Nothing to say (c) bommelmützenkind, via Flickr

It’s a tough time of the year for me at the moment.  It’s the start of the new academic year, so learning groups have to be formed and teachers need to be assigned..  For those who want to know more about the English system we use, here is the first and the second article which go some way to explaining it.  A big issue this year is oral testing – for me the most important aspect of an English course and the most revealing.  At the moment we test candidates individually which has the advantage that we can focus of language skills, but has the major disadvantage that the candidate is not really tested on discourse skills.  For that reason, I really want to test the candidates in pairs this year which will introduce a whole new set of challenges for both the learners and the teachers.

To get the bad news out of the way first…  Concentrating on a couple of hundred kids speaking somewhat sloppy to really bad English is hard on the nerves.  Some of the kids are trying their hardest without much success, and some simply don’t care.  The important thing to remember is that they are all entitled to a professional evaluation.  To that end, the kids are always tested by two teachers who are neither their current English teacher, nor their class teacher.  The pairings of the teachers are also rotated regularly to limit bad habits setting in.  This goes some way to making the evaluation as neutral as possible.

The challenge of marking oral tests is, as anyone who has done it regularly will know, to judge the balance between communication and accuracy – one candidate doesn’t say much, uses a limited range of vocabulary, but is quite accurate; whilst another talks a lot, but makes frequent minor mistakes and some serious errors.  I see it as entirely possible for both students to get the same mark (though for very different reasons).  If anyone thinks otherwise, please say so. In this respect I’m working from belief rather than from knowledge.

Now for the scary bit…  It’s obvious that different teachers mark differently and frankly I’m surprised how often we agree.  For example, one colleague consistently awards five to ten percent more than I do.  Another consistently gives around ten percent less.  When different testers work together we can create an adjustment scale which can even out such differences.  It would probably be better to sit down together and discuss the differences and agree on a common approach, but this would take quite a lot of time (to say the least) and time is something which certain colleagues values as a priceless commodity.  What really worries me is that some colleagues fluctuate wildly in their oral marking – something which isn’t apparent in their text evaluation.  I have one who routinely varies from plus twenty percent to minus forty percent.  Others are less extreme, but very inconsistent nonetheless.  I wondered if it was me, but other colleagues have privately confirmed my experience.  Added to this, some are very convinced that their appraisal is accurate and are not particularly open to negotiation.

I’ll be honest and say that I don’t know what the solution is here.  I’d be very interested in hearing from teachers who have agreed on oral benchmarks or standards and learning how they were implemented.  At the moment I’m stuck with the opinion that some teachers are good at this and others aren’t.  With that as a starting point. the idea of complicating the evaluation further is daunting to say the least.

The core of the problem is that the kids at my school are largely weaker learners and added to that they often lack the life skills experience to know what to talk about.  As an experiment, I conducted some English oral tests in German and the results were depressing.  The communication level scarcely improved at all.  As an example 90% of the kids answered the question, “What did you do last weekend?” with “Nothing.”  When pressed, “nothing” turned out to be going out with friends, playing computer games, buying clothes and going to the cinema – more than enough to to fill a basic oral test, but the candidates really do believe that all that is nothing.  A rather more shocking example was that 35% of the kids had no idea what their fathers did for a living – something which I had always thought was the result of a vocabulary deficiency.  I now know it’s result of a family communication deficiency.

Intercultural differences feature here.  I’m well aware from my adult teaching that Germans often find small talk extremely challenging, not because of language issues, but because they simply don’t know what they should talk about.  Even skilled learners often sound very stilted during this stage of a conversation – as if they are ticking off a checklist.

Now the State authorities have been making noises for a couple of years about introducing oral testing of pairs of candidates and although I really don’t expect this to become fact within the next two or three years, I would very much like our school to be ahead of the game.  To that end I am visiting schools in other countries this Autumn to see how they do it and begin to work out how we should implement such testing in our school.

The big issues are the differences in the evaluations by teachers and the kids who have nothing to say.  Both of these issues will be exacerbated by a more complicated system and that is before the kids, who have almost no culture of teamwork, start to complain that their testing partner is responsible for a bad performance.

I have the feeling…  No.  I know that doing the right thing is going to create a lot more work this year. Ideas are very welcome.

I’m going to start with perhaps the most fascinating question, which was put by Pandoora who asked:

does this mean my 13-year-old daughter and I shouldn’t be bothered by her having to sit next to that 16-year-old gang banger boy who keeps getting retained and can’t seem to get out of middle school?

