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 19


Student
talking

time
Teachers who are very talented and
very energetic can often get all the
students, particularly young learners,
responding together in harmony, but
older students seldom appreciate this
chorus technique. Some educators may
say the silent ones are actually
participating by giving the answers in
their heads. This may be true to a
certain extent, but the best way to learn
something is to have the opportunity to
explain it to someone else, to have the
chance to articulate an answer in
complete sentences, and not just think
about it.
The importance of
tutorials
In order to increase individual STT
dramatically, my team and I decided to
emphasise oral activities that would
enable many, or even all, the students to
speak at the same time. My idea was
simple: if I could get all the students to
work on their own in the school’s
language lab on activities designed to
perfect their speaking skills, then I
would be able to work with one student
at a time, tailoring my teaching to suit
their individual needs. I wanted to give
all the students the opportunity to
speak with their teacher alone for 20
minutes on a subject of their choice
several times during the year. I thought
this ‘lab + tutorial’ setup would
encourage autonomy and allow the
students to choose the materials they
wanted to study.
From the very beginning, the
tutorial system totally changed the
teacher–student relationship. My
colleagues were delighted, since we all
saw that the students were breaking out
of their shells and talking to us on topics
about which they were passionate. By
eliminating peer pressure and focusing
on personal interests, we enabled them to
hone their speaking skills. Moreover, we
were able to ask authentic questions not
pre-prepared ones. The students put in a
tremendous amount of work preparing
20 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
for their tutorials, and the teachers had
the opportunity to point out incorrect
usage without embarrassing them in
front of their classmates.
Creating a lab
programme
Our language lab has technology that
was cutting edge at the time it was
installed: 15 years before the advent of
the internet. Today, teachers can organise
their own ‘lab with tutorials’ system in
any room equipped with computers
(with or without a connection to the
internet). In the future I see ‘language
labs’ composed of MP3 players with
amplifying headsets that are simply
linked through wifi to a central server,
to an interactive whiteboard or to the
teacher’s own computer.
Getting our students to prepare for
their one-to-one tutorials was easy. The
Having a teacher
correct you, show
interest in what you are
saying and give you
positive feedback is a
unique experience
difficult part at the beginning was
creating lab programmes that would
keep all the other students busy for 60
minutes. Today, resources are readily
available online free or for a minimal
fee. Our programme had the students
repeating, responding to stimuli or
translating into English for the first half
of the hour. I made sure that recordings
allowed space for ‘listen and repeat’
activities. I found interactive grammar
drills were valuable, too. They may seem
difficult and tedious, but they are very
effective as they develop spontaneous
verbal reaction. We found that exercises
taking about 20 minutes were ideal for
this first part. During the last 30 minutes
of lab, we had the students work on
listening comprehension with written
cloze exercises, on pronunciation pitfalls
with grids to fill in, or on the correction
of homework with audio keys.
Recordings lasting ten minutes proved
to work best for the last half hour.
Audio files seem to work better than
video, as the students have to
concentrate on the sounds they hear and
are not distracted by pictures. Language
assimilation is quicker because the brain
creates its own pictures in order to recall
words or expressions. Workbooks with
written exercises to do while listening or
repeating are excellent, as writing
reinforces learning and students have a
written record of the work they have
done in the lab for further study or to
prepare for tests. In order that students
never feel lost, we make sure answer
keys are always available to correct
finished work or simply to help the
students understand what is being said.
Audio files can also be used as keys for
written homework assignments – and, of
course, a song at the end of a lab hour
is always appreciated. Songs can involve
gap-filling exercises or the students can
just sing along with the lyrics. With
challenging exercises, all the students
will be speaking or practising intensive
listening 90–95% of the time in the lab.
The importance of lab
work
Some teachers may object to lab work,
saying that students can listen to English
and do online exercises on their own out
of class. But we all know the importance
of motivation. We may promise on
January 1 to exercise every day, but if
we don’t join a gym, we often give up
very quickly. Another advantage is the
wonderful ‘library atmosphere’ you can
create. Students go into the lab on time
and start working independently out of
respect for classmates who are about to
do their tutorials. Our lab has no
partitions but, with their headsets on,
the students cannot hear those who are
having their private sessions with their
teacher. Nobody ever raises their voice,
and if students do speak with their
neighbours they do so in whispers.
Our tutorials are not limited to 20-
minute talks. We also get the students to
give shorter presentations in the form of
interviews, reports or stories. We have
even used the same system for oral tests
towards the end of the term.
Having a competent and dedicated
teacher correct you in real time, show
interest in what you are saying and give
you positive feedback is a unique
experience. In large classes, tutorials can
be conducted in pairs with students
asking each other questions towards the
end in a debate or discussion. Whatever
the class setup, do try to give some
private tutoring to your students. It is
well worth the effort.
Increased STT during
the classroom hour
In our programme all the students had
a two-hour session once a week, with
one hour in the lab and one hour in the
classroom. Once we had achieved more
or less 90 percent talking or intensive
listening time in the lab through the
tutorials and intensive lab work, we had
to find an effective plan for the classroom
hour. Obviously, question–answer
routines were out. We searched for a way
to have all the students talking as much
as possible, with the teacher intervening
very seldom. We aimed at 60 to 70
percent individual STT. An additional
concern was ensuring the students were
speaking correct English. We tried
various solutions until we decided on
the following strategy: we would have
the students ‘teach each other’.
Homework correction lends itself
very well to pairwork. Students are lent
one key for each exercise. One student
reads out their answers, while the other
checks, advises or explains orally. We
make it a firm rule that the student with
the key must never show it to their
partner. When keys are easy to follow
(eg duplicates of the worksheets but with
the right answers inserted), teachers
don’t have to intervene. Everyone is
speaking or listening intensively all the
time. Try it and you will see homework
correcting goes three times faster, and
teachers can answer questions
individually. When several teachers share
keys (stored in binders in plastic sleeves
and only lent out to students), this
reduces photocopying time, saves paper
and encourages teamwork. Finally, when
correcting written answers to questions
based on a text, the students don’t even
need keys. Most often they have come up
with the same answer and copied it from
the text. Through pairwork, this written
‘checking’ exercise becomes oral work.
Increased participation
in classroom activities
After the pairwork correction activity,
we decided to have our students recite
short texts or poems to each other.
These were generally the listening
comprehension exercises they had
worked on the week before in the lab.
They could also be poems illustrating a
grammar point. No student was ever
called upon to recite in front of the
class so there was no embarrassment,
and the listening student was allowed to
follow along with the text so they could
help. Teachers are frequently afraid of
giving students texts to memorise, but
the memory potential of students is
extraordinary, and I feel it is our duty
to train this innate mental capacity.
At other times, the assignment would
be to translate sentences orally into
English from the students’ native tongue
with a partner giving prompts. This
activity was often followed by an ad-
libbing session, with students producing
sentences based on a topic suggested by
the teacher. Much gesticulating and
natural laughter generally ensued.
Next, we would have a ‘guided’
group activity in threes. Students would
spontaneously discuss topics or negotiate
on themes presented in documents.
Former students
often write to thank
me for making them
learn by heart and
speak in class all
the time
During their discussions they would have
to tick off the expressions they had used
that were listed in their workbooks. Of
course, during all these activities the
teacher would walk around the room
and correct the students discreetly. They
accepted such correction well as it was
done in the presence of only one or two
other students.
Finally, for the last half hour we
would have oral presentations. These
could be individual with one- to two-
minute presentations in rounds – the
students would say the same thing four
times to different groups of three,
according to a chart. We also had
presentations done by pairs in front of
the whole class. First they were very
short, consisting of reports on surveys
with graphs and ongoing projects found
on the internet and delivered in four
PowerPoint slides. Later they became
longer (with 15 minutes speaking time
and a ten-minute follow-up activity for
the class). To get even more active
participation, two other students were
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
assigned to prepare a thank-you speech,
explaining what they had learnt, giving
positive feedback and inviting their
classmates to applaud the speakers. The
rest of the class took extensive notes, as
they were told that an analysis of one of
the talks (chosen at random) would be
part of their end-of-term oral exam. Of
course, the students were given detailed
worksheets with advice and suggested
or required language to prepare for each
of these presentations. The language
they would need was often practised
ahead of time in the lab exercises.

With hindsight, I can say that focusing
on individual STT was the best
professional decision I ever took.
Former students often write to thank
me for making them learn by heart and
speak in class all the time. They
remember how much they laughed.
Today there is much emphasis on
exploiting new technology, but many
teachers are not confident in using it
and find it stressful. I believe there is a
middle way that can benefit everyone.
Have your students use all the
communication tools available today to
read, study what they are interested in
and prepare amazing visuals or video
documents on their own. Then, in class,
train their speaking skills, guide them
towards correct usage and give them
positive feedback, complimenting them
on their technological prowess. There is
no need for us to compete in this area
with our ‘digital natives’. And that is not
what they expect from us. Try to reach
the 75 percent rule: students speaking or
listening attentively for 45 minutes out
of every hour. Become a guide, coach
and cheerleader instead of the ‘master’.
You may have to learn to be silent, but
your students will never forget you! ETp
Marianne Raynaud is a
former professor at
Grenoble Institute of
Technology, France, and
is the author of
QualityTime-ESL: The
Digital Resource Book.
She was awarded the
prestigious Palmes
Académiques for
innovations in teaching.
Today she is webmaster
of QualityTime-ESL.com
and airs three podcast
series on iTunes:
‘QualityTime-ESL’, ‘Your
English’ and ‘5-Minute
TOPs’.
marianne.raynaud@free.fr
21
 TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS
Routine,routine
Laura Gamble recommends the reinforcement of rites for her very young students.
s adults, we often like a change
A in our routine, something to
shake it up a little. If we found
ourselves in a classroom, learning a
second language or any other new skill,
we would most probably be bored if the
teacher followed the same format week
in week out. Young children do not
have this problem. They like routine and
anything that differs from the norm may
be met with questions and confusion.
It is important to create a safe and
comfortable learning environment in
the classroom, and the teacher–student
relationship is central to this
environment. Students need to be able
to trust their teacher. They also need to
feel that the teacher believes in them.
And paramount for children is, I believe,
to establish a routine. This article will
focus on the teaching of very young
learners (VYLs): three to four years old.
Lists and lower case
Once you have planned your lesson and
are ready to start teaching it, you need
to find a way to convey your plan to
your students. Children as young as
three can often understand the meaning
of simple ideas, such as new sound, story
and song. These can be markers for them
to look for throughout the lesson. I
have found that writing a numbered list
on the board helps enormously. Even
though the children can’t read, they can
see how many points are on the list.
The stages of the lesson should be
written in lower case as this is more
recognisable to VYLs (as it is to any
learners). When learning the sounds
represented by different letters, the
letters are generally presented in their
lower-case form. Moreover, the biggest
exposure to written language that VYLs
get is probably through story books,

which are predominantly in lower case.
It is rare to see big chunks of language
written anywhere in capital letters.
VYLs can usually count – if not in
English, then in their native language –
and a total of seven or eight points
seems manageable. Putting a picture
next to each item is even better, as
portraying things visually is key at this
age. My board may look like this:
1 game
2 old sound
3 new sound
4 all sounds a b c
5 writing
6 song
7 story
8 bye bye!
Lessons and likes
I have found over time that putting ‘bye
bye’ at the end really does make a
difference. When I first started teaching
VYLs, I didn’t recognise this as an actual
stage in the lesson. I would also get a
little upset when students asked if it was
home-time next, as I thought this was an
indication that they weren’t enjoying the
lesson. On reflection, I don’t believe this
to be the case at all. It’s just something
that they understand.
As the lesson progresses, I tick off
each point covered as we go along and
put a smiley face next to it. Then I let
the children count how many more
things we have to do before it’s time to
leave. If, for example, early in the lesson
a student asks if it’s ‘story’ next, I will
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
show them ‘story’ on the list and count
with them up to that point. I feel that
this enables students who are too
young to have any real concept of time
to follow the lesson plan.

Once a routine is established, it’s hard –
but not impossible – to change it,
especially if it is something the students
like doing or have previously been
praised for. In one of my classes, I used
to let the children put away their own
whiteboards, thinking this would allow
them to develop responsibility for
keeping the classroom tidy. The
problem was that they started fighting
over who could do what. It’s simply no
good telling a four year old that ‘it’s
Jamie’s turn this week’. This awareness
of time is too sophisticated for
students of this age group.
Change is not, then, impossible.
Obviously, when students progress from
one level to the next there are inevitable
changes. Likewise, if you observe a fellow
teacher and you decide to try out his
or her way, this will necessarily involve
changes to your own routine. Children
are adaptable and once the change has
been explained and carried out a couple
of times in practice, it becomes a new
routine and they can barely remember
how it was done before. Just be
prepared for all the questions! ETp
Laura Gamble taught
business English in
Germany for two years
and has also taught in
the UK. She is currently
teaching and writing
materials in Hong Kong.
lauragamble19@yahoo.co.uk
23
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Language
patterns
K
Phillip Brown suggests nitting patterns are, or so I
am told, easy to follow once
that practice makes perfect. you get going. It’s just a
question of getting the hang
of them. That’s the beauty of a pattern,
any pattern: it’s repeatable. And what is
repeatable can be practised, and practice
makes perfect. Herein also lies the
beauty of patterns, when discoverable, in
the business of language teaching and
learning. In this discussion, I shall limit
myself to two types of pattern.
These patterns are useful in the
teaching and practice of what we have
come to call discursive English, both
written and spoken.
Pattern 1 So what? Well, simply this: a pattern
Most teachers who prepare candidates
for examinations such as IELTS, CAE
and CPE will agree that it is difficult to
get their students to follow the rules of
correct lexical and grammatical
structure in the context of discussions
of global topics such as poverty,
homelessness, terrorism, education,
ignorance, pollution, and so on.
Topics like these are expressed as
abstract general uncountable nouns, and
examination questions are, of course,
not a test of philosophical or political
originality but of the candidate’s ability,
among other things, to use such nouns
according to the canons of correct
English. These topic nouns are key
words, so errors concerning them are
regarded as fundamental. Moreover, the
ability or inability to use them correctly
is often immediately apparent, as when
24 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
a student begins a talk or essay by
saying, ‘The violence is a very serious
problem, and ...’. Candidates who begin
like this have, from the word go,
announced their inability to use the key
word properly, causing sighs of despair
and knitted brows from the examiners.
The use or non-use of articles is a key
feature of nouns such as these and is no
easy matter. A candidate’s L1 may well
contain articles, but the rules of usage
may be different (as they are in French,
Italian and Spanish); or they may
contain articles of an entirely different
species, if we can even call them articles
at all (for example, Japanese, Korean
and Turkish).
is something that can be followed. And
then, once you get the hang of it, well ...
Consider the following text:
Unemployment is a very serious
issue. The unemployment of the
younger generation, in particular, is a
problem that should concern us all.
The unemployment of very large
numbers of people obviously affects
the social and economic fabric of
society, and this could have
disastrous effects on the political
future of the country concerned.
There are many other issues that
should worry us. However,
unemployment is not something that
can be ignored indefinitely, because
the unemployment of the 1920s and
30s in Western Europe taught us
lessons we should never forget.
Can we see a pattern here? Well, who are
you asking? If I speak a language which
doesn’t use articles in the same way, the
point may yet be lost on me. So, let’s try
again, and this time with a topic which
may touch us all even more closely:
Love is a house of many mansions,
which is to say that it is of many
different kinds. The love of a person
for their job is very different from the
love which exists between mother or
father and child. The love of a man
or woman for their partner is very
different from the love of music or of
art. The love of one’s job is different
from the love between composer and
music. The love of mathematics is
not the same as the love between
Romeo and Juliet. The philosopher
Bertrand Russell says that love is
wise and hatred is stupid. What kind
of love is he talking about?
Is the pattern clear now? No? Well, let’s
try again. Let’s try poverty:
Poverty is a global issue. The poverty
of so-called third-world countries has
been much publicised. However, the
poverty we can associate with, for
example, the poor quarters of Brazil,
is abject and totally unacceptable.
Although poverty is on the political
agenda of most civilised countries,
the poverty we only occasionally hear
about is almost beyond belief. The
discussion of poverty should therefore
take into account the poverty which
most civilised people would consider
totally reprehensible in modern times.
Still not clear? No matter, we could go
on and on, through pollution, hunger,
inflation, drug addiction, beauty ...
Let’s try beauty:
Beauty is of different kinds. The
beauty of mathematics is very
different from the beauty of Mother
Teresa or of Jesus Christ. The beauty
we may associate with a piece of
music is very different from the
beauty of Catherine Zeta Jones. The
beauty of Catherine Zeta Jones is not
the beauty Don McLean sang about
in connection with the life of Vincent
van Gogh. Beauty is not, therefore,
one thing. It is not easy to talk about
beauty without talking about the
beauty of very different things.
Abstract general nouns take the definite
article in such constructions as ‘the +
noun + of ’, ‘the + noun + between’ ...,
and so on, which are constructions of
greater specificity. They also require the
definite article in clauses which take
which or that, or in clauses where which
or that can be employed but are omitted
according to the preference of the
speaker or writer.
The point here, however, is not to
argue the grammar of abstract general
nouns, but merely to point out the
importance of establishing patterns
which students should then be
encouraged to imitate.
We can also present students with
the wrong pattern and invite them to
correct it:
The beauty is a house of many
mansions, which means that it is of
different kinds. Beauty of mathematics
is very different from beauty of Mother
Teresa or of Jesus Christ. Beauty we
may associate with a piece of music
is very different from beauty of
Catherine Zeta Jones. Beauty of
Catherine Zeta Jones is not beauty
Don McLean sang about in
connection with life of Vincent Van
Gogh. The beauty is not, therefore,
one thing. It is not easy to talk about
the beauty without talking about
beauty of very different things.
Texts demonstrating correct or incorrect
patterns can be presented in a variety of
ways, including dictation by the teacher
or by the students themselves. The aim
is to teach our students to knit language
together, and to follow the right pattern
in doing so.
Having established the pattern, it
may now be time to try it out in spoken
English. Aspects of the pattern may be
made more memorable by inviting
students to discuss together, for example,
Plato’s suggestion that ‘the purpose of
education is to teach us to love beauty’.
Note in this quotation it is education,
not the education, and beauty, not the
beauty. Or how about ‘The world will be
saved by beauty’ (from The Idiot by
Dostoyevsky)? Note: the world, not
world, and beauty, not the beauty.
Pattern 2
My second structural pattern, which I
believe students should be encouraged
to imitate, also shows us the practical,
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
sociological function of grammar and
of choice of grammar. Since it relates
grammar to real life and to real-life
choices, it should appeal to students
who very naturally seek a practical
framework for the understanding of
English grammar. Our context is still
discursive English. Again, consider
topics such as pollution, violence,
homelessness, poverty, etc. The point is
that we are providing students with a
grammar ‘framework’ suitable for the
discussion of many different topics,
almost like a picture frame: the frame
remains the same, but the picture can be
changed.
Type 1 Conditional:
a) If we fail to address the problem
properly, the consequences may
be dire.
b) The consequences may be dire
if we fail to address the problem
properly.
c) If we should fail to address
the problem properly, the
consequences may be dire.
d) The consequences may be dire
if we should fail to address the
problem properly.
e) Should we fail to address the
problem properly, the
consequences may be dire.
f) The consequences may be dire
should we fail to address the
problem properly.
Type 2 Conditional:
a) If we failed to address the
problem properly, the
consequences could be dire.
b) The consequences could be dire
if we failed to address the
problem properly.
c) If we were to fail to address the
problem properly, the
consequences could be dire.
d) The consequences could be dire
if we were to fail to address the
problem properly.
e) Were we to fail to address the
problem properly, the
consequences could be dire.
f) The consequences could be dire
were we to fail to address the
problem properly.

