Jeremy Harmer Lectures

I had quite a bit of spare time today (don't say, "Lucky you", because I've got 12 lessons tomorrow!) and I was watching some of Jeremy Harmer's conference speeches to try and pick up some tips from the "TEFL master".

Surely, you have all come across him before at some point, at least through the standard text 'The Practice of English Language Teaching', among others.

His speech on ideas for working with (and controlling) very large EFL classes were not new for me, but it was good to get a reminder of them, seeing as I haven't taught such big classes for a long time.

The lecture on motivating English students also contained lots of common sense stuff, that was put across in a very entertaining way. Again, good for just brushing up on methodological ideas.

If you've got an hour or two for some infotainment, then Jezza's your man!

Students! You are the teacher!

I have just listened to an interesting podcast (you don't have to download, sign up to anything etc, you can just listen without any commitment or passwords!) from Steve Kaufmann who is the king of LingQ.com (an excellent language learning site btw).

The subject is "What I would do if I were a teacher". He freely admits that he has never been a teacher and doesn't know how to teach, but he is giving his opinion merely as a language learner who has had lots of experience from the receiving end of L2 teaching.

It's interesting to get student feedback in this way, as perhaps teachers do not put themselves in the shoes of the learner often enough.

To paraphrase the podcast, he says that if he were a teacher he would outline to Ss in the first lesson that the onus of L2 learning responsibility lies completely on their shoulders. This is what he would say....

• My job is to make myself unnecessary.
• You (the Ss) must be independent of me.
• You should not expect ME to teach YOU the language.
• My job is to give you the habits and attitude for YOU to learn the language yourself.
• You cannot learn the L2 only in the classroom and I cannot teach it to you only in class

He also highlights the huge importance of reading when outside the classroom and dedicating the time needed.

I think that this is not only good advice, but would make all language teachers' jobs much more interesting (than they already are, of course). Imagine having a class of rabidly motivated students, that bring the lesson to you, in terms of new vocab, phrases, idioms etc etc.

My in-company business students could do with a little bit more of this student ideology!

Personalised vocabulary sentences

When we encounter new vocabulary in class, I get the students to make sentences about themselves that contain the new words.

However, Ss sometimes get stuck for inspiration when making a personalised sentence.

I had continued success with a TOEFL group by adopting a "Theme of the session for the personalised sentence". This did not have to be related to the lesson content.

For example, one day Ss had to write the sentence relating to 'summer holidays'. Another day it was 'winter'.

'Things I do at the office', 'Stuff I do at the weekend', 'Favourite films and actors' were other themes of the day.

This focus seemed to be a faster way of forcing a personalised sentence out of Ss.

...and they all got the TOEFL scores they needed in the end :-)

More free books!!!

Wow!!! More free downloadble TEFL books

Here's some from the OUP

And a whole raft from the British Council

Get reading fellow Dippers!

Free e-book: The Lexical Syllabus

Something free? Too good to be true?

Well, unbelievably the CELS at the University of Birmingham have The Lexical Syllabus: A new approach to language teaching by David Willis absolutely free to download on their website.

I've just scanned a couple of pages and it looks very useful if you are doing the TESOL Dip/DELTA or MA Applied Linguistics etc.

Download it while it's still up on the website. It says it's free for students (at Birmingham!).

Happy studying! :-)

Free language podcasts in 10 languages!!!

I came across a language site (sorry if it's old news for you!) that is superb!

Steve Kaufman's LingQ site is fantastic for teachers and awesome for L2 students. I am living in Berlin and probably about Intermemdiate German. There is a podcast of native people speaking the L2 naturally on a topic AND a transcription. This is the German podcast. Here is the Spanish one.
If you are an English teacher, then maybe your students would like to hear the English conversations.
There are 10 different language podcasts on Steve's site (they're on the right hand side, halfway down the page). Pretty incredible stuff! Thanks Steve!

Semantic clusters hinder adult beginners

Further to my post a couple of days ago re semantic clusters hindering learning, I found an interesting bit of research from the ELTJ March 2009.

The research concludes that....

adult beginners performed significantly better on the unrelated vocabulary test than on the related vocabulary test

children (intermediate level) showed no significant difference in test scores between related and unrelated vocabulary

This suggests tentatively that the presentation of unrelated vocabulary may assist learning of new L2 words more than related vocabulary only at beginners’ level (adults).

I am getting more and more interested in this subject, as it seems to buck the trend of vocab teaching and I have just started a new crop of courses of real / false starter adult beginners.
(Apology if this is old news to everyone and I've only just stumbled upon it!)

Has anyone out there (more knowledgeable and experienced than me) already changed the nature of their lessons in terms of giving vocab in non-related clusters?

If so, have you noticed any discernible improvement in Ss vocab recall after such a change??

I'd be very interested to get some feedback from anyone who has successfully taught vocab in this way and what the student reactions were?? Did the students think that there was no method and that they were suddenly presented with a load of random words???