This was an issue which I spent a lot of time considering when developing the system and frankly I wasn’t sure what to think.  The advantage for Pandoora’s daughter was clear in one aspect – the 13-year-old troublemaker in her class would soon be left behind and would not have the chance to disrupt her English lessons for more than half a year, but the older troublemakers could also be in the class and although I didn’t think it was grounds for rethinking the system, it needed to be discussed.  The headmaster blew the discussion out of the water with a couple of sentences which I somewhat doubted, and it was nearly a year after the system started before I experienced his prophesy first-hand.  It went something like this:

A “difficult” kid in Year 7 was in Level 1 and was showing admirable dedication to remaining there for ever.  He was a permanent problem in the class and despite countless sanctions, he showed absolutely no signs of improvement.  One day, after yet another series of wisecracks and disruptive tactics a girl from Year 5 turned round and said,

“You’re still too dumb to get it in Year 7, but this is easy and we want to pass the level.”

As you can imagine, I’ve sanitised the comment.  It was considerably more bluntly put.  But the effect was immediate – the troublemaker was no longer “cool”, he was simply dumb, and most important of all the control came from the class, not the teacher.  The exchange went round the school like wildfire and was used by many younger kids from then on.

Another approach that we have used from time to time is to put all the troublemakers in one group as they often remained in Level 1.  It would be unprofessional to state this publicly, but unofficially the group was called the “DM Group”.  Fans of Michelle Pfeiffer will get the allusion.  The rest can click here for a hint.  Interestingly, several teachers have, since then, volunteered to take the difficult group and have had such success that the difficult group is now in Level 2.

Matthias asked two very important questions which I should have clarified in the first article.  The problem of comparing children with different levels of achievement was solved with a certificate.  It lists the different levels together with a brief overview of the content and an indication of the difficulty according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, of which you can find a detailed introduction from the here.  Each level  is signed off by the current teacher as and when the child passes.  A remark is added to the school report stating in which level the pupil achieved the grade, and it is further stated on the report that the mark for English should only be read in conjunction with the certificate.  In visits to local companies we have presented this concept and have struck on universal acceptance.  Employers love it because it is an objective assessment which is backed by a clearly-understood European standard.  The mark on the report can be seen as a measure of current achievement – the certificate shows the big picture.  In eight years only two parents from over a thousand have asked for clarification.  One was cleared up in less than five minutes, but with the other we had to agree to differ.

An important aspect in dealing with parents is transparency, so I regularly attend parents’ evenings to explain the system and answer questions.  The parents can see two to three years in advance if their child is on target to reach the required standards and the children know that getting a higher graduation (Realschulabschluss) can’t be achieved just with a few months’ effort – it takes consistency and long term commitment to succeed at higher levels.  Having said that, it is possible for a child to repeat every level once and still achieve the higher graduation.

The system was already running when we had our last school inspection. We received the highest mark possible for the innovation and have subsequently been visited by a team from the local education authorities to examine the system in detail.  Although we received fulsome praise, changes at this level don’t happen fast!

I’ll finish with a quick overview of the balance of power in the system.  Those parents who take an interest like the system.  Employers really like the system because they get a document they understand.  Some teachers don’t like the system at all, though they are not brave enough to say it openly.  They pay lip service and get involved in passive resistance. One who did complain to the headmaster was offered the option of applying for a transfer.  One thing that all the teachers agree on though, is that they don’t want to return to the old system.

Identifying the opinions of the children is hard, as they are quite skilled at telling teachers what they want to hear, but I believe strongly that an aspirational culture exists among the children at this school, so I will try to illustrate my impressions with three short stories.

A girl in Yr. 8 came to me once and asked me if it was true that a boy in her class was really in Level 7.  I told her that was true.  ”Wow,” she said.  ”That’s amazing, because he’s really dumb at everything else!”  Shortly after, we identified the fact that he wasn’t dumb in the other subjects – he was bored.

A girl did Level 2 five times before finally passing. Subsequently, she passed every level at the first attempt and went on to become one of the best students I’ve had.  She left school and immediately got a job in an English-speaking organisation. In a normal system she would never have had the chance to get things sorted out at her own pace.

My final story is not yet over and it concerns a pupil with an extraordinary talent in English. There is no obvious reason for this talent and the pupil is “difficult”.  I have no interest whatsoever in what takes place in other lessons, and slowly I’m starting to see a change in behaviour in mine.  This is not down good marks or special treatment.  I believe it’s down to the culture of the system which puts no limits on achievement and supports the weak. Both the weaker and the stronger recognise this in the course of time and both get the benefit from it.

I will happily answer any further questions about this in the comments section.