25

Language
patterns
 Teachers know best how to teach what
they teach. Granted. But here we have a
pattern, and patterns are repeatable.
Consider the political/sociological/
psychological difference between If we
fail to address the problem properly, the
consequences may be dire and Were we
to fail to address the problem properly,
the consequences could be dire.
If you were a party leader
contemplating the imminent elections
and you had been preaching the
importance of positive attitudes, you
would much rather hear Were we to lose
the election, the consequences for the
party could be dire than If we lose the
election, the consequences for the party
will be dire.
Not very clear? Well, what about
simple courtesy and sensitivity?
Suppose a sensitive, hardworking but
not exceptionally bright student is
worried about his performance in a
forthcoming examination. Would you
say If you fail, it won’t be the end of the
world or Were you to fail, it wouldn’t be
the end of the world? The decision is
yours, but in the interests of sensitivity,
I should choose the latter as it doesn’t
suggest the inevitability of failure in
quite the same way that the former
does.
The simple point here is that there
are patterns to practise, and in the above
examples I would argue that the
differences between the choices are
differences involving diplomacy and
sensitivity; they are not simply straight
alternatives, differing purely in their
structure.
The conditional sentences given here
are items which can be practised and
applied to the topics denoted by
abstract general nouns of the type we
began by discussing. Such sentences are
expected in discursive English, and the
patterns and range of choices should be
presented to students so that they can
then apply them in their own work. If
we can get across to them such notions
as sensitivity and diplomacy and
common human decency, so much the
better. After all, grammar should have
evolved to suit our needs and our
values, not vice versa.
26 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Structural patterns are also found in
retrospective judgements, which should
appeal to students for the same reasons
that they appeal to us all. Consider
historical speculation:
a) If Charles I had defeated
Cromwell, the course of English
parliamentary history might have
been very different.
b) The course of English
parliamentary history might have
been very different if Charles I
had defeated Cromwell.
c) Had Charles I defeated Cromwell,
the course of English parliamentary
history might have been very
different.
d) The course of English
parliamentary history might have
been very different had Charles I
defeated Cromwell.
Here, in c), we have a third conditional
pattern including inversion. And there is
a mixed third conditional in a) below:
a) If Charles I had defeated
Cromwell, the present role of the
British monarchy might be very
different.
b) The present role of the British
monarchy might be very different
if Charles I had defeated
Cromwell.
c) Had Charles I defeated Cromwell,
the present role of the British
monarchy might be very different.
d) The present role of the British
monarchy might be very different
had Charles I defeated Cromwell.
And for more immediate effect, let’s
apply this to a student:
a) If Laura had stayed in Italy, she
would have worked in a beauty
salon.
b) Laura would have worked in a
beauty salon if she had stayed in
Italy.
And so on.
The pattern continues. And the object is
precisely to get students to go on in the
same way. Isn’t that what we always try
to do? We should try to get students to
think for themselves; their ideas, their
opinions are matters of their own
choosing, of their own evolution as
thinking human beings, of their own
perceptions of logic and of goodness
knows what else. However, whether or
not they can express their ideas and
their views correctly in English is not a
matter of their own choosing, nor is it
of ours as teachers. It is a question of
the rules of language, of what they
make possible and what they do not.

Whether you are a student of
mathematics or of a language, it is
comforting to be presented with the
phrase and so on. It means ‘If you’ve
grasped the point, you can go on by
yourself, with confidence’. If the point
has not been grasped, well at least we
can try again. It may be true that ‘the
point’ in language is not what it is in
mathematics. If it were, the Tower of
Babel would collapse in an instant.
Even so, patterns can sometimes be
found, which is why we can speak of
‘rules’. As teachers, our job is to
understand patterns and point them
out. ‘Do it like this’ means ‘Do it as we
do it’, and doing it as we do it means
following a pattern. ETp
Dr Phillip Brown teaches
English at Studio
School, Cambridge, UK.
He has a PhD in
Philosophy from St
John’s College,
Cambridge, and has a
continuing interest in his
area of specialisation.
He plays classical guitar
as a hobby.
phillip.brown7@ntlworld.com
Writing for ETp
Would you like to write for ETp? We are
always interested in new writers and fresh
ideas. For guidelines and advice,
write to us or email:
editor@etprofessional.com
Reviewing for ETp
Would you like to review books or other
teaching materials for ETp? We are always
looking for people who are interested in
writing reviews for us.
Please email
editor@etprofessional.com
for advice and a copy of our guidelines for
reviewers. You will need to give your postal
address and say what areas of teaching
you are most interested in.
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 TA L K B A C K
Setting
a good
example
Peter Viney hasn’t got
I was having a bath when
an elbow on his leg, but the phone rang.
he’d remember it if he had.
W
hat is it with this sentence
that has led to so many
irate articles and lectures?
I remember Christina
Latham Koenig mentioning it in a talk
ten years ago. If only she’d copyrighted
the example and charged later users a fee!
I’ve heard it mentioned at least six times
in the last ten years. It was the title of a
talk in Brighton last year, and now Pete
McFarlane focuses on it in ETp Issue 73.
Pete MacFarlane’s point is that
‘people don’t really say that’. I don’t
suppose people often say I usually have
tea with breakfast or I went to school in
London either, though the latter is a
reasonable answer to the telephone
identity check. Where did you go to
school? What’s your mother’s maiden
name? What was your favourite school
subject? What was the make of your first
car? They sound brusque and artificial,
but they are all questions used by banks
to establish identity on the phone.
Artificiality
In my early teaching days, I used to
moan about the artificiality of sentences
in textbooks, but these were surreal,
along the lines of I am Mary. I am your
wife (Present Day English For The
28 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Foreign Student) or I have an elbow on
my arm. I haven’t an elbow on my leg
(Success With English). A clever
contextualiser can usually think of a
possible situation where the lines occur.
For example, Mary has just removed her
veil after an arranged marriage, and her
husband has never seen her before. The
other is harder. Perhaps Frankenstein’s
monster is exploring his new body? But
the artificiality was clear to everyone.
I was having a bath when the phone
rang is not artificial in the same way. It’s
an example sentence and, unlike I
usually have tea with breakfast, it’s a
memorable example sentence. In real
life it’s more likely to be I was having a
bath when the f*!%*£! phone rang. It was
a cold-call phone survey, too!
Memorable images
If I were writing a grammar summary
on the past simple and past continuous
tomorrow, I was having a bath when the
phone rang is probably the example
sentence I’d use. Why? Because we all
know that for some reason the phone,
the doorbell, the bath, the toilet and the
shower have a mystical connection in
real life. My postman rings the doorbell
about twice a week, and inevitably does
it at least one time in three when I
literally have my trousers down or off.
That’s probably as fake as any other
statistic, but that’s what it feels like when
it happens. And if it’s not the doorbell,
it’s the phone. Why? Because I remember
the times when it happens vividly.
The example of someone relaxing
happily in a bath or shower when the
telephone interrupts them sticks in the
mind. It’s mildly funny. It illustrates
beautifully with a cartoon, with a
doorbell example being even funnier.
Students need memorable examples on
which they can hang a structure. It’s a
good example for an exercise, too,
because having a bath and phone rang are
easily substituted. It’s not subtle stuff,
and even beginners can feel the pleasure
of thinking of a replacement: having a
shower, sitting on the toilet, cleaning my
teeth, making love … They’re bending
the structure around, playing with its
parts, grasping the concept.
There is an art to composing
examples which pin down a grammatical
point clearly and exemplify it, and which
are also memorable. Mundane isn’t
memorable. Corpus frequency has little
to do with it. I could even argue a case
for the ridiculous Frankenstein’s monster
seeking his elbow. It would make a funny
sketch, re-cycling vocabulary for parts
of the body. Students would laugh, and
laughter creates a relaxed and positive
environment.
Sequential learning
There’s a difference between a grammar
explanation designed to be comprehensive
at intermediate level, and a grammar
summary in a starter or elementary
coursebook. The former can draw on
everything at that level for examples.
The summary in a lower-level book is
restricted to what students know at that
point in their studies. A ‘big’ grammar
book doesn’t have to consider the
sequence of student acquisition either, so
it can use a present perfect sentence to
illustrate object pronouns: I’ve met her, but
I’ve never met him or If you’d met them,
you’d like them. However, the grammar
summary in a lower-level book has to take
Model sentences
are designed for
explanation, not
immediate transfer to
real-life situations
into account that the student seeking
information on object pronouns will
almost certainly not have studied beyond
the present simple and continuous tenses,
if that far. So the grammar summaries
accumulate sequentially. This is why they
have to be composed rather than winkled
out from corpus examples. Going back to
I was having a bath when the phone rang,
we can predict that students at the level
where they might seek information on the
past continuous and past simple will know
bath, phone and ring/rang. This might not
be so easy with Pete McFarlane’s ‘real
English’ example What were you just
saying? because, while the next utterance
is unpredictable, reported speech is likely
to be involved. The response might well
be I was telling you that I’d forgotten her
name or I was saying that I’d texted you
20 minutes ago … – reported speech with
past perfect. The sequence of acquisition
has just leapt forward several places.
I’d take issue with the other example
in Peter McFarlane’s piece, too: If it rains
tomorrow, I’ll take an umbrella. Its
frequency, I entirely agree, would fall off
the scale. I suspect that umbrella appears
in so many example sentences because it’s
a convenient noun to demonstrate a/an,
and it’s easy to illustrate. So it’s a
known vocabulary item from early on.
The idea that I take issue with is that
either the teacher or the learner believes
that it’s a useful or transferable
sentence. Its function is slotting together
known and transparent concepts to
explain the basic meaning of the
structure. It may rain. It may not rain. If
it rains, I’ll take an umbrella. If it doesn’t
rain, I won’t take an umbrella. No one is
labouring with meaning here, and no
one is deluded into believing they’ll ever
need to say it. They’re getting used to
the basic mechanical fact: we use the
present If it rains – not the will future If
it will rain. The basic meaning has long
been supplanted by derived uses (Pete
McFarlane’s If you’re interested in art,
you’ll love the Van Gogh Museum). You
focus on those in the communicative
parts of the lesson. Then you have a clear
grammar summary that learners use for
later checking and revision. I’d add that a
truculent 12 year old can understand the
dull but transparent concept of rain and
umbrella, but may find it even duller still
to discuss visiting art museums, feeling
that the only interesting thing about
Van Gogh is that he cut his own ear off.
Authenticity
Authentic material may or may not be
memorable. It’s often incomprehensible
for beginners, anyway. If you take a
corpus extract with the target word in
the middle and the authentic stuff that
goes either side, you’ll have a bunch of
‘authentic’ sentences that make little
sense outside their context, and you’ll
find it hard to detect a pattern. All of us
create unique or near unique sentences
on a daily basis.
Are corpus examples truly
‘authentic’? Probably not. Anything from
a TV or radio programme is scripted,
and when you script a TV programme,
you remind people of the unfolding plot
within your scripted dialogue. You use
characters’ names more often than in
unscripted dialogue so as to orientate
the viewer. You move from A to B with
clarity. Any examples of native-speaker
vague communication are decoration.
Authentic dialogue, for me, is not
dialogue ‘designed for native speakers’,
but that which results from people being
recorded surreptitiously. If people are
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
interviewed on radio or TV, they think
hard about what they’re saying. So we can
only record truly ‘authentic’ transactions
without the speakers’ knowledge. They’re
full of hesitations, false starts and
incomplete sentences. Writers knew that
already, without consulting corpora. We
just didn’t consider it to be particularly
interesting in teaching the language. So
an authentic speech act might be:
‘Well. I’m like … Urgh? Yuk! … and
so he’s like … ‘Right!’ … then it’s just …
you know, kinda SO random, cos now he
is like … No way! Why are you askin’
me? … and so I’m kinda like, ‘You what?
I dunno if… I mean, like …’
Authentic. Yeah, right. Useful?
Kinda not.

We cannot and should not teach learners
to be inarticulate. Our model language
demands clarity and communication.
There is no reason for a learner to emulate
an inarticulate native speaker. Given
enough exposure, they might acquire the
ability to be as inarticulate, and sound as
dumb, as a native speaker. But they don’t
have to do that. I can’t count the times
when non-ELT people have asked what I
do and, after I’ve told them, they’ve said
‘Foreigners speak English so much better
than we do’. Yeah. Well, they gotta, see,
to be like, understood, innit?
Example sentences are not
phrasebook examples for repeating
parrot fashion. They’re designed to
explain a grammatical point. All students
need the set phrases, the formulas and
fixed expressions (There you go. Anything
else? £5.67 altogether. Bear with me …)
and the coursebook should provide those
fixed formulas. Exemplifying grammar is
different. Model sentences are designed
for explanation, not immediate transfer
to real-life situations, nor as a statistical
frequency sampling of what native
speakers say to each other. ETp
Peter Viney is the co-
author of Streamline,
Grapevine, Handshake,
In English and many
video courses. His latest
book is Fast Track To
Reading (Garnet
Education). He has
recently re-published
licensed DVDs of his
first two video courses,
A Weekend Away and
A Week By The Sea
(Three Vee).
Blog: http://peterviney.
wordpress.com/
peter@viney.uk.com
29
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Hot seat
plus
Sasan Baleghizadeh and Hadi Barzegar
promote teamwork and a team activity.
H
ot seat is a game which is
frequently played in
language classes. It was
originally a TV game in
which an interviewer asks several
questions about the personal life and
career of an interviewee, usually a
celebrity, who sits in the ‘hot seat’.
Questions are typically things such as
Who is your favourite singer and can you
sing like him/her? and Would you like the
chance to go to Mars?
In the classroom, the activity can be
conducted in a similar way, with one
student acting as the interviewer and
another as the interviewee, either
playing themselves or pretending to be a
celebrity. Either role can also be taken
by the teacher.
In its traditional form, the classroom
version of Hot seat rarely goes beyond
the asking and answering of a set of
basic questions. The questions mostly
revolve around the lesson topic or
concentrate on a particular vocabulary
set or grammatical structure. When the
game is played in this way, the role of
the teacher is vital: the situation can
easily get out of control if the students
ask unsuitable questions or give
inappropriate replies.
Hot seat plus
We have modified the game, retaining
only the ‘seat’ part of the original. Our
version does not involve asking personal
or clichéd questions of the interviewee,
30 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
nor is the interviewee pretending to be a
celebrity. Our Hot seat plus game is
more of a word-guessing game, in which
the person in the hot seat is part of a
team and they have to work together to
try to guess words. The words are put
together by the rest of the team from
letters displayed in a place where the
student in the hot seat cannot see them.
The game involves teamwork and
practises the skill of speaking. Points
are scored, but the points are allocated
to the whole team, not just the student
in the hot seat.
Playing the game
Preparation
To play Hot seat plus, you will need to
put together several PowerPoint slides,
each with a set of six letters, chosen at
random but from which the students
can reasonably be expected to make
words. You will also need a computer
with a large monitor or a data projector
and screen in the classroom. If these
facilities are not available, you could
prepare several large sheets of paper
with the sets of letters on.
Procedure
1 Put the students into teams of six.
There are many different ways in
which students can be allocated to
teams and the actual process of
selecting teams can act as a warm-
up activity. Teachers will all have
their own preferred methods of
grouping students. One way is to
choose a different topic for each of
the teams, put words connected to
each topic on slips of paper,
distribute them randomly amongst
the students and get them to find
their team members by discussing
the words on their slips of paper and
deciding which topic they relate to.
2 When the students are successfully
divided into teams, explain the
game procedure to them and ask
each team to distribute the
following roles among its members:
● One team member is the person
who sits in the hot seat.
● Three team members will be the
word finders, and one of them is
also the team secretary.
● The remaining two team
members are word definers.
3 Set up chairs so that there is a hot
seat for each team. The students in
the hot seat should be facing away
from the computer screen or
wherever you are displaying your
PowerPoint presentation or sheets of
paper with letters. The students in
the hot seat must not see the letters
and take no part in trying to make
words out of them.
4 Display the first group of six letters.
The word finders try to make words
out of the letters; they must be
actual words, not abbreviations. As
the word finders come up with
suggestions, the secretary writes
them down.
5 Once they have found and written
down three words, these are handed
to the word definers. The word
finders then continue looking for
more words. The word definers’ job
is to think of definitions of the
words they are given and tell them
to the person in the hot seat so that
they can guess what the words are.
They are not allowed to use
synonyms, antonyms or collocations
as these make the defining and
guessing process too easy.
6 Each team has five minutes to find
as many words as possible from the
given letters before the next group
of letters is displayed. For every
correct word guessed by the person
in the hot seat, the team is awarded
one point. At the end of the game,
 teamwork means to them. The reason
Characteristics of effective teams, based on for this is that companies are often
those identified by Larson and LaFasto looking for people who are team
players, who are able to get along with
their colleagues and who can work
● The team must have a clear goal.
together in a cohesive group to achieve
Avoid vague statements. Team goals should call for a specific performance
the same goal. Some companies will
objective, expressed so concisely that everyone knows when the objective has
even go to the trouble of organising
been met.
team-building events in an attempt to
● The team must have a results-driven structure. get their staff to work as a team rather
The team should be allowed to operate in a manner that produces results. It is than as individuals.
often best to allow the team to develop its own structure. Several characteristics of effective
teams were identified by Carl Larson and
● The team must have competent team members. Frank LaFasto in their book Teamwork:
In an educational setting, this can be taken to mean that the problem given to What Must Go Right/What Can Go
the team should be one that the members can tackle given their level of Wrong (see box). Hot seat plus fulfils
knowledge. many of Larson and LaFasto’s criteria: it
● The team must have unified commitment.
presents the students with a clear goal;
This does not mean that team members must agree on everything. It means that
encourages the teams to work within a
all individuals must be directing their efforts towards the goal. If any individual’s
results-driven structure; promotes team
efforts are directed purely towards personal goals, then the team must confront
commitment and collaboration; and
this and resolve the problem.
provides the external encouragement
that is key to motivation.
● The team must have a collaborative climate.
This is a climate of trust produced by honest, open, consistent and respectful 
behaviour. In such a climate, teams will perform well, without it they will fail.
We recommend that you try Hot seat
● The team must have high standards that are understood by all. plus in your classroom. Your students
Team members must know what is expected of them individually and collectively. will enjoy it and you will be impressed
by their ability to work together
● The team must receive external support and encouragement. towards a common goal. ETp
Encouragement and praise work just as well in motivating teams as they do with
individuals. Larson, C and LaFasto, G Teamwork:
What Must Go Right/What Can Go Wrong
Sage Publications 1989
the team with the highest score is Teams and teamwork
the winner. As this score has been Sasan Baleghizadeh is an
Hot seat plus is a way of preparing Assistant Professor of
achieved as a result of groupwork, TEFL at Shahid Beheshti
it is attributable to the whole team, students for their roles as team members University (GC), Iran,
not just the person in the hot seat. in business and real-life situations where he teaches applied
linguistics, syllabus
outside the classroom. Our intention is design and materials
The teacher’s role not to promote the notion that the development. He is also a
member of the Research
Once the game is up and running, all individual is not important, but to and Planning Department
the different stages will be happening encourage the students to appreciate at the Iran Language
Institute, where he
simultaneously, so the teams never that efficient and effective teamwork designs, develops and
waste time waiting for other students to can take them beyond what an edits English language
examinations and
finish their tasks. individual can accomplish alone, and to teaching materials. He
The teacher’s role is to control the demonstrate that the most effective has published in TESL
workflow and make sure that every teamwork is that in which all the Reporter, Modern English
Teacher, The ELT Journal
group within a team is performing its individuals involved work together in and The Teacher Trainer.
own tasks and that there is no harmony to share their contributions sasanbaleghizadeh@yahoo.com
interference between the groups. For and work towards a common goal.
Hadi Barzegar has an
example, the teacher should make sure Successful teamwork requires the MA in TEFL from
that the word definers are using words team members to recognise the different Khatam University in
Tehran, Iran. He is
which have come from the word finders, strengths and abilities found within interested in exploring
not ones they have worked out their team and to apply them to solve a the effect of CALL on
the writing skills of EFL
themselves from the letters on display. problem or achieve a goal. The concept learners.
The teacher should also monitor and is well known in the worlds of sports
judge if each guessed word deserves a and business where, in many situations,
point or not, checking that the word goals cannot be accomplished by people
definers are using only proper word working individually.
definitions, not synonyms and Candidates in job interviews are
barzegar.x@gmail.com
antonyms. frequently asked what the concept of

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 31

 Over
the
wall ... Alan Maley
has a good laugh.
umour, like some kinds of wine,
H does not travel well. What is
funny in one culture or language
falls flat when transposed to
another. So, although laughter is a
universal human behaviour, what causes
it is not. And, although humour causes us
to laugh, we laugh for other reasons, too.
An early classic investigation into
laughter was Bergson’s Laughter, way
back in 1900, and Koestler’s The Act of
Creation (1964) draws upon Bergson to
make parallels between what causes
laughter and what constitutes creativity.
There has also been considerable
speculation about the possible
evolutionary value of laughter, and the
benefits it has for our health (lower pain
thresholds, better general physical health,
strengthened immune system, etc). But in
this column I am reporting on just a few
of the very many titles which offer
insights into humour itself.
Playing With Words
iStockphoto.com / © Steven Robertson
Playing with Words by Barry Blake is an
attempt to offer a view of the whole
range of humour through word play. It is
a somewhat unwieldy book, which
attempts to cram into 170 pages virtually
everything that might count as word play,
including quite a lot which hardly counts
as humorous. After an overview in
34 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Chapter 1, the second chapter deals with
things people joke about, including other
ethnic groups (Irish jokes, Belgian jokes,
etc), religion, politicians and, of course,
sex and the relationships between the
sexes, especially marriage. There is a
good deal on language itself: Chapter 4
examines compounds, blends, prefixes,
euphemism, etc; Chapter 5 deals with
puns and Chapter 6 grammatical
ambiguities; Chapter 9 is on language in
context; Chapter 10 is on errors (slips of
There has also
been considerable
speculation about the
possible evolutionary
value of laughter
the tongue, malapropisms, spoonerisms,
misinterpretations, etc); Chapter 11 looks
at rhymes. In between, Chapter 7
attempts a typology of jokes, including
cannibal jokes, blonde jokes, knock-
knock jokes, graffiti, headlines, questions,
oxymorons, etc. Inevitably, this falls far
short of being comprehensive. There are,
however, many, many examples of jokes
throughout the book, and it is certainly a
useful sourcebook for anyone remotely
interested in the subject of humour. But I
felt it was somewhat superficial. The
overloaded lark, in fact!
Stop Me If You’ve
Heard This
By contrast, Jim Holt’s Stop Me If You’ve
Heard This is a serious look at humour.
The book is in two parts. In Part I, History,
it traces the history of jokes back to
classical times: in collections of jest-
books, such as the Philogelos (fifth
century AD), through Poggio Bracciolini’s
Facetiae of 1441 and the 18th-century Joe
Miller’s Jests. Many jokes prove to be very
old, and are continually being elaborated
or reinvented. There have been more
recent collections of jokes, such as G
Legman’s Rationale of the Dirty Joke and
Alan Dundes’ Jokes and Their Relation to
the Unconscious. In Part II, Philosophy,
Holt tackles the issue of theories of
humour. Essentially, there are three: the
Superiority theory (humour at the expense
of others that makes you feel superior to
them); the Incongruity theory (which
places two incompatible frames of
reference together, needing a flash of
insight to perceive the humorous
connection); and the Relief theory (where
the humour helps people escape from
their inhibitions). These days, most
commentators tend to favour the
Incongruity theory, with its strong links to
the creative spark in other fields. But
others, such as Ted Cohen, refute the idea
of a general theory completely: ‘Every
general theory of jokes known to me is
wrong … Such a monotonic theory always
seizes upon one or two kinds of jokes, and
misses the other kinds.’ This leads into a
consideration of the different kinds of
jokes: topical jokes, classic jokes, jokes
about different groups of people, about
musical instruments, geography, politics
and national disasters. There are clean
jokes and dirty jokes, intentional and
unintended jokes, short ones and long
shaggy-dog stories … and, again, this
typology leaves out as much as it
includes. Holt discerns a shift over the
centuries from initial lewdness and
aggression towards puns and wit: ‘What
is fun is the way the incongruity of the
punch line marks a defeat for a necessary
tyranny: the tyranny of bourgeois morality
in some jokes, of reason itself in others.’
The pleasure lies in ‘… finding connections
and contradictions where none were
expected’. This is a thought-provoking
book, and if ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, it
scores highly, with only 126 pages.
The Naked Jape
Jimmy Carr, one of the two authors of
The Naked Jape, is himself a stand-up
comedian, and the book is written by
‘enthusiasts, not academics’. Perhaps
because of this, it is a more stimulating
and engaging book than some of the
others here. It is not only a book about
jokes but also a joke book, with 450
jokes spread throughout its pages. Some
of these are at the bottom of the pages,
others at the end of each chapter. There
are 12 chapters, dealing with different
aspects of humour: the value it has, the
role of clowns and jesters, children’s
humour, explaining how humour works,
gender in humour, offensive jokes, ethnic
jokes, the role of the court jester and
censorship and persecution. There are
highly quotable quotes throughout:
‘… a good joke can offer even the
stuffiest of adults the opportunity to
throw open an internal window on to the
fresh, freewheeling creativity of childish
imagination.’
‘A joke defies definition, defies control,
because it’s a scrap of chaos pinned
proudly to the lapel of the individual in
defiance of society.’
‘When the mouth is open for laughter,
you may be able to shove in a little food
for thought.’
In the final chapter, a number of important
points are reiterated about the seriousness
of humour. ‘The ability to choose to find the
world funny is a powerful survival tool …’
‘Jokes are a chink in the fundamentalist’s
armour.’ I highly recommend this book.
Humour and laughter
are essential markers
of being human
Laughing Matters
I don’t normally refer to ELT books in this
column, but I feel bound to mention Peter
Medgyes’ book Laughing Matters. It is
unique in that it offers the teacher a rich
selection of humorous material, together
with a genuine sense of the importance
of humour in language learning. As he
himself says, ‘... humorous texts and
activities have to be light-hearted, as befits
humour, and useful, as befits learning’.
He has also taken the trouble to spell out
the potential advantages of using humour
in language teaching. These include:
providing authentic cultural information,
offering genuine language contexts,
bonding between class members,
releasing tension and creating a relaxed
atmosphere, promoting creative thinking,
enhancing motivation and offering a
welcome change from fixed classroom
routines. The content is arranged into ten
chapters, including Jokes and wisecracks,
Puns and puzzles, Proverbs and
quotations, Poems and songs, Pictures
and images, Stories and anecdotes,
Sketches and dialogues, Errors and
failures and Children and schools. The
material itself is well-chosen and genuinely
funny, and the pedagogical framework of
activities is both practical and useful to
teachers wishing to introduce an element
of humour into their teaching.

I have not mentioned the many aspects of
humour encountered in English literature,
but the names of Charles Dickens,
Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde,
P G Wodehouse, Jerome K Jerome,
George Mikes, James Thurber, Mark
Twain and Roald Dahl spring to mind, as
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
do the verse forms of the limerick, the
clerihew and the cautionary tales of Hilaire
Belloc. Neither have I discussed the more
recent excursions into absurd and political
humour in television or radio shows such
as ‘The Goon Show’ (with Peter Sellers),
‘Fawlty Towers’ (with John Cleese),
Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the
Footlights revues, ‘Yes, Minister’, the
Woody Allen films, and Rowan Atkinson
as Mr Bean and Blackadder. These are all,
to a large extent, a matter of individual
taste; personally, I find Mikes, Jerome and
Wodehouse deeply unfunny, whereas
Wilde, Thurber and Dahl unfailingly push
the laughter button. Most also rely for
their effect on the kind of shared cultural
knowledge not possessed by most of our
students – hence their omission.
Humour and laughter are essential
markers of being human. Perhaps our
classrooms would be the better for
drawing on them more than we
sometimes do. ETp
Featured books
Blake, B Playing with Words Equinox
2007
Carr, J and Greeves, L The Naked Jape
Penguin 2006
Holt, J Stop Me If You’ve Heard This
Profile Books 2008
Medgyes, P Laughing Matters CUP 2002
Some other titles
Baring-Gould, W S The Lure of the
Limerick Panther 1974
Bergson, H Laughter downloadable free
from Gutenberg www.gutenberg.org/files/
4352-h/4352-h.htm 1900
Jerome, J K Three Men in a Boat
Penguin Classics 1999
Koestler, A The Act of Creation
Arkana/Penguin 1964
Mikes, G How to be an Alien Wingate
1946
Thurber, J Fables for Our Time Harper
Colophon 1983
Wodehouse, P G The Inimitable Jeeves
Arrow Books 2008
Alan Maley has worked in
the area of ELT for over
40 years in Yugoslavia,
Ghana, Italy, France,
China, India, the UK,
Singapore and Thailand.
Since 2003 he has been
a freelance writer and
consultant. He has
published over 30 books
and numerous articles,
and was, until recently,
Series Editor of the
Oxford Resource Books
for Teachers.
yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
35
  IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
 Big brother mistakes
My students can already communicate
freely and know the rules of grammar,
but they still keep making mistakes,
and I often find these difficult to deal
with. Fluency seems to be much easier
to achieve than accuracy! Of course,
there are plenty of strategies one can
try for this sort of problem, and here
is one of my favourites.
At the beginning of the lesson, I write
on the board: The mistake I don’t
want to make today is ... and ask my
students to think of ways to complete
the sentence. Together we choose one
mistake for that lesson – for example,
use of third person s for present
simple forms, conditional sentences
or articles – and keep the rest for our
future classes.
During the lesson everybody tries to
monitor their speech for the chosen
mistake. They do this naturally, with
greater attention and concentration
than usual because the mistake is
there on the board ‘watching’ them.
I find that the students also correct
one another, and I encourage them to
do so. At the end of the lesson, we
recap on the mistakes made during
the class.
Nataliya Potapova
Uzhhorod, Ukraine
36 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
More tested lessons, suggestions, tips and techniques which have all
worked for ETp readers. Try them out for yourself – and then send us
your own contribution. Don’t forget to include your postal address.
All the contributors to It Works in Practice in this issue of ETp will
receive a set of Young Learners English Practice Tests by Sandra Fox
and Bryan Stephens, published by Macmillan. Macmillan have kindly
agreed to be sponsors of It Works in Practice for this year.
 Colour-coded cooperation
Most teachers will be all too familiar participate actively in discussions,
with the following situation: You ask I handed out coloured cards. I used
a question that is supposed to trigger six different colours and gave cards
a discussion among all the students of the same colour to three or four
in the class, but only those who students. (Of course, this also works
regularly participate actively raise with numbers or different symbols
their hands in response. I expect that on pieces of paper.) I kept one set of
in every class there are students who cards of all the colours for myself.
are more eager to participate in
The rule now was that when I held
discussions than others. However,
up a card, it was the turn of those
especially with students of
students with cards of the same
intermediate level or above, this is
colour to talk next. This seemed to
not necessarily due to their lack of
work pretty well. By cheating a bit
confidence in their own language
when distributing the cards I created
skills, but may be related to their
colour groups consisting of students
personality. In some cases, they are
who were usually quite active and
simply slow to raise their hands and
groups consisting of those who were
by the time they do so, the faster
usually quite quiet. Thus, the quiet
students have already had their say.
students could no longer rely on the
Some students might simply enjoy
more active ones to do the talking
listening to discussions rather than
for them. On the other hand, as
actively participating or may consider
there was more than one person in
their opinions not important enough
each group, there was always a way
to be expressed in larger groups.
out if one of them simply couldn’t
Some students, of course, simply
find anything at all to say.
can’t be bothered to participate.
There was an additional advantage:
There are many tricks teachers use to
the technique prevented the
try to involve as many students as
students from automatically
possible: roleplays, passing on a ball,
switching off, as there was always
assigning tasks or opinions. But in
the chance of their own colour
the course of a whole term, these
coming up, encouraging them to
activities can wear out quickly.
speak or demanding that they did.
A while ago, I tried something new. Britta Hofmann
In order to give everyone a chance to Leipzig, Germany
 Political presidential debate
I’ve been doing this activity for years, and it really works as you can adapt it
to any level or age or topic. It is based on electing a new president and
enables and encourages discussion and debate along the way.
1 To set the scene, elicit some of
the different political parties in
the UK (or some other country).
Make sure you have some major
parties and some minor ones to
make it interesting. Have a class
discussion of their main agendas.
2 Put the students into groups of
four and ask each group to create
their own political party, giving
it a name and an agenda. (This
is the point at which you can
introduce any particular topic,
if you want to, asking for the
agenda to reflect the party’s
views on this topic.)
3 Ask the students to prepare for
a leader election within their
groups by creating speeches,
using language such as:
‘Vote for me because ...’
‘A vote for me is a vote for ...’
‘This party needs a leader who
can ... and ... – that’s me!’
4 Each candidate presents their
speech and the parties hold
elections.
5 The elected leaders give short
acceptance speeches and make
three promises:
‘I promise to ...’
‘I swear that I will ...’
‘I will not rest until ...’
6 Elicit the parties’ agendas and
put common policy areas on the
board, eg education tuition fees,
defence, immigration, housing,
unemployment.
7 The leaders canvas the electorate
(the whole class) and note down
their wishes.
8 Explain the following debate
procedure:
● One party leader will be asked a
question and will give a two-minute
answer.
● Another party leader will then give
a one-minute response.
● An optional one-minute extension
will then be given to any leader who
requests it or is thought to need it.
9 Ask the leaders to prepare on their
own by thinking of questions they
may be asked and deciding on their
responses. While they are doing this,
choose someone to control the
debate: the moderator or presenter.
This person should ask the voters for
questions that they would like to be
put forward to the leaders.
10 The debate begins and the voters
participate with clapping and booing.
11 You can also add the following
sections:
● Open-floor questions from the
voters.
● Candidate-to-candidate open-floor
debate (the leaders should speak
to and even walk over to the voters
to make their points).
12
Hold the election.
13 The winner makes an acceptance
speech and the losers make speeches
conceding the election.
Here are some useful YouTube clips to
demonstrate the activity:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUY-
D7w1Cs&feature=related
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRPcUu4du14
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZdQ0kA3ksg
Phil Wade
Bordeaux, France
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
 What’s the
word, Mr Wolf?
This game combines the old
favourite Hangman, a word-
guessing game, with the
children’s game What’s the
time, Mr Wolf? in which
participants move forward one
step at a time, trying not to
be seen by the ‘wolf’ at the
front. It caters for students
with the bodily-kinaesthetic
intelligence profile, as
defined by Howard Gardner in
his theory of multiple
intelligences.
● Draw a dash on the board
for each letter of your
chosen word (jazz is a good
choice because nobody ever
gets it right straight away).
● Ask the students to form a
horizontal line across the
centre of the room. Tell
them they should shout out
letters that they think
might be in the word you
have chosen. If a letter is in
your word, you write it in
the correct position. If it
isn’t, you write it at the
side. Each time they shout
out a correct letter, they
can take a step forward, but
each time they shout out a
wrong one, they have to
take a step back.
● Furthermore, if they guess
the word and get it wrong,
the penalty is double: two
steps back.
● The winner is the person
who shouts out the answer
(the whole word), or the
person closest to the front
of the room when you bring
the game to an end.
Michael Berman
London, UK
37
 EAP An all-round challenge 7
Sarah Brewer refers to referencing and references.