(c) Sunshine on the Road, via Flickr

When I was younger, it wasn’t all that unusual to see a small kids struggling to get around on his or her big brother’s bike.  It always looked a bit strange.  It was undoubtedly both somewhat dangerous and tiring, and the kid would have always been better served by having a bike of the right size.  Obviously, not every family could afford it.  And if you travel a lot in developing countries, you will still regularly be confronted with such a sight.

Now ask yourself this…  If you decided to learn a new language and went to evening school to enrol in a course would you find the following conversation between yourself and the enrolment clerk odd?

“Hello, I’ve decided I’d like to learn Chinese.”
” That’s great!  How old are you?”
“Er… Forty-two.  Why?”
“Excellent.  We’ll put you in a Level 6 Course”
“But I’m a beginner!”
“At 42 you should be in Level 6.”
“Er…”

If you don’t find the above odd, then stop reading now – this article is not for you.  For the rest of you, ask yourself the following:  Why do we do that with foreign languages in schools?

From the Guinness TV ad.

When I first came to Germany I was confronted with this issue.  Children who were for whatever reason having problems in English were still passing the year and having to deal with material that was far too difficult for them in the next year.  A sport teacher wouldn’t demand that a kid who’d failed to jump 1.20m should next attempt 1.50m, but that happens in almost every English class.  I observed lessons where children with six years of English tuition were not able to answer basic questions or convey simple information, but according to the curriculum were being taught mixed conditionals and passive forms.  The small child on a big bike is nowhere near the right image here, more the image of a fish on a bike from the Guinness commercials.

I was lucky insofar that I was given the power to make changes by the then headmaster and so I introduced a system whereby the kids in the school were divided up into two bands – from Year 5 to Year 7, and from Year 8 to Year 10.  Within those bands the children were to be sorted according to ability.  Because I didn’t come from a teaching background, I took my model from language schools with rolling programs, and the way I had been taught French at my school in England.  I spent a considerable amount of time ignoring the claims, “It doesn’t work like that here.”

The materials available for the  school may well have been produced by experts and authorised from a whole panel of “Professor Dr” titled academics, but they were wholly unsuitable for weak learners (and the children in a German Hauptschule are, by definition, academically weak).  Writing new materials would have been a massive task in conjunction with the introduction of a new system, so a book was chosen that is often used in language schools and is focused at young adults.  The book chosen was, Language in Use by Adrian Doff and Christopher Jones, and although it was viewed by some even then as being rather old-fashioned, it had two huge advantages over just about every school book on the market.  It has very short and clearly focused units, and it offers a well-controlled introduction of grammar issues.  Another point that shouldn’t be underestimated is that it has an exceptional teacher’s book.

It was decided, rather arbitrarily, to have nine levels.  Level 1 is somewhere between beginner and false beginner, and Level 9 is around  Cambridge FCE. Most years we don’t have a Level 9 course.  After the first placement test we had no-one above Level 5 and only ten pupils from nearly three hundred above Level 3.  A Level 4 pupil should have no problem with the KET and at level 6 or 7 the pupil should do well at the PET.

Each course lasts for half a year, at which point a mixture of coursework together with a final exam and an oral exam decides whether the child should progress to the next level.  There are regular stage tests throughout the course which are taken by all pupils at the same time.  The course teachers do not see the tests in advance.  Each level test is marked by one teacher chosen by rota.  The oral test at the end of the course is always done by two teachers who are not the course teachers of the pupil being tested.  Where possible, the children in the higher levels are tested by teachers from other schools.

Because there are always more children in certain levels than would fit into one course, we always have parallel courses.  This lead to one of the first big problems I experienced.  School teachers find it quite hard, compared to language school teachers, to keep to a given tempo.  In the first few years of the system teachers would frequently come to me and say that they had not covered the material for that cycle.  Another issue which became, and has remained, very serious is the transparency within the system.  Not all teachers like the idea that their marks can be directly compared with those of a parallel course.  For Germany this was particularly unusual.  Some also make the mistake of believing that bad marks are a sign of bad teaching despite being told that bad marks can very easily be the sign of a bad group.  If a child fails to reach the standard to pass into the next level, then they repeat the course.  This is not a sign of failure – it is a sign that this learner needs more time.  That’s OK.

The system has been running now for nearly eight years, and due to regular benchmark tests, I can safely say that the performance of the school has increased in that time by over 70%.  What is most pleasing is that the confidence of the children in English has grown and some of them have even landed jobs where English is a major aspect of their career.  The best in the school at the moment is a boy in Year 8, closely followed by a girl in Year 7.  They are not being held back by the rest of their class, they are being challenged by the older kids who are snapping at their heels.

That in itself is pleasing, but the real benefit is for the low achievers.  We still have lots of kids in Year 10 in Levels