ll students, whether they are with the advent of technology and the

A undergraduates or postgraduates,
have to produce work that is
referenced. If they fail to reference
‘properly’ by means of in-text citations
and lists of references, they will, at best,
lose marks and, at worst, be accused of
plagiarism. For many students, the whole
concept of referencing is an alien one,
and the difficulty of coming to grips with
it is compounded by the range of
different systems available, the huge
variety of sources they can access and
use in their essays, and sometimes the
lack of organised guidance at the time
they need it.
Systems and styles
Probably the most widely used system in
the UK is the Harvard one. This method
sounds scholarly and is, indeed, a useful,
versatile system. However, the problem
lies in its very versatility. Unlike other
major referencing systems (for example,
APA, MLA and Chicago), there is no
easily accessible and frequently updated
manual, so each department or academic
school develops its own individual
variation on the Harvard ‘theme’. This
posed few problems in the days when
students and academics relied on books
and journals for their sources. However,
use of e-resources, writing references
has become increasingly complicated.
Students now need a far greater range
of models or samples so that they can
reference all the varied sources they may
have used for their writing. For this reason,
the exercises in this article are based on
the APA system, which has a published
manual: Concise Rules of APA Style.
Despite the many (and interesting)
complexities of referencing, the basic
premise is that the essay writer is looking
for an author, date, title and source (ie
place of publication and publisher in the
case of a paper source, or web address
in the case of an electronic one). These
should always be written down in the
same order and it is important to
establish this with the students from the
very beginning.
The exercises in the worksheet on this
page and page 39 are an introduction to
referencing to be completed before the
students embark on an essay. They give
the students some examples that they
can draw upon as models and some
scaffolding to develop their understanding
of the basic principles. The students can
then keep the completed worksheet for
future reference.
Editor’s note: In keeping with other
references in this article, the APA style
has been used below rather than the
usual ETp house style.
American Psychological Association.
(2005). Concise rules of APA style. (5th
ed.). Washington: American
Psychological Association.
Neville, C. (2009). How to improve your
assignment results. Maidenhead: Open
University Press.
Neville, C. (2007). The complete guide to
referencing and avoiding plagiarism.
Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Pears, R., & Shields, G. (2010). Cite them
right: the essential referencing guide. (8th
ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Soles, D. (2010). The essentials of
academic writing. (2nd ed.). New York:
Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.
Sarah Brewer is
Co-ordinator of
Research, Development
and Publications at the
International Study and
Language Centre at the
University of Reading,
UK. She teaches on
both pre-sessional and
in-sessional courses,
supporting students in
developing their
academic reading and
writing skills
s.m.brewer@reading.ac.uk

REFERENCING WORKSHEET • REFERENCES

Badger, R., & White, G. (2000). A process genre approach to teaching writing. ELT Journal 54 (2) 153–60.

Bamforth, R. (1992). Process versus genre: anatomy of a false dichotomy. Prospect 8 (Pt 1–2) 89–99.

Brinton, D. M. (1997). New ways in content-based instruction. Alexandria, VA: TESOL.

Hyland, K. (2002). Teaching and researching writing. Harlow: Pearson Education.

Johns, A. M. ed. (2002). Genre in the classroom: multiple perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Johns, A. M. (2003). Genre and ESL/EFL composition instruction. In Exploring the dynamics of second language writing
(B. Kroll, ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kelly, S., Soundranayagam, L., & Grief, S. (2004). Teaching and learning writing: a review of research and practice summary.
Retrieved January 10, 2006, from www.nrdc.org.uk?uploads/documents/doc_342.pdf.

Swales, J. (2004). Research genres: explorations and applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tribble, C. (1996). Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

38 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 REFERENCING WORKSHEET
References to your sources have to be included twice, once in the text of your essay
(an in-text reference or citation) and then again in your list of references at the end of the essay.
Task 1
Look at the following paragraph and the list of references (see page 38). The paragraph is taken from a student essay
on the topic of writing. The reference list includes all the sources that the student used.
● Compare the citations in the text with the references in the list.
● Decide which part of the full reference is included in the text.
● Write down the necessary components of the in-text reference below:
1 ___________________________________ 2 ___________________________________ 3 ___________________________________

Writing can be seen as a social, cultural and political activity,
as opposed to a learner-centred, cognitive activity (Hyland,
2002, pp.17–22; Johns, 2003, p.195). Partly because of the
nature of this dichotomy, the genre approach has developed
as a ‘top-down’ method of teaching writing, whereas the
process approach has developed a ‘bottom-up’ method.
Learners are given materials to work from and, through
guided activities, turn these into a text. Alternatively, they
themselves generate content and, again, through guided
activities produce their own individual text. The genre
process, conversely, requires learners to analyse model
texts, deduce organisational patterns and then produce their
own texts following these structures (Tribble, 1996, p.94).

Task 2 Task 3
Now number the references in the list and decide which references are: Answer these questions:
● a book ● available on the internet ● What kind of order do the references
● a journal article ● part of another book follow?
Which parts of the reference helped you to decide on the type of source? ● What do you notice about the use of
Discuss your answers with another student and check with your teacher. italics?

Task 4
In author–date systems, the bibliographical descriptions of sources are always organised in a similar way.
You can follow the same pattern of referencing for all the sources that you use. The example below can
be analysed to give you a basic referencing pattern.

Hyland, K. (2002). Teaching and researching writing. Harlow: Pearson Education.

● Copy out the different parts of the reference into the table ● Analyse the different parts of the reference that you have
below (first row). One part has been filled in for you. filled in (second row). Use the labels in the box below to
fill in the table.

Hyland,

Title in italics Author’s family name Place of publication Name of publisher Date of book Initial of author’s first name

NOTES
1 References or bibliography?
The list of sources at the end of a text is sometimes called
References and sometimes called Bibliography. Sometimes
these terms are used interchangeably. However, often the term
references is used when the sources match exactly with the
sources in the text; and bibliography is used when the list
includes extra sources which have not been referred to in the
text. These are usually sources that have been used for
background reading but have not been cited directly in the
finished piece of writing. You need to check what kind of list
you are expected to produce.
2 Different referencing systems
The list of references here follows the APA referencing system,
which is an author–date system. There are other author–date
systems, one of the most popular being the Harvard system.
This system is adopted by many university departments
because they can adapt it to their own individual style.
However, the advantage of the APA system is that there is a
published manual, Concise Rules of APA Style, which gives
nearly 100 examples of different types of paper and electronic
sources that you may come across and need to reference.

Task 5
Now list the books and articles that you have found for your essay. Try to include all the relevant information in the
correct order. You may need to use the computer to find any details that you have forgotten to record.

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 39

 LANGUAGE LOG

The spreading present continuous

John Potts charts the intricacies and idiosyncrasies,
the contradictions and complications that make
the English language so fascinating for teachers and teaching.
In the first of this new series, he wonders if you are loving it.

O
ne piece of contemporary English that upsets
many a language teacher is ‘I’m lovin’ it’, the
slogan used by McDonald’s. We spend hours in
the classroom teaching our students about
stative verbs – and everywhere we look, there’s a
McDonald’s slogan, contradicting our carefully-established
rules and explanations.
I’m loving it – no, no, no, it should be I love it. Why?
Because love is a stative verb, and these verbs describe
how people or things are, not what they do (that’s the job
of event or dynamic verbs).
And because they are concerned with states, stative verbs
don’t have a continuous aspect, with its attendant
concepts and meanings – you are either tall or you’re not.
You either have a brother or you don’t. You can’t be in the
middle of being tall, or temporarily having a brother.
But it’s not quite as cut-and-dried as that.
clear in examples like: This angora sweater feels so soft
versus She was feeling her way to the door when the lights
suddenly came back on. It’s clear that the dynamic
meaning is something like search or grope, and is
something we do with our hands (or feet).
But what about this pair: I feel ill and I’m feeling ill? Here,
the above distinction in meaning doesn’t hold. So what (if
anything) is the difference?
Well, we could introduce a new idea to the discussion. So
far, the parallel stative and dynamic meanings are clearly
different – perceive versus meet, exist versus behave, have
texture versus search, etc. But in the feel ill/am feeling ill
example, the core meaning is the same – I perceive this
sensation of illness.
Could it be that the difference now is one of perspective,
rather than basic meaning? When I say that I feel ill, I seem
to be making a general and encapsulated statement about
myself. It says: I am ill. That’s a fact. That’s all there is to it.

But when I say I’m feeling ill, I seem to be focusing on

First of all, we all know examples of stative verbs that enjoy
a parallel life as dynamic ones, such as see. Its stative
meaning is perceive (visually or cognitively): Do you see
that house over there? Do you see the problem? In its
dynamic life, it means meet: I’m seeing them on Sunday for
lunch.
Then there’s be: its stative meaning is existential – He is
tall/English/35/a teacher/silly, whereas its dynamic meaning
is behave or act – He is just being silly.
what’s going on inside me. Things are happening: my head
is aching, I’m shivering. My illness is developing. It’s in
progress. Symptoms are changing (getting worse!). Notice
that ideas like these are all concepts related to the
continuous aspect.
So, I’m feeling ill turns the rather generalised and global
statement into a much more dynamic event. I’ve turned my
all-encompassing perception of illness into an ongoing and
active process.

And also smell: The milk smells off versus The dog was
smelling the suitcases, where the stative meaning says
what the milk is, and the dynamic what the dog does. By choosing to use the continuous form, we allow a
normally stative verb to become the acting of itself, rather
So far, so good. We could say that there are two parallel
than just the static state of it. Hence the difference between
verbs: one stative, one dynamic, and that their meanings
I think and I’m thinking: the former expresses my formed
are crucially different: the dynamic meaning requires the
thought/opinion, while the latter says that I’m still in the
subject to do something.
process of forming my thought or opinion.
Let’s try this with another verb of sensation, namely feel.
The contrast between the stative and dynamic meanings is

40 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 LANGUAGE LOG The spreading present continuous

Which takes us to modern usage. There are numerous Here are some song lyrics from the 1960s: I’ve Been Loving
examples of verbs that would normally be used only in the You Too Long (Otis Redding), Since You’ve Been Loving Me
simple forms being used in the continuous. Here are some (Velvelettes) and the 1970s: Since I’ve Been Loving You
I’ve collected from the media: (Led Zeppelin).

‘Pay Bills With a Click? More Americans Are Doing It And a professor of philosophy who specialises in
and Banks Are Loving It’ epistemology, the study of the grounds of knowledge:
(New York Times headline 2006) ‘... for in believing this we are believing that when all the
truths are in, our justification will remain ...’
‘Only someone badly lost would find himself driving
(Jonathan Dancy, An Introduction to Epistemology 1985)
through a village as unremarkable as this, I’m thinking.’
(Charles Simic, US poet, London Review of Books 2011) And finally, the oldest example I’ve found to date:
‘I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you.’
‘Credit Suisse agreed to sell Winterthur, the insurance
(Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles 1891)
business it has been wanting to divest since 2004,
to AXA for SFr12.3 billion ($10 billion) in cash.’
(The Economist 2006)
In all these examples, the focus seems to be on the
‘So this might be an interesting new product but I’m
process and activity that may (eventually) result in a state.
not really believing this is going to turn the industry
From loving to love, thinking to thought, believing to belief.
upside down.’
(CEO of Dell, quoted by cnet news 2005) So, to return to McDonald’s: I’m really enjoying the
experience of eating this burger, these fries ... yes, I’m
‘As much as it pains a Wolves fan to say this, I’m seeing a
loving what I’m doing.
Portsmouth-West Brom final with West Brom winning.’
(Ben from Wolverhampton, via text, BBC website 2008) John Potts is a teacher and teacher trainer
based in Zürich, Switzerland. He has written
‘I’m ready to battle Mariah over this because I’ve been and co-written several adult coursebooks, and
is a CELTA assessor. He is also a presenter for
Mary Carey for a long time,’ she told Reuters. ‘It’s kind of Cambridge ESOL Examinations.
funny because I’m a porn star and I’ve been being myself
for a long time. I think she’s being silly.’
johnpotts@swissonline.ch
(Mary Carey, BBC news website 2006)

COMPETITION RESULTS
22 19 2 21 7 19 12 9 2 14 2 18 5 Congratulations to all those readers who successfully completed our
G L O B A L E C O N O M Y
26 10 16 7 15 2 15 Prize Crossword 45. The winners, who will each receive a copy of the
R K I A U O U Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, are:
7 20 7 26 4 23 26 16 25 12 6 7 14
A W A R D P R I Z E V A N
9 5 12 13 11 2 1 12 4
Iwona Anchim, Michalowo, Poland
C Y E S T O H E D Tatyana Belskaya, Moscow, Russia
12 8 20 20 1 2 12 20 12
E X W W H O E W E Alessandra Cingi, Cardiff, UK
24 9 26 16 21 3 15 16 11 12 2 26 Lorraine Traynor, Andújar, Spain
F C R I B Q U I T E O R
15 13 16 11 23 15 11 19 16 12 Christine Muñíz, Seville, Spain
U S I T P U T L I E María Rosario Cela Sánchez, Utrera, Spain
19 2 15 11 7 2 24 24
L O U T A O F F Naiara Navas Torre, Miranda de Ebro, Spain
18 12 7 10 16 14 24 15 14
M E A K I N F U N
Aileen Wilsdorf, Tarbes, France
21 12 17 2 10 12 13 1 7 19 19 Fedelma Woodhouse, Belfast, UK
B E J O K E S H A L L
26 2 7 7 12 14
Catherine Young, Baden-Dättwil, Switzerland
R O A A E N
11 12 18 23 12 26 16 14 11 12 22 26 7 19 12 4 15 9 7 11 16 2 14 16 13 11 1 12 18
T E M P E R I N T E G R A L E D U C A T I O N I S T H E M
2 13 11 23 2 20 12 26 24 15 19 20 12 7 23 2
O S T P O W E R F U L W E A P O
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 20 1 16 9 1 5 2 15 9 7 14 15 13
H O Q D Y V A X C K T E S N W H I C H Y O U C A N U S
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 12 11 2 9 1 7 14 22 12 11 1 12 20 2
N U I J M L W B G P F Z R E T O C H A N G E T H E W O
26 19 4
R L D Nelson Mandela

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 41

SCRAPBOOK Gems, titbits, puzzles, foibles, quirks, bits & pieces,
quotations, snippets, odds & ends,
what you will
Baker’s dozen
s sometimes arise
Popular misconception
from misleading nam
es. For example, many True or false?
criptions of things in
oddities show up in des Next, to challenge you a little further, can you tell which of the following
res t is neither new (it
England: the New Fo statements are true and which are false?
stablis hed in the 16th
was already well-e
est (it is heathland). 1 The Portuguese Man o’War (a 11 The naked, bow-carrying statue
century), nor is it a for ls,
UK are indeed schoo type of jellyfish) is named after a in London’s Piccadilly Circus is
Public schools in the
and gen erally Portuguese warship. the Greek God of Love, Eros.
but they are private –
extremely expensive! 2 A mince pie contains fruit, not 12 The Munich Oktoberfest beer
thoughts, see if you minced meat. festival is held in November.
So, armed with these
ing questions – by
can answer the follow 3 Bombay duck is a cooked fowl. 13 A velvet ant isn’t an ant.
t the answers are
now you will realise tha 4 Orange blossom isn’t orange in 14 A horned toad is a lizard.
not obvious! colour. 15 The liquid inside a coconut is
ebrate
1 In which month do Russians cel 5 According to the Bible, two coconut milk.
n?
the October Revolutio examples of each animal were 16 Wolfgang Amadeus were not
rs War
2 How long did the Hu red Yeand taken onto Noah’s ark. Mozart’s original names.
last? 6 The characters Bugs Bunny, 17 A Spanish fly is a kind of fly.
we get catgut?
3 From which animal do Brer Rabbit and the Easter
18 Blackboard chalk is what it says
a hats? Bunny were not inspired by
4 Which country makes Panam – chalk.
de of? rabbits.
5 What is a camel’s hair brush ma 7
19 Roman emperors gave the
Tulips originally came from
6 What colour is a purple finch? Holland.
thumbs-down sign to call for
nds the death of a gladiator.
7 What animal are the Canary Isla 8 There were four members in
20 ‘Kangaroo’ means ‘I don’t
named after? the band The Thompson Twins.
t name? understand’ in one of the
8 What was King George VI’s firs 9 The kilt originated in Ireland. aboriginal languages of
9 Where are Chinese gooseberr
ies from?
10 Mock turtle soup has fish as its Australia.
in a
10 What colour is the black box main ingredient, not turtle.
lan e?
commercial aerop
11 What kind of creature is a kill
er whale? Aboriginal word for a grey kangaroo. September. 13 True. It’s a wasp. 14 True.

make
don’t understand’. In fact, gangarru is an for the poor of London. 12 False. It’s held in
12 What did Stone Age people passing local was ‘Kangaroo’, meaning ‘I philanthropic love of the Earl of Shaftesbury
tools out of? are these called?’ and the reply from a was intended to commemorate the selfless
dogs
13 Where do Australian Shepherd
jumping around in Australia and said ‘What brother, representing mature love. The statue
pointed to the funny-looking animals he saw brains. 11 False. It’s Anteros, Eros’ younger
come from? commonly believed that Captain Cook either. It’s made from calf’s head, foot or
the contestant was spared. 20 False. It is There’s no turtle in it, but there’s no fish
the Pyrenees) a fist, this signified a sheathed sword and 8 False. There were three. 9 True. 10 False.
United States (though drawn sword. If the thumb was clenched in by hares. 7 False. They came from Turkey.
they probably originat
12 Wood and bone (as ed in
well as stone); 13 The die, they gave a thumbs-up sign, signifying a cows and goats). 6 True. They were inspired
known as kiwi fruit.); 10 19 False. To show they wanted a gladiator to take seven of each ‘clean’ animal (eg sheep,
Orange; 11 A dolphin;
beloved husband.); 9 18 False. It is gypsum (calcium sulphate). 5 False. In Genesis 7:2, God told Noah to
New Zealand (They are
king should ever be call also
ed Albert, the name of Theophilus Mozart. 17 False. It’s a beetle. 3 False. It’s a fish dish. 4 True. It’s white.
respected Queen Vict her
oria’s wish that no futu called Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus a savoury dish which did contain meat.
8 Albert (When he cam re
e to the throne in 193 of the coconut. 16 True. He was originally England. 2 True now, though it originally was
Latin name was Insularia 6, he
Canaria: Island of Dog derived by grating and squeezing the flesh 1 False. The Man o’War design originated in
4 Ecuador; 5 Squirrel s.);
fur; 6 Crimson; 7 Dog 15 False. It’s coconut water. Coconut milk is Answers
1 November; 2 116 yea s (The
rs; 3 Sheep or horse;
Answers

Scrapbook compiled by Ian Waring Green

42 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 More fallacies
History
The Vikings didn’t wear horns on their
helmets – or, at least, there is no evidence
that they did.
John F Kennedy’s words ‘Ich bin ein
Berliner’ are German for ‘I am a Berliner’.
It is widely believed that his use of the
indefinite article ein means that he
claimed to be a jam doughnut, and that
the population of Berlin was amused by
the supposed mistake.
The Great Wall of China is not the only
man-made object visible from the Moon.
In fact, none of the Apollo astronauts who
landed on the Moon reported seeing any
man-made object, and even Earth-orbiting
astronauts can barely see it, although city
lights are easily visible on the night side of
the Earth. The misconception is believed
to have been popularised by Richard
Halliburton decades before the first Moon
landing. Shuttle astronaut Jay Apt has
been quoted as saying ‘… the Great Wall is
almost invisible from only 180 miles up’.
The human body
Human hair and fingernails do not
continue to grow after death. When a
person dies, their skin dries and shrinks
away from the base of their hairs and
nails, and this gives the appearance of
growth.
Humans cannot catch warts from toads.
Warts on human skin are caused by a
virus, the human papillomavirus, which is
unique to humans. The bumps on the skin
of a toad are not even warts at all.
Swallowed chewing gum does not
remain in the digestive system for ever,
nor does it take seven years to digest.
In fact, chewing gum is mostly
indigestible, but passes through the
digestive system at the same rate as
other matter.
Science
Lightning can strike twice in the same
place. The idea that it can’t is one of the
oldest and most well-known
superstitions about lightning. There is no
reason why lightning would not be able
to strike the same place twice. If there is
a thunderstorm in a given area, then
objects and places which are more
prominent or conductive are more likely
to be struck. For example, lightning
strikes the Empire State Building in New
York City about 100 times per year.
A coin dropped from the Empire State
Building will neither kill a person nor
crack the pavement. The terminal
velocity of a falling coin is about 30–50
miles per hour, and it will not exceed
this speed, regardless of the height
from which it is dropped. At this speed,
its energy is not enough to penetrate a
human skull or crack concrete.
Glass is not a liquid at room
temperature. It is an amorphous solid,
although it does have some chemical
properties normally associated with
liquids. Panes of old stained glass
windows often have thicker glass at the
bottom than at the top, and this has
been cited as an example of the slow
flow of glass over centuries. However,
this unevenness is actually the result of
the window manufacturing processes
used in earlier eras, which produced
glass panes that were unevenly thick.
Normally, the thick end of glass would
be put at the bottom of the frame during
installation, but it is also common to find
old windows where the thicker end has
been installed to the sides or at the top.
The natural world
An earthworm does not become two
worms when cut in half. Only a limited
number of earthworm species are
capable of anterior regeneration. When
most earthworms are bisected, only the
front half of the worm (where the mouth
is located) can survive, while the other
half dies.
It is not harmful to pick up baby birds
which have fallen to the ground and
return them to their nests. There is a
common belief that doing so will cause
the mother to reject them.
Bulls are not enraged by the colour red.
Cattle are dichromats. This means that
although they can distinguish between
some colours, their colour vision is
limited and red does not stand out as
particularly bright. It is not the red
colour of the cape of a professional
matador that angers the bull, but rather
the movement of the fabric, which
irritates the bull and incites it to charge.

Following the crowd The suicide myth was

mainly popularised cou
rtesy of
n adventure
l by now be 5, an ‘Uncle Scrooge’
car too
ting fact from myth wil Disney Studios: in 195
he difficulty in separa without elv es off

T
the ms
ing is repeated enough showed huge number
s of lemmings hur ling
very apparent! If someth the ‘va lidi ty’ of de an Ac ade my -Aw ard-
n, it will take on 8, Disney ma
challenge or justificatio it diff icult or Norwegian cliffs. In 195 s, also sho win g
ent time has passed to ma ke called White Wildernes
truth, and once suffici om es even winning documentary fs. The sad tru th
origins, the ver ific atio n bec certain death from clif
impossible to trace the ge what are lemmings jumping to ion sce nes staged for the
rat
der is the will to challen emerged that not only
we re the mig
harder. What is also har e example is the ed for the occasion),
accepted fac ts: one prim s specially transport
apparently universally cide when cameras (using rodent nched from the
for lemmings to commit
sui mals were, in fact, lau
supposed propensity hap pens is that but the unfortunate ani
ual ly
wit h a sui tab ly inv iting cliff. What act clifftop using a turntable
!
fac ed vel in large useful to
ses the rodents to tra tap hor of lem ming suicide is indeed
the urge to migrate cau The me inio n even when
they will sw im acr oss rivers which following of popular op
numbers; occasionally deaths of the describe unquestioning k it’s pro bably time
ost , cau sin g the dangerous, but I thin
stretch their abilities to
the utm the consequences are
community in the animal’s reputation!
e size of the migrating to rehabilitate the poor
weakest. Given the larg
can be numerous.
first place, these deaths

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 43

Reviews
The Construction of English
by John Gray
Palgrave Macmillan 2010
978-0-230-22258-8
The Construction of English is a
research-based study by John Gray
which explores major British English ELT
coursebooks for adults learning English
around the world. It has an intriguing
approach to materials analysis because
it does not focus on methodology or
syllabus. Instead, it examines how
materials ‘seek to make English mean
in specific and highly selective ways’.
This introduces a cultural studies
perspective to the work which reviews
how culture is represented, produced
and consumed in materials. Elements
of culture in a number of coursebooks
– Streamline Connections (Hartley
and Viney, 1979), Building Strategies
(Abbs et al, 1979), The New
Cambridge English Course 2 (Swan
and Walter, 1990) and New Headway
Intermediate (Soars and Soars, 2003) are
discussed, along with references to other
materials. Gray then interrogates the role
of publishers in materials productions
before concluding the study with the
reflections of 22 EFL teachers working in
the Barcelona area of Spain about such
material.
He makes several engaging points.
On female participation, he notes that in
newer materials there are more women
relative to men and that women are
increasingly associated with
independence, material wealth and
career success. Materials also
demonstrate a ‘progressive
multiculturalisation of content’ over time
by showing a wider variety of ethnicities
and social customs. However, Gray asks
if this indicates progress or whether real
‘issues of power and inequality are
elided’. Interestingly, he quotes an ELT
publisher stating that the topic of
environmentalism can make it into ELT
materials in challenging ways as it
doesn’t ‘harm anyone’. He continues by
suggesting this ‘harm’ is publishers’ code
for any content which might threaten
their global sales by offending more
socially conservative customers. The
distinct lack of disabled or homosexual
characters in ELT global materials is also
44 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
noted as further evidence of how ELT
publishers routinely opt for safe
materials.
‘Perceived commercial imperatives’
are also coupled to the development of
artwork. Gray wonders if today’s ELT
artwork has a positioning effect on the
student by encouraging material
aspiration and linking this with learning
English. He also asks if commercial
forces rather than pedagogy have
created the neat syllabi and limited
models of language across ELT materials
today.
There were, however, some
disappointing strands in the work. Owing
to the age of three of the books
analysed, some conclusions about
female and multi-ethnic representation
were predictable. This selection also
limited the opportunity to explore and
compare representational practices in the
best-selling global ELT coursebooks on
the market today. The work also contains
a language style which punishes the
casual ELT reader: Applied Linguistics
jargon, long multi-clause sentences and
over-reliance on flowery words mean the
text is not as lucid as it could have been.
Furthermore, for readers to accept
many of the points raised, they need to
accept that language learning is more
than just a linear, criterion-referenced
development of linguistic skill and
knowledge. Many successful English
language learners may feel it is
precisely this. The final difficulty this
reader had was with the validity of the
study of the 22 ELT teachers. Gray
acknowledges that much more research
into teacher opinion on ELT materials is
needed, but what was here felt open to
the charge that it could well have been a
biased selection of reactions.
Despite these difficulties, Gray’s
study raises awareness of subtler
phenomena occurring in the global ELT
coursebook. This should interest ELT
teachers and those involved with
materials creation. However, although
encouraged in the conclusion to
challenge these phenomena as
educational professionals rather than
passive consumers, the working realities
of many teachers, along with the profits
of ELT publishers, may mean that Gray’s
concerns are not satisfactorily addressed
in future global ELT coursebooks or
materials.
Peter Lyn
Cambridge, UK
Academic Writing – A Handbook
for International Students
(3rd ed)
by Stephen Bailey
Routledge 2011
978-0-415-59851-0
This third edition of the comprehensive
academic writing textbook for
international students from Stephen
Bailey is considerably improved since the
previous second edition of 2006. It
benefits from a new, more appealing and
clearer design, brighter, better quality
paper for reading ease and a substantial
expansion and reorganisation of content,
without becoming unwieldy. Designed for
self-study or for use in class, the new
edition also has a companion website
(http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/bailey/)
that includes further exercises relating to
the book’s current content, extra topics
not covered in the print edition, a
plagiarism quiz and a glossary of
academic writing terms.
Reviews
As before, this handbook attempts to
address a variety of writing needs and is
divided into four sections: Part 1, The
Writing Process; Part 2, Elements of
Writing; Part 3, Accuracy in Writing; and
Part 4, Writing Models. A new addition in
Part 1 is a greater recognition of the Web
2.0 world, manifest through a critical
approach to dealing with internet texts.
The ever-growing important issue of
plagiarism receives more extensive
coverage. Insertions into Part 2 include
structuring the evaluation of various
solutions to problems; and in a nod to
diversity of university assignment
approaches (and possible future
professional requirements), there is a new
section on groupwork. Writing Models
(Part 4) now includes a brief section on
emails; for more advanced writers, the
concept of the literature review is
introduced, together with a model review.
However, given that this is sometimes the
topic of whole chapters or entire
textbooks for research students, its
mention here may seem somewhat
perfunctory.
International students will find the
book’s Part 3 (Accuracy in Writing) a
particularly helpful resource, dealing with
challenging language items such as
abbreviations, academic vocabulary, the
thorny problem of articles, conjunctions,
singulars and plurals, time words and
prepositions. Meanwhile, instructors
may appreciate that the answers
section (previously provided at the
back of the book) has now moved
online, so that students may not
have recourse to it during class.
Gone also are the short writing tests
in the end material, replaced by
equally brief self-assessment
tests.
Overall this is a book that
bridges the gap between simpler
academic writing textbooks
designed for ESL students and
more forbidding or formidable
textbooks for novice native-
speaker academic writers, such as
Kate Turabian’s A Manual for Writers
of Term Papers, Theses, and the text of the story itself are fingerprints,
Dissertations. No current textbook indicating the presence nearby of
ticks all the boxes as far as writing important information and clues.
for second-language writers in an Gray and Benevides have taken the
international academic environment traditional end-of-chapter comprehension
goes, but this revamped edition of questions and transformed them so that
Bailey’s Handbook contains they don’t just support the story, they are
sufficient nods to all the key areas an intrinsic part of it. The questions form
necessary to set students on the part of a puzzle, which the students need
path to further inquiry. to solve in order to gain further clues as
Tina Ottman to who committed the crime. There is also
Kyoto, Japan a review section at the end of each
chapter with class discussion activities
and the audio for each chapter (on a CD),
which can be anything from the original
Whodunit call to the emergency services which
by Adam Gray and Marcos Benevides sparked off the investigation to a phone
Abax 2010 call from someone at the crime lab
978-1-896942-33-9 passing on important forensic information.
Whilst trying to solve the crime, the
Most teachers are delighted if their
students are encouraged to take notes in
students get involved in extensive reading,
a delightful ‘Detective’s Notebook’
but introducing them to the pleasures of
inserted in a pocket in the inside back
reading in English often consists simply
cover. This acts as a place to record vital
of giving them access to a range of
clues from the story, a useful vocabulary
graded readers and letting them get on
notebook and a workbook with extra
with it in their own time. The authors of
quizzes and exercises.
Whodunit describe their book as ‘a
All in all, a book that is well worth
coursebook that is a bridge to extensive
investigating if you want to solve the
reading’ and it is an imaginative way of
problem of how to get your students
introducing students to the pleasures of
interested in reading in English. Whodunit?
reading fiction in English in class in a
You’ll have to read the book and find out.
structured and engaging way.
Helena Gomm
The book contains two gritty detective
West Meon, UK
stories, each divided into six chapters. At
the beginning of each chapter, there is a Note: ELB, the UK distributor of this
pre-reading section, presenting an book, will give a 15% discount on
opportunity to pre-teach any vital Whodunit to anyone who mentions this
vocabulary and to remind the students of review. Contact Anthony Forrester
events so far in the story. Scattered over (anthony.forrester@elb-brighton.com).
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 45
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Factors
for failure
T
Simon Neale sees his article will explore my
experiences of teaching
the need for training English in Korea to classes of
40-plus girls aged from 14 to
teachers to move away 17. The level of these students is quite
low, to the point where if I talk to them
from the curriculum. outside the classroom, they often
struggle to deliver any kind of
communication beyond a basic greeting.
Having taught at the school now for
over a year, it is clear to me that the
curriculum and teaching methods are
not producing improvements in the
students’ language competence, so I aim
to look at the factors that are leading to
this failure and how in my class I have
come to try different strategies which I
believe could improve the students’
language levels.
First impressions
My early impressions of the fluency
levels at my school were high. After
spending my first week observing my
new classes, I had the sense that most
students were capable of producing clear
and correct verbal answers to their
teachers’ questions. It later became clear,
however, that the answers asked for and
given were rigidly defined by a textbook
that consisted of a series of very short
dialogues, which were easy to memorise
and repeat with little understanding of
the actual meaning. This was not
communicative language use, it was a
series of verbal signs, each one designed
to provoke an exact response. The
overall effect on the students was that
they saw English as just another subject
which had to be studied, not a skill that
could be used in life. This view is not
46 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
uncommon; writing on literacy, Linda
Bausch initially struggles to find the
connection between what occurs inside
the classroom and what occurs outside
it: ‘In school you learn school stuff and in
the real world you learn real stuff. So
where is the connection? They’re separate.
Everyone knows this.’ Although the
students in my school gave the correct
answers to their teachers, they had little
interest in or understanding of the
words they were using.
The overall effect
on the students was
that they saw English
as just another subject
which had to be studied,
not a skill that could
be used in life
Time and tests
When I questioned my colleagues about
the students’ apparent lack of interest in
the subject that they teach, several of
them were aware of the problem but felt
constricted by a lack of time and by the
curriculum in which they work. ‘We
don’t have time to teach anything other
than what is in the book,’ Miss Yu told
me. She showed a desire to connect with
her students’ lives and interests by
encouraging them to bring in objects
from home to talk and write about, but
said these activities only occurred in
extra-curricular classes, ironically for
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
the students who needed the least help.
She said, ‘We do lots more fun activities
in extra classes, but I don’t have time for
anything other than our textbook in day-
to-day lessons. Progress is determined
solely by their test results. The students
have no motivation to speak up in class,
as their tests are exclusively writing and
listening tests.’ This problem was
confirmed by another colleague, Miss
Do, who stated that attempts were being
made to change the system of
measuring students’ progress, but that
the process was slow. ‘The government is
trying to implement change, and we know
the current system is not perfect.
However, change would bring more work
for teachers, and we are also unsure of
how to implement speaking tests when
our own English is not perfect.’
Information and insight
From speaking to my colleagues, then,
it became apparent that many students
view English in school as a subject to be
studied, not something to be used. In my
school, the problem is compounded by
an exclusively results-based test system,
and the tests are of a type where the
answers need only be memorised – which
does not encourage genuine learning.
Nor is this a problem confined to my
school; Victoria Carrington identified
similar factors contributing to low levels
of achievement in Australia, finding that
students were ‘disconnected from the
world, intellectually unchallenged, and
distanced from classroom practice’. It
seems that the students are not being
viewed as individuals, rather as statistics
to be recorded on report cards. This view
was confirmed by further comments
from Miss Do. When I asked her
whether the teachers wrote report cards
for students, she stated they did write
them, but only in terms of recording test
scores. She spoke about how this made it
‘Change would bring
more work for teachers,
and we are unsure how
to implement speaking
tests when our own
English is not perfect’
I began to analyse
which aspects of my
lessons were successful,
and also how I had
come to find the
methods that engaged
my students the most
hard to really get to know her students:
‘As a substitute teacher, I found this term
hard at first because I did not know the
students at all, and was restricted in what
I could find about their previous studies
as that kind of information only exists as
a number on a report card.’
Research has shown that when
educators have the time to understand
the background of a student,
improvement is often made by both the
teacher, in terms of how they can frame
the curriculum, and also by the student,
in terms of improvements in
achievement. This is illustrated by
Barbara Comber and Barbara Kamler,
who analysed the work of a young
teacher in Melbourne who was able to
‘turn around’ his view of a particular
student thanks to knowledge gained
from home visits and other time spent
with the student out of school. Key
findings were that ‘with knowledge came
respect rather than judgement’ and that
‘this knowledge can be used as a
springboard to think differently about the
literacy curriculum’.
Both Miss Yu and Miss Do
recognised the faults in such a system,
but stated that they were hampered by
the numbers of students they had to
deal with. Both felt it would be
impractical to meet with such a large
number of parents and write so many
individual reports for students. The
problems of an exclusively test-based
system and the lack of room for insight
into the students’ background have
helped to create students who do not
have the language skills that they should
have. When looking at my own role in
this situation, I began to analyse which
aspects of my lessons had been
successful and which had not, and also
how I had come to find the methods
that engaged my students the most.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
Materials and motivation
My lessons are dictated by the school’s
curriculum, which I have to follow. In
one sense, this makes life simple for me;
I do not have to develop new materials
and teach them. Instead, I only have to
find a way to use the materials I am
presented with at the start of term.
When I started teaching, this did,
however, quickly lead to problems, with
my students becoming bored and
restless in class, merely repeating my
words in an attempt to match my
pronunciation, or reading with one
voice words that I had written on the
blackboard. Apart from my uninspiring
teaching methods, the problem for me
was that the material we were using had
little relevance to the students and,
I came to realise
that I needed to
develop lessons that
were relevant to my
students, as well as
fulfilling my duties
to the school
therefore, only interested them in the
sense that it was further information in
another textbook which had to be taken
home and memorised. The students had
no outlet in the classroom for using their
own relevancy as people with outside
interests, friends and families. They left
the person they were at the door before
every lesson and came in, chanted their
words back to me in unison and left.
The result was English that sounded
correct, but was spoken with no
meaning, understanding or feeling.
I came to realise that I needed to
develop lessons that were relevant to
them, as well as fulfilling my duties to
the school. This would mean using their
abilities to read and speak aloud the
sentences in their textbooks, but also
having them produce sentences
independently of the textbook and with
a relevancy to their own lives. Now when
I reflect on these ideas, I find similarities
in the work of other educators and
researchers into education who speak of
the importance of being aware of the 
47
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Factors
for failure
 lives of the students outside of the
classroom. I knew that I needed to find
ways to engage with my students, to
allow some of their personality, which
does not have other outlets at school,
into my classroom. Once I decided to
learn more about my students and use
their ‘funds of knowledge’ in our classes,
I realised that there were many places to
seek inspiration. To quote Bausch again,
I realised that there were resources all
around me. She states: ‘There is an
unbelievable vastness and diversity of the
literacies at large.’ In my case, those that
could be harnessed for my classroom
purposes consisted of messages of love,
devotion and desire written on school
bags, pencil tins and various body parts.
There were also song lyrics and movie
lines to consider, as well as posters,
newspapers and flyers. In short, I was
entering the world of the Korean
teenage girl.
Texts and technology
My early attempts at changing the
structure of my lessons involved asking
my students to think about their
favourite pop and movie stars, and to
use these names when speaking their
parts of a dialogue. This led to some
enthusiasm from the students, but this
slight change in our lessons did not
hold their attention for long. The
partial success did, however, lead me to
consider other aspects of their lives
which I could use in the classroom.
After each class, the students always
dive onto the computer, and are able to
navigate websites of complex
appearance with great skill and speed. I
realised that if I could develop lessons
which not only featured topics they like
to discuss outside of school but also
more closely resembled the media which
they are familiar with, my teaching
would be more effective. My aim was to
engage them in the classroom, whilst
exploiting and developing the skills they
need in the modern world.
The outcome of my decision to
redevelop our classes was a series of
48 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
PowerPoint slides to accompany every
page of our textbook, which
incorporated aspects of Korean popular
culture. There were two important
aspects to this. The first was the content
of the PowerPoint slides, which I wanted
to reflect the interests of my class; the
second was their visual layout, which I
wanted to be far removed from the rigid
format of the textbooks we use, and
more similar to websites, magazines and
other forms of new media that my
students know and enjoy.
A key feature of websites and other
new media is their unusual layouts. This
was something I wanted to tap into with
my PowerPoint presentations. Not only
did I want a visual focus to my lessons
that more closely resembled the world
that the students had knowledge of, but
I knew it would produce a more
challenging classroom environment for
my students to study in. This was
important to me, as the ineffectiveness
of previous methods was largely the
My aim was to engage
them in the classroom,
whilst exploiting and
developing the skills
they need in the
modern world
result of students knowing in advance
of lessons exactly what would be
expected of them, to the point that they
did not need to concentrate in order to
be participating members of the class.
In order to achieve a more productive
environment, I used different fonts for
dialogue, changed the position of the
dialogue, replaced correct words with
incorrect words and used pictures of
people and speech bubbles to highlight
who was speaking. This allowed the
students to think more critically about
the English they were learning: they
were no longer merely relying on code-
breaking skills but had to go some way
towards using genuine communication
skills. Identifying incorrect words was
usually accompanied by laughter as the
students reacted to how a sentence had
become bizarre, funny or horrifying
because of the replacement of one word
Although the work
we were doing was
essentially the same in
terms of the language
we were covering,
the students were less
restless, more involved
and easier to engage
with another. In understanding this they
were not just using code-breaking skills,
they were also analysing the text.
Changes and challenges
My new strategies have made lessons
more difficult for the students, a fact
that some of them have acknowledged.
One second-grade student, Su Bin, said
that lessons were ‘a little bit difficult to
follow at first’, but that she had got used
to it and knew that ‘it was good for
concentration’. That she understood my
reasoning was heartening; she could see
the benefit of more challenging work, a
point which has been made by many
researchers, including Madeleine Gregg,
who asserts: ‘Children’s reading makes
the most progress ... when they are
challenged and supported at a level just
above the ability to read easily on their
own, and when they are engaged in
meaning-making conversations about the
texts’. Although she was referring to
reading, specifically, I have found that
by planning and teaching all my lessons
and materials at a level just above the
level my students are comfortable with,
they are more attentive, more
enthusiastic and produce better work.
The incorporation of PowerPoint in
our lessons quickly led to more
responsive and focused students.
Although the work we were doing was
essentially the same in terms of the
language we were covering, the students
were less restless, more involved and
easier to engage. When asked if they
preferred the lessons with PowerPoint,
the students replied that they did. Min
Yong, a first-grade student, said, ‘It is
easy to follow and see, and we do not
need our books.’ Another student, Min
Su, also in the first grade, said that she
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
liked them for the ‘visual effect’. I was
encouraged by these comments and
further comments made with regard to
the use of Korean celebrities in our
lesson, which the students really
enjoyed. One student, Ji Min, said,
‘Lessons are familiar and fun; it makes
the lesson more like speaking real
English.’ This last comment, in
particular, was very heartening as it
seemed I was achieving my aim of
moving our lessons away from
something which happens solely in the
classroom, to something which has a
function outside in the real world.
Colleagues and
competence
Another interesting outcome of how I
use PowerPoint was the reaction from
my Korean co-teachers. It gave me
further insight into the problems of
language teaching and learning in my
school. It became apparent to me that
my older Korean co-teachers found it as
difficult, or more difficult, than my
students to follow the layout of my
PowerPoint slides. Often, they found it
hard to locate the different parts of the
dialogue. This highlights the changes
that are occurring in society, whereby
older generations are lacking the skills
to function in the modern world. Whilst
very competent at what they do, the
older-generation teachers I work with
emphasise the importance of grammar
and teach through explanation and
exercise. There is little engagement with
the students, and little acknowledgement
that the world has changed from the
time when they trained to be teachers.
This view was confirmed by Miss Yu,
who pointed out that the older teachers
teach ‘as they were taught to teach’. The
teaching styles of my colleagues
indicated that teachers, and older
teachers in particular, may need
educating in how to teach languages in
the twenty-first century. This is unlikely
to be a problem confined to my school,
or even Korea, however.

Whilst reflecting on the issue of how
English teaching can be improved in my
school, several key points arose. Firstly,
there were those points that stemmed
from the curriculum itself, which is
outdated, unchallenging and which the
ENGLISH
students see as having no bearing on
who they are. Teachers who would like
Tprofessional
EACHING
to make changes are limited by the
pressures they are under to get the This is your magazine.
students to pass exams which are based
solely on memorised answers and by
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lack of practical help from the
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The positive response to my attempts
to make my lessons more relevant to the
IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
students indicated that using their own Do you have ideas you’d like to share
interests and knowledge was a good with colleagues around the world?
approach, but the reaction of some older Tips, techniques and activities;
teachers indicated that they themselves simple or sophisticated; well-tried
may need educating in how to teach or innovative; something that has
worked well for you? All published
language in the 21st century. For levels
of fluency to improve in my school, the contributions receive a prize!
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outside of school. If this knowledge
could be harnessed to a curriculum that
is less heavily reliant on tests from a
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progress, then achievement levels would an article in the current issue of ETp?
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lessons and find little reason to Write to us or email:
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editor@etprofessional.com
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this article have been changed.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 49
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Initial teacher
training 1
I
Steve Hirschhorn n an apparent attempt to
professionalise initial English
argues the case against an language teacher-training courses
(ITTCs), colloquially known as
over-academic model. ‘the four-week course’, exam boards
seem to have lost sight of what such
initial training should be doing. As a
provider of Trinity College London
(TCL) courses since 1996, at my peak
overseeing the delivery of 14 courses per
year, I feel qualified to comment on the
change in emphasis which has occurred
and which now causes trainee teachers
to hurl themselves headlong through
hoops of quasi-academia, instead of
focusing on developing the attributes of
a good teacher.
Entry
Even before the TCL Cert TESOL
course starts, the emphasis for potential
course members is less on recognising
the qualities which might contribute
towards becoming a teacher and more
on the proverbial ticking of boxes. In
order to qualify for acceptance on the
course, applicants must demonstrate
that they have sufficient qualifications
to enter UK higher education or an
overseas equivalent. This is the start of
a process which seems to ignore the fact
that being academic or having the
ability to pass exams is not part of what
creates a good teacher. We probably
throw away hundreds of potentially
good UK teachers every year because
they didn’t leave school with A levels.
When I took the course in 1980, aged
30, I had no relevant formal
qualifications at all, but I passed with
an ‘A’ grade. Since then, I have gone on
to gain an MA, a PGCHE (distinction),
become a Fellow of the Higher
50 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Education Academy, a Senior Lecturer
in Applied Linguistics, external
examiner for three UK universities and
Principal of a respected language
school. If current regulations had
existed in the 80s, I would never have
had this career. It is also true, again
anecdotally, that some of the best
trainees to pass through my hands have
been qualification-free! Perhaps they
This process seems
to ignore the fact
that being academic
or having the ability to
pass exams is not part
of what creates a
good teacher
have more to prove. In most fields these
days, one can cite one’s life experience
in lieu of study but not, apparently, to
take Cert TESOL.
Surely it should be left to the ITTC
provider to decide on entry qualifications
– the exam board should be there to
ensure that certain predetermined
standards are achieved by the provider
and the course participant.
Demands
While teaching practice is still a central
component of the course, trainees are
overwhelmed with written tasks right
from the start. One implication is that
just as some language learners will take
refuge in grammar to avoid the risks of
speaking, so trainees can hide
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
themselves in written work rather than
face the real challenges of developing
teaching skills.
Just in case the reader is not clear
about the demands placed on a TCL
course member these days, there are five
separate pieces of written work to be
completed during the course (not
including lesson planning). The total
word count for these, excluding the
exam (which in our case is a take-home
affair), is about 7,600. That’s around
half of what might be expected for a
Master’s dissertation! Assignments range
from a relatively short (2 x 400 words)
but precise account of two sets of
materials, through to a major study of a
learner and their needs, error analysis
and devising of a future syllabus.
Although we tell course participants
that when prioritising is required, they
should put their energies into lesson
planning and preparation, the fact is
that they must complete all components
of the course to qualify and therefore
prioritising becomes ‘putting off’. The
stress build-up, which I believe almost
every participant experiences, is due in
part to teaching nerves, which is
completely understandable and
probably even desirable to a certain
extent, but the stress is multiplied by the
burden of written work which distracts
them from considered preparation for
the teaching experience. In reality,
trainees spend less time planning and,
particularly, preparing lessons than they
should – but also sometimes work so
late into the night that their
performance suffers substantially. This,
as far as I am concerned, has nothing to
do with training entry-level teachers: it
simply represents an external body’s
unchallenged and arguably misguided
Trainees spend
less time planning
lessons than they
should – but also
sometimes work
so late into the night
that their performance
suffers substantially
Isn’t it what happens
in the classroom which
determines whether or
not a teacher might be
considered ‘good’?
view of what the profession requires
from its new members. It is time to
challenge this view and return towards
the values which were set originally by
John Haycraft: an initial teacher-
training course should be exactly that;
it should be designed and delivered,
examined and interrogated to develop
and nurture the qualities of a good
language teacher, nothing more and
nothing less.
Argument
In order to focus an ITTC on the
qualities of a good language teacher, it
is obviously essential to know what
those are – a dilemma, indeed, since
nobody has ever been able to create a
definitive list of such qualities with
which all agree. Having said that, I
would challenge anyone who states that
an academic background will help to
create a good general language teacher
or that the ability to work late into the
night under considerable pressure helps
to develop the qualities needed by a
good teacher or, indeed, that the
inability to function under such a
workload signifies an inability to teach.
Isn’t it what happens in the classroom
(and in its immediate vicinity, at least in
metaphorical terms) which determines
whether or not a teacher might be
considered ‘good’? If so, then we should
examine what is needed for that context:
awareness, empathy, sense of humour,
sensitivity, reflectiveness, leadership,
authority, ability to guide, responsiveness,
flexibility, determination and, of course,
subject knowledge must be amongst the
qualities which language students might
expect from their teacher in most
(though perhaps not all) cultures.
And yet, even the one area mentioned
which would seem to support TCL’s
stance on written work – subject
knowledge – is debatable.
The assignment most obviously
designed to increase subject knowledge
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
is the Language Learner Profile in which
course participants must engage with a
student, conduct a recorded interview
with them, list and analyse errors, plan
and deliver a one-hour lesson, create a
needs analysis, prepare a future syllabus,
and so on. This assignment requires
upwards of 2,500 words and many
hours’ work. The results are that
trainees cite this as the straw which is
most likely to break the camel’s back.
Under those conditions of practically
forced labour, is it likely that efficient
learning is going to take place? I have
never undertaken a ‘viva’ for this
assignment, but it would be interesting
to note the results – I dare to suggest
that they would be very poor indeed.
This is the assignment most likely to trip
up those who have no formal academic
qualifications (and many who do), but
in my view it does not achieve what it
sets out to achieve: commensurately
greater subject knowledge.
Experiencing life as
a beginner can be very
useful but why can’t
course members and
course providers decide
how they would like
to reflect on their
experience?
One could also challenge the view
that writing a 1,800-word report on the
experience of four hours of language
learning contributes to one’s subject
knowledge. Note that I am not arguing
against the task itself, only the way the
report should be written. Experiencing
life as a beginner can be very useful (and
may even have some impact on subject
knowledge) but why can’t course
members and course providers decide
how they would like to reflect on their
experience? This could as well be done in
brief note form or even in an oral form
as a sharing session in small groups and
would thus save huge amounts of time
without sacrificing learning.
In addition, I would make a strong
argument in favour of having little
formal grammar input during the 
51
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Initial teacher
training 1
 training itself since every teacher knows
that one cannot cover enough of the
English grammar system in four weeks
to make any impression and that many
of us learn this aspect of our subject
knowledge as we go along – in the first
year or so of full-time teaching. Even
the keenest of linguists cannot hope to
gather enough grammar knowledge in
four weeks. Instead, we could be
opening new doors into the world of
collocation and corpus – something we
already do but haven’t the time to cover
sufficiently. We could also be spending
more time on showing new teachers
how to deal with questions to which
they don’t yet know the answer!
Attention
If I am right, then we should be
focusing on helping individuals develop
those parts of themselves which are
relevant to the classroom context and
recognising those parts which are not so
appropriate to professional teachers.
This training programme must be largely
based on the practical, through both
peer teaching and ‘real’ teaching.
Drastically reducing the written load
would allow for time to explore and
reflect on the trainees’ performance in a
wide variety of contexts. We could easily
increase the amount of time allotted to
teaching practice and allow for both
observed and unobserved lessons; we
could experiment with planned and
unplanned sessions. In short, we could
challenge trainees with relevant and
substantial experiential learning.
Reducing the written workload would
permit more detailed feedback sessions,
We should be focusing
on helping individuals
develop those parts
of themselves which
are relevant to the
classroom context
52 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
which would be able to focus more
effectively on each participant’s
strengths and weaknesses. There would
be greater possibilities for peer feedback
and trainees would become more
sensitive to each other’s needs, they
would have more time and focus to
support and assist each other. Video
could be used as a genuine tool (as more
time to view would be available) rather
than, as currently on my course, as a
tutor back-watcher when a participant
is having difficulty. In short, we could
attend to our learners just as we advise
our learners to attend to theirs.
Even the best
four-week courses are
now tending towards
quasi-academic
boot camps
Assessment
Moderation, the name that TCL gives
to the assessment at the end of the
course, has become a true box-ticking
activity. A moderator not long ago
criticised us because the sessions on our
timetables hadn’t been initialled by the
tutors ‘properly’. This, I suggest, is a
distraction. When moderators focus on
the regulations (because they are
instructed to) and not on whether or
not good new teachers are being
produced through our efforts,
something must surely be wrong.
Moderators should be focused on
the quality of course delivery and the
course participants’ experiences and
development but, most of all, they
should be assessing whether an ITTC is
doing what it says on the tin –
producing new, employable teachers.
My purpose here is not to attack
individuals but to challenge the
requirements of the exam boards – and
their masters, too.
Validity
I understand that in order to have the
Cert TESOL recognised by the British
Council and the QCA (or now Ofqual)
at Level 5 of the National Qualifications
Framework, the course has to adhere in
certain ways to certain criteria, but just
as we would advise our students against
a particular learning strategy as being
inefficient, surely the exam boards have
the duty, expertise and authority to
guide the QCA towards an
understanding of what our profession
needs. Or perhaps this is actually the
final straw in the long process (started
in the 1970s) of attempting to gain
professional status; if so, it is
misconstrued and misguided. Even the
best four-week courses are now tending
towards quasi-academic boot camps,
despite the very best efforts of excellent
tutors all over the world. It is to their
credit that some four-week courses are
still managing to create new teachers of
a high calibre, but it is those trainers
and their students who are battling
quite unnecessarily against a system
which was born as an inspiration but
has grown into a monster.

My lone voice will not carry very much
weight and probably won’t attract the
notice of those who are ultimately
responsible for this negative shift in
emphasis but, if others agree, then we
must begin to put pressure on institutions
such as the British Council who know
our business and could provide the
guidance necessary to change direction
before it is too late. ETp
Steve Hirschhorn
has been in ELT
since 1979, lecturing,
teaching and training in
mainstream and ‘fringe’
methodologies. One of
several current projects
is a history of ELT
methodology 1950–2000.
He is Principal of
Eckersley Oxford, UK,
and an external examiner
for the University of
Wales (Bangor).
steve.hirschhorn@eckersley.co.uk
TALKBACK!
Do you have something to say about
an article in the current issue of ETp?
This is your magazine and we would
really like to hear from you.
Write to us or email:
editor@etprofessional.com
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

Learning coach 5
In the fifth article in their series on learner coaching, Duncan Foord and Daniel Barber look
at how teachers can help students recognise and maintain their motivation.

A
s teachers, we can design
classroom activities which we
think will tap into our
3 Think about what you have written.
learners’ motivation as
individuals and as a group, but if we are
to coach our learners towards greater
autonomy, then we need to hand over
the ‘motivational controls’ so that they
can tap into their motivation themselves
when we aren’t around. Motivation is at
the heart of effective independent
learning, so learners need to do two
things:
● recognise their motivation
● maintain and boost it.
Here are two activities which you can
do with your learners to help them
4 Compare with a partner or in small
recognise and take charge of their own
motivation. We conclude with a
checklist of ideas to help you sustain
and boost your learners’ motivation.
5 Relate what you have talked about to
Recognising motivation
Activity one
This activity helps students explore their
own motivation.
personal goal or a project of some
kind.
Try to identify important motivational
factors. In Dan’s case we could
point to:
● the race as a motivator. Dan had
something to prepare for, an event
which would measure his progress
in some way.
● Dan’s autonomy. He made the
decision to print and follow a
training schedule, and he chose the
best schedule for him.
● Dan’s discipline. He kept to the
schedule and didn’t give up.
groups. What common factors are
there in your stories? What
differences are there?
your English learning. What can Dan
learn from his marathon training
experience that he can apply to
improving his Spanish? What can
you learn from your motivation
stories, which you can apply to
3 ‘We’re going on holiday to New
York in October.’
4 ‘I always wanted to learn English
again, but until now I haven’t tried.
English will help me develop
personally and professionally. I’d
really like to be able to express
myself in English.’
5 ‘I wasn’t very good at English at
school; we had a terrible teacher
and it was just another subject,
another obligation. But now it’s my
hobby and I’m learning it because I
want to, not because I have to.’
6 ‘I tried English classes three times
before but they never lasted more
than a few months. Then, two years
ago, a good friend said that she
wanted to do the same, and now I
never miss a class. Knowing that
she’ll be there means I don’t want
to stop.’
7 ‘The world is such a small place
these days: travelling, the internet,
films and TV, and so on, and it’s all
English, English, English. I want to
be part of the global community.’

1 Read an example of Dan talking about learning English? 8 ‘I remember the first time I went to
a time when he felt very motivated. Dublin; I couldn’t say anything. I felt
‘Recently I did my first half marathon. like Tarzan! I just pointed to things
Activity two that I wanted and smiled. But the
Ten weeks before the race, I found a
This activity helps students think about last time I went to Ireland was much
training schedule on the internet,
the different reasons they may have for better. I could order food in a
which told me when and how far to
learning English. restaurant and ask questions
run each week. I printed it out and put
it on the wall in the kitchen. It was politely. My boyfriend was very
magic! That little piece of paper made impressed. A good feeling!’
1 Read what other learners say about
me run four times a week ... and I their motivation for learning English. 9 ‘I don’t know; I’ve always enjoyed it,
always did it. I’ve been running for a Tick ( ) any reasons that are similar ever since I was at school. I was
couple of years, but I was never as to yours. How are your reasons good at it so I carried on. It’s a part
motivated before. Not surprisingly, different? of my life that I’m really happy with.’
since the race I usually only go
1 ‘I’m learning English because it will Did you tick more than one of these
running once or twice a week.’
be useful for my job.’ reasons? That’s good because it means
2 Write about a time when you felt very 2 ‘It’s the language of science and your motivation is strong enough to
motivated about something. It could research. I need to pass English to help you keep learning, even if things
be at school or at home, a hobby, a succeed in my studies.’ change. 

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 53

 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Learning coach 5

2 Now read the text below about the
different types of motivation that
those nine learners illustrate:
Learners 1, 2 and 3 have clear, practical
reasons for learning English. English is
necessary in their lives, jobs, hobbies
and interests. We can call these
‘extrinsic’ motivations or ‘goals’, and
they can be very important because they
help us decide our long-term objectives.
Learners 4 and 5 are motivated because
they can make their own decisions
about how, when, who with and for how
long they do it. If they are in control, they
take responsibility for learning. Their
motivation comes from ‘autonomy’.
Learners 6 and 7 enjoy sharing the
learning experience with other people. It
is important to be part of a community
and to speak to people with similar
interests: to have friends! We can call
this motivation ‘relatedness’.
Learners 8 and 9 want to keep learning
because they are good at it. They enjoy
making progress and it makes them feel
good about themselves. We can call
this motivation ‘competence’.
3 Think about your motivation. How
much of it comes from competence,
relatedness, autonomy or some
extrinsic reason? Mark them from 1
to 5 on these ‘motivation dials’:
2 3
1 4
0 5
COMPETENCE
2 3
1 4
0 5
RELATEDNESS
2 3
1 4
0 5
AUTONOMY
2 3
1 4
0 5
EXTRINSIC REASONS
54 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
4 Now write about your motivations.
You may sometimes want to look at
them, so write them in an important
place in your notebook or on a piece
of paper in your wallet. You can write
them like this:
I’m learning English because …
I’m learning English so I can ...
I think the most important reason why
I’m learning English is …
But I also …
Maybe in the future I will …
Maintaining and
boosting motivation
Here is a checklist for helping your
students maintain and boost their
motivation. (Can you relate each item
to the four motivators identified in
Activity 2?)
1 Make sure your classroom is a
community where learners have the
chance to participate and have a say in
what happens, when it happens and how
it happens (whatever their age).
2 Suggest they keep a learning
journal in which they reflect on what
they have learnt, what activities they
have liked or disliked and what is
affecting their learning. Alternatively, or
in addition, allow class time for them to
report on this to a partner or in small
groups.
3 Exploit the motivational tools that
accompany coursebooks these days.
These may include progress tests, ‘can
do’ self-evaluative checklists and
portfolios based on the Council of
Europe’s Common English Framework.
All aim to foster feelings of competence.
4 Wherever possible, give your
students a choice of what they do in
class and for homework, either as a
group by voting for one activity which
everyone will do or allowing them
individually to choose different
activities.
5 Help your students set goals for
themselves, as a group and individually.
Encourage them to write these down
and check their progress.
6 Offer your students the opportunity
to prepare for an external exam which
relates to their needs, such as the Trinity
GESE exams for spoken English.
7 Promote the out-of-class activities
suggested in previous articles in this
series. If self-study is stimulating, the
students will be more likely to choose to
do it in their own time.
8 Do activities in class such as the
two suggested in this article and follow
up on them.
9 Ask your students how they are
feeling about their English on a regular
basis. Ask them where their motivation
levels are from one week to the next.
Get them to ask each other.
10 Be a role model by paying attention
to your own motivation!

Finally, it isn’t enough to do a lesson on
motivation and think your job is done.
A motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar (yes,
really!), said: ‘People often say that
motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither
does bathing – that’s why we recommend
it daily.’ ETp
Recommended reading
Dörnyei, Z and Ushioda, E (Eds)
Motivation, Language Identity and the
L2 Self (Second Language Acquisition)
Multilingual Matters 2009
Pink, D H Drive: The Surprising Truth
About What Motivates Us Canongate
Books 2011
Daniel Barber is a
teacher, teacher trainer
and writer. He worked in
Mexico, Oxford, London
and Barcelona before
moving to Cádiz, Spain.
daniel@activelanguage.net
Duncan Foord is Director
of Teacher Training at
OxfordTEFL. He lives in
Barcelona and is author
of The Developing
Teacher, published by
DELTA Publishing, and
co-author, with Lindsay
Clandfield, of The
Language Teacher’s
Survival Handbook,
published by iT’s
Magazines.
duncan@oxfordtefl.com
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Swearing
in class
Simon Dunton
‘Don’t be so nervous about it; it
will be OK. Anyway, they already
canvasses students and
know these words.’
teachers on whether we
T
his was the response of my
should study swear words former Director of Studies
when I explained that the film
and how we could. she was recommending for use
in class (Up in the Air) was full of
cursing and swearing. What surprised
me most was that this is Russia, where
the use of MaT (swear words) is taboo
(so much so that in one region an
experimental programme of on-the-spot
street fines was attempted) and they
would never be heard in an officially-
certified film translation. Eventually,
believing the use of parts of the film
would be of great benefit to the class, I
agreed to go ahead with the idea, but
only after giving the students a brief
warning regarding the contents of the
film and requesting that they never
repeat this type of language in class.
This event led to several interesting
discussions in the teachers’ room,
focusing on the central question: should
we teach swearing and, if so, how and
when?
Teacher opinion
The cons were clearly stated: swearing is
simply not acceptable classroom
language; it isn’t comfortable to bring
up such a topic in a natural way; it can
be culturally offensive (especially if we
include blasphemy); it doesn’t sound
right coming from a non-native speaker;
groups of mixed ages might react badly
to such a lesson topic; it could be
extremely difficult to teach in a serious,
educational way; some teachers
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
personally dislike the use of such words
and phrases; the topic could lead to
embarrassment, complaints and even
loss of students.
The pros are equally strong: we are
here to encourage the learning of the
English language – all of it; students
need to know how to defend themselves
or react naturally if confronted with
swearing in an English-speaking
environment; some students are
personally interested in it, whether or
not the teacher is; these words can be
heard in films, songs, etc, and teachers
should demonstrate how to use them
correctly, and how not to use them, to
avoid future misunderstanding.
It is clear that the issue really
depends on the personality and wishes
of the teacher and their respective
students, the teacher–student
relationship, the general comfort level
within the classroom and the personal
use of L1 swearing in the real world.
Other issues arising include when and
how to start teaching such language;
whether swear words can be seen as
idiomatic expressions and introduced
It is clear
that the issue really
depends on the
personality and wishes
of the teacher and
their respective
students
along with these around the intermediate
level, or perhaps introduced slowly in
their varying parts of speech forms; and
whether it is possible to imagine a
general coursebook including at least
some of these words, or whether they
should remain, as now, dealt with in
separate and specialised lessons.
Materials
So what is available out there in terms
of lesson plan material for the brave
teacher who takes up the challenge? A
brief search on the internet reveals that
some pre-made lessons exist, mostly
based on ‘Swearing’, a lesson in
Richard MacAndrew and Ron
Martínez’s book Taboos and Issues.
The bulk of this lesson relies on the 
55
 Swearing
in class
 students’ previous lexical knowledge,
and asks for their opinions on swearing
in general, as well as focusing on two
specific cases in reading task format. It
is not for the weak of heart or the easily
embarrassed teacher as it requires them
to hear and speak the offending words
repeatedly (through gap filling and
drilling) and even to help define a fairly
comprehensive list of blasphemous,
‘weaker’, ‘stronger’ and ‘taboo-strength’
words. It should be noted that that the
‘F-word’ is listed as the strongest.
Again, this begs the question: Should
students be taught that there is a
stronger word (the ‘C-word’) and that it
is totally taboo for some people? There
is, of course, a plethora of YouTube.com
and Videojug.com videos that also
attempt to teach expletives, though
most – if not all – cannot be considered
as educational or suitable for a
classroom atmosphere.
Student opinion
Of course, it’s all very well asking
teachers and checking what lesson plans
are already out there, but what do the
students think? Should it be the choice
of the teacher or the students to teach
or study profanities? What sort of
reaction could we expect if we decided
to conduct one such lesson without
warning? How many complaints could
the DoS expect? Or would it be a total
success? Would it be possible, in fact, to
have a swearing lesson without swearing?
Making use of one of my long-
standing, advanced-level groups, I
decided to put this to the test, though
not quite as directly as the material in
Taboos and Issues. Within a pairwork
discussion based on the topic ‘World
English’, I added the question: Should
English swearing be taught in class?
Class feedback showed that the students
were overwhelmingly in favour of this,
at which point I decided to tackle this
issue directly by asking which of the
following would be the most
comfortable way of doing this for them:
● Writing up all the words we know on
the board
56 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Books
Student-produced ideas
Several of my students had read (or
even owned or carried about) books
specifically written about swearing,
which give very detailed translations
and clear examples. Though
shocking, these at least give accurate
information. More detailed books like
An Encyclopedia of Swearing by
Geoffrey Hughes is a philologist’s
dream, giving the origin and history
of many contemporary and past
swear words, but it is not for the
average language student.
The internet
Sites such as urbandictionary.com
give real (though at times bizarre,
colloquial or obsolete) definitions.
Noswearing.com offers not only a
clear dictionary with softer definitions,
but also a ‘bad word filter’ which can
tone down entire obscenity-
containing sentences typed into it.
● Watching a film/listening to a song
and exploring the precise meaning of
the phrases and words
● Drilling the words for intonation
● Roleplaying situations in which they
might be used
● Seriously examining the grammar,
formation and function of each word.
The answer to each of the above was a
resounding No. The interest in swearing
was there, but the question of how a
lesson on the subject might be executed
appeared to stump them, too.
I continued by asking the students
to discuss the following questions in
pairs (where they could feel more at
ease and use what language they liked):
● Why should swearing be taught?
● How have you learnt these words?
● How could it be taught?
● How would you feel if you were asked
to teach Russian swear words?
● Would you use the same methods?
These mini-discussions worked
extremely well and, during whole-class
feedback, a very long, detailed and
engaging discussion took place, almost
without teacher intervention or
Songs
English songs played on the radio
are usually in their original format in
Russia, so the explicit version can
be heard at all times of the day.
Questions about lyrics could be
asked on a one-to-one basis, since
songs are very personal anyway.
Once the students have checked if
the teacher is comfortable with such
a role, they could ask for further
explanations where the meaning is
not clear.
Films
Films are perhaps the easiest and
most common way to see how
swearing is used in a natural way.
Translations should absolutely be
avoided and, as with songs, any
queries could be discussed in private
with a willing teacher.
encouragement. Some of the students’
ideas are shown in the box on this page.

My satisfaction with this simple idea
came not only from the fact that a
variety of ideas on how to self-learn or
revise these words was drawn up, but
that the entire talk was carried out
completely without swearing or teacher
embarrassment, and it was entirely
student-focused. It was, therefore, an
effective and delicate way to approach
the issue – and useful for any of those
who wished to go away and make use of
these words in future. ETp
MacAndrew, R and Martínez R Taboos
and Issues Thomson Heinle 2001
Simon Dunton taught
the full spectrum of
ages and levels whilst
working at three major
language schools in
Moscow, Russia. He is
currently Director of
Studies of a smaller
school in the Universitet
district of the city.
simondunton@gmail.com
Webwatcher
Web
ack in Issue 69 I wrote about the Wallwisher tool, but only
B in passing. Recently, I have been giving a number of
presentations about it at conferences, and I have begun
to get quite a lot of feedback which indicates that I may have
overlooked its potential. So I have decided to devote an entire
article to it, pointing out some of the benefits of the tool as well
as some of the things that you can do with it.
Wallwisher
Wallwisher is really like an electronic noticeboard. You create a
‘wall’ on the Wallwisher site (www.wallwisher.com), you are given
an address for your wall, and you can then begin to add ‘sticky
notes’ to it. You can set it up so that only you can add notes to
it and other people can only read it, or you can set it up so that
everyone can add their own notes. By allowing everyone to add
notes, it becomes a useful classroom tool for groupwork and a
great place for brainstorming ideas and projects.
There are four things you can do with sticky notes:
1 You can add a sticky note to your wall and write on it, so it
simply contains your thoughts on a topic or idea.
2 You can add a sticky note with a link to a YouTube video, so
that people can click on the note and watch the video.
3 You can add sticky notes that link to pictures. When people
click on the note, the picture appears on the screen.
4 You can add sticky notes that link to webpages. If people click
on the note, they will be taken to the linked page.
You can see an excellent example of the use of sticky notes on a
wall at www.wallwisher.com/demo. Just click on the different
sticky notes – and see what happens.
Another brick in the wall
Teachers can use Wallwisher to prepare material for a class.
Imagine, for example, that you want your students to do a
project about a famous person, such as Nelson Mandela. On
your wall you can add links to videos, websites, articles and
pictures, and you can put sticky notes with ideas for things to
think about. The students can then use your wall as a starting
point for reading and gathering information about the topic. It
can be used at any level. For a lower-level class, your wall might
simply have a collection of links to useful tools, websites,
videos, etc that can help the students learn vocabulary.
Teacher trainers might create a wall with links to different
articles, videos, pictures, etc about a particular methodology.
The possibilities are endless.
Student walls
Students can also make their own walls. A project in class might
involve the students choosing a famous place and then creating
a wall about it. They could then share these with the teacher or
with the class. One thing you can do is to get some of the
students to stand up and present their walls to the rest of the
class. This way you bring an oral component into the work.
There is the danger that the students will simply find links,
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 •
Russell Stannard thinks
Wallwisher
Wallwisher is well worth a second visit.
videos and pictures and add these to the wall, which doesn’t
involve them in much language work. One way to avoid this is to
insist that each picture, video or link includes some text
explaining what it is. You could also insist on a certain number of
written posts (remember, sticky notes can be used just to write
on). I have had all sorts of feedback from teachers regarding this
idea. It can help in the writing process as a way of encouraging
the students to get their thoughts and ideas together. This can
be done in the class or as homework, as long as the students
have access to computers.
Class walls
Teachers can set up a wall, add a few posts to get it started and
then share it with the students and get them to add things to it.
This is easily done by setting it up so that anyone can contribute
to it. I often use class walls for brainstorming vocabulary and
ideas on a given topic. The students don’t even have to be in
the class to participate: you could set up a wall and then get the
students to contribute for homework. If they are working in
groups, then you or they can set up a wall for each group to
work on to collect ideas and contributions.
Bricklaying
Using Wallwisher is very easy. You simply go onto the site and
click on ‘build a wall’. You then have to give your wall a title and
a subtitle, select an icon to go in the corner, set the control
levels and click on ‘done’. You can start adding things to your
wall immediately. You just do a couple of clicks on an empty
space to add a sticky note. It is that simple!
You don’t even have to sign up to Wallwisher to create a
wall, but it is much better if you do. Once you are signed up, you
have a profile where you can see all the walls you created. You
can edit, delete or view your walls at any time. It is also a good
idea for you to get your students to sign up. The reason for this
is that if they are signed up, then when they add a sticky note to
any wall, it will clearly show you who added it. This makes it
easier for you to track who wrote what.
One last useful tip is that if you are worried about what your
students might write on the walls, then there is a very handy
setting that only allows new sticky notes to be added to the wall
once you have approved them. Again, to be able to moderate
what is written on a wall, you need to sign up. ETp
The videos at www.teachertrainingvideos.com/wall/
index.html go through everything in detail and will help you
to use Wallwisher.
Russell Stannard is a Principal Lecturer in ICT at the
University of Warwick, UK, where he teaches on the
MA in ELT. He won the Times Higher Education
Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and
Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site
of the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council
ELTon award, all for his popular website
www.teachertrainingvideos.com.
Keep sending your favourite sites to Russell:
russellstannard@btinternet.com
57
 T E C H N O L O G Y
Five things you always wanted to know about
blended learning
(but were afraid to ask)
1 What exactly is blended
learning?
The most common definition of blended
learning is learning that combines face-to-
face (f2f) teaching with online elements.
2 Why would I want to use
blended learning?
As technology becomes increasingly
ubiquitous, learners expect it to be
integrated into their language classes. This
means not only bringing technology into the
classroom, but offering learners technology-
enhanced options outside of class time.
Learners today increasingly expect to be
able to fit learning into their own busy lives
and working schedules. This is particularly
true of university students and adults who
are busy professionals.
If you are a freelance teacher, offering
a blended option to your learners may
provide you with a unique selling point
and an attractive degree of flexibility. In
some situations, teachers are being asked
by their institutions to offer blended
options to learners. In other contexts,
there may be Ministry of Education
directives expecting teachers to offer
blended learning in many disciplines.
So in some cases, teachers may want
to start using blended learning, while in
others they may have to start using it.
3 What’s the right blend?
There is no one right blend. The amount of
f2f instruction versus online instruction can
vary widely, and will depend on factors
which include your teaching context, the
needs and expectations of your learners,
the resources you have available and the
content and design of your course.
Let’s look at a number of possible
blended learning scenarios:
1 A business English teacher meets her
learners for three hours a week. Because
her learners are busy professionals, they
cannot come to more than one hour per
week of f2f class time. So she offers
them an additional two hours per week of
online work.
58 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
2 An English for Academic Purposes
teacher at a university teaches her B2-
level students for one hour a day, Monday
to Friday. The university has decided that
at least 50 percent of all courses must be
delivered online. So now she meets her
learners for one hour on Monday and on
Friday, and offers them three hours per
week of online work.
3 A language school in the UK offers
intensive 25-hour-per-week summer
courses to international students. After
they leave the UK, they complete an
additional ten hours of online work.
4 A secondary school teacher meets her
learners for three hours per week of f2f
EFL classes. For homework, she regularly
sets tasks using a range of Web 2.0
tools, such as creating online posters,
mobile phone video or audio clips and
posting to the class blog or wiki.
Scenario 4 is often where teachers
start experimenting with blended learning,
if they have a choice. The best way is to
start small, preferably with one class and
offering as little as ten percent of the work
online – possibly simply as an extra, as in
scenario 4 above. Once you and your
learners gain confidence with the tools
and online work, you can build more
online components into your course.
4 I need to offer at least 50
percent of my course online.
Where do I start?
Take a look at your syllabus. Identify those
areas that are most easily delivered online,
such as reading, writing and listening.
Although speaking can also be delivered
online (via group audio or video
conferencing sessions, for example), you
will want to keep as much speaking as
possible for your f2f classes. You could use
a blank grid in which to map out the main
elements and activities of your course.
Then write in the following for each
element:
● topic
● language focus
● whether this element will be offered
online or f2f
In this series, Nicky Hockly
explains aspects of technology
which some people may be
embarrassed to confess that
they don’t really understand.
In this article, she examines
blended learning.
Receptive
skills
(reading &
listening)
Productive
skills
(writing &
speaking)
Language
work
(grammar &
vocabulary)
Review
activities
Week
1
Topic:
_____
Week
2
Topic:
_____
● estimated time the activity will take
● interaction (individual, pair- or groupwork)
● if the activity is online, if it is synchronous
(takes place in real time) or asynchronous
(learners can contribute to the task when
they like – within the task deadline)
It’s important to start with an overview of
your course, and a clear awareness of
which elements to offer online and which
to offer in the f2f classroom. Mapping
your coursebook syllabus for an entire
month or term onto a grid can help you
keep the big picture in mind.
5 How can I deliver the online part
of my blended learning course?
Email is a ‘low-tech’ possibility. It could
work in scenario 4, where the teacher
could send homework instructions and
links to online tools, or to the class blog
or wiki, by email. But in a proper blended
course, you would want to look at
keeping your learners’ tasks and work in
one place online, such as in a class wiki,
a blog or in a virtual learning environment
such as Moodle.
Whatever tool you decide to use, start
small, try it out, get feedback and then
adjust your task types and online delivery
tools in the light of reflection and hindsight.
Nicky Hockly has been involved in
EFL teaching and teacher training
since 1987. She is Director of
Pedagogy of The Consultants-E,
an online training and development
consultancy. She is co-author of
Teaching Online (DELTA Publishing),
which was nominated for a 2011
British Council ELTon award. She
maintains a blog at
www.emoderationskills.com.
Contact Nicky at nicky.hockly@theconsultants-e.com and
let her know of any other ICT areas you’d like her to
explore in this series.
 In this column Rose Senior explains why certain teaching techniques and
class management strategies are effective, and identifies specific issues that can assist
all language teachers in improving the quality of their teaching.

Personalisation
ommunicative language teaching and, rather than simply letting students communicative value because we know

C (CLT) is all about helping students

to develop their speaking skills by
giving them a range of
opportunities to interact in English with
fellow students during class time. A powerful
technique for encouraging oral interaction is
that of personalisation: giving students the
opportunity to share with others aspects of
themselves as people – their likes and
dislikes, feelings, personal experiences,
knowledge, opinions, and so on.
Personalisation
is powerful because Personalisation is powerful of the kind outlined above,
it enables students because it enables students to since they can readily step in
to link the subject
matter of the lesson link the subject matter of the or phrases as needed, correct
to their own lives, lesson to their own lives
thereby making new
concepts or linguistic forms more
meaningful and relevant. It also provides
them with opportunities to use English in
unique ways – making statements that no
one has heard before and that can,
therefore, be highly memorable (and
sometimes amusing). Provided they show
that they value the unique statements
made by individual students (rather than
ignoring them or indicating disapproval),
teachers say that personalisation makes
their classes more alert and alive; it is as if if students are given opportunities
the students think: ‘The teacher values me
and what I can say in English, so I am
willing to contribute to this class!’
Many coursebooks provide students
with opportunities for personal expression
through post-reading activities. Questions
accompanying a reading text about
exploring cave systems might include Have
you ever been caving or done any other
sport which involves taking risks, like
parachuting or mountaineering? What do
you like about the sport? Would you like to
do one of these sports or a similar one?
Why? Why not? Questions such as these
typically elicit personal responses from
students that give them practice in
speaking spontaneously and focusing on
the content of what they are saying rather
than the form. However, teachers who are
intuitively class-centred go one step further
discuss their responses to the coursebook
questions in pairs or small groups, spend a
few minutes finding out what activities
individuals have done and what the general
class feeling is towards extreme sports. This
promotes the feeling: ‘This is our class, and
these are some of the feelings/interests of
our overall class group’. As a result, class
solidarity as well as fluency is enhanced.
It is easy for native English-speaking
teachers to provide their classes with
opportunities for free interaction
and provide additional words
linguistic errors on the spot,
and so on. However, teachers
who themselves learnt English by more
traditional methods and who may be less
confident in their own levels of fluency are
likely to want to teach in more structured,
‘safer’ ways. Other teachers who may be
reluctant to give their students the
opportunity to use English freely in class are
those who believe that grammar exercises
are the best way to consolidate
linguistic forms – and that Personalisation is a highly individual students’
valuable teaching time will be lost effective technique for statements on the
to personalise their learning. A encouraging students to grammatically correct
further reason why grammar speak from the heart
exercises are widely used is that
they are regarded by many teachers as a
means of keeping large classes of
potentially unruly teenagers under control.
Grammar exercises typically take the
form of a series of sentences that must be
manipulated in some way: completed by
having gaps filled with grammatically correct
forms of verbs or other linguistic items, or
restructured to say the same thing differently
(eg changing direct to reported speech).
Here are some examples: 1 The seminar will
finish (in/on/at/the) five o’clock. 2 She learnt
(ride/riding/to ride) a bicycle when she was
nine years old. 3 He said to her: ‘Do you like
chocolate?’  He asked her …) The problem
with such exercises is that the language
contained within them lacks genuine
nothing about the people or the situations
described: the statements are devoid of
context and are, therefore, ‘empty’.
Astute teachers make a point of
selecting linguistic structures from grammar
exercises and giving their students the
opportunity to personalise them. With
example 1, they might spring one or two
quick questions on their class, such as
When will this class finish today? or When
will you finish your homework tonight?,
inviting individual or choral responses
which, if students laugh or groan, indicate
that their responses are genuine. (The
teacher will, of course, insist that students
use the correct grammatical form in their
responses: at four o’clock, at midnight, and
so on). Students soon learn to respond to
teachers’ questions with personally
meaningful statements such as ‘I learnt to
ride a bicycle when I was six’ (following the
structure of example 2). Teachers can also
set up controlled pairwork. After example 3,
students could ask each other questions,
with individuals reporting back to the class:
Kim asked me whether I liked rap music,
and so on. By writing
board as models of
English, teachers not
only validate those
students’ contributions but also strengthen
the class’s awareness of common English
sentence patterns.
In sum, personalisation is a highly
effective technique for encouraging
students to speak from the heart and to
improve their overall levels of fluency. It is
also a valuable way of helping students to
consolidate linguistic structures in more
traditional language-focused lessons. ETp
Rose Senior is a language teacher educator
who runs workshops and presents at
conferences around the world.
rsenior@iinet.net.au

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 75 July 2011 • 59

 Prize crossword 48
ETp presents the forty-eighth in our series of prize
crosswords. Send your entry (completed crossword
grid and quotation), not forgetting to include your
full name, postal address and telephone number, to
Prize crossword 48, ENGLISH TEACHING professional, Pavilion Publishing
(Brighton) Ltd, PO Box 100, Chichester, West Sussex, PO18 8HD, UK.
Ten correct entries will be drawn from a hat on 10 September
2011 and the senders will each receive a copy of the second
edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced
Learners, applauded for its unique red star system showing the
frequency of the 7,500 most common words in English
(www.macmillandictionary.com).

12 3 22 26 13 6 26 19 18 23 16 13 3 VERY FREQUENT WORDS ** To move slowly and in a tired or

*** A reply to a question unhappy way, often behind other
13 18 22 3 22 19 1 19 19 *** A male child people
*** To receive money for work
22 15 13 3 20 13 19 3 21 22 7 3 FAIRLY FREQUENT WORDS
Y that you do
* Lack of clarity because there is
*** To fasten something so it
12 3 10 2 10 11 19 18 26 more than one possible meaning
cannot move
* A small insect that lives
24 22 15 10 18 17 24 7 17 18 13 *** To direct your eyes towards
underground
something so you can see it
13 10 14 3 5 8 10 6 9 19
* A tool used for making holes
*** A negative answer
* A type of music in which the
*** ___ Golden Pond (a film
8 12 4 19 25 25 10 24 1 players often improvise
starring Henry Fonda)
22 18 6 12 19 26 10 14 13 16 *** A lonely number LESS FREQUENT WORDS
*** A word used to connect – To fight with someone
24 19 12 19 18 23 7 3 26 22 possibilities/choices – This kind of tea has no caffeine
*** The plural of person – A document, sometimes with a
20 13 3 21 19 24 7 12 10 26 3 *** To keep something from photo, that gives personal details
harm – In a way that expresses affection
23 24 13 26 24 22 22 9
*** Able to move fast – To hear a conversation in which
L
8 23 20 13 3 7 13 19 3 24 7 *** To express in words you are not involved
*** ‘Life shrinks or expands in – A castrated bull often used to pull
proportion ___ one’s courage.’ a wagon or plough
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 (Anaïs Nin) – A small plant with large bright
Y *** ‘You never achieve real flowers
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
success ___ you like what you – A hole dug in the ground to put
L things in
are doing.’ (Dale Carnegie)
To solve the puzzle, find which letter each number represents. You *** ‘You have enemies? Good. – To travel with no particular
can keep a record in the boxes above. The definitions of the words That means you’ve stood ___ for purpose
in the puzzle are given, but not in the right order. When you have something, sometime in your – Informal British English for thank
finished, you will be able to read the quotation. life.’ (Winston Churchill) you
– Work done by a group of people
FREQUENT WORDS
6 22 1 12 8 26 13 3 23 19 3 13 8 – Full of strong emotions, especially
** The place where your foot
sexual ones
joins your leg
23 13 24 13 23 23 26 20 13 7 6 19 18 – To lead someone politely
** Thick, plastic-covered wire
somewhere
22 18 24 7 17 10 15 13 7 22 8 26 ** The daily rising and falling of
– A very important person
the level of the sea
20 13 19 18 23 16 13 3 23
– Done once every year
Pablo Picasso ** An object for a child to play
– Strange or unusual in a funny way
with

60 • Issue 75 July 2011 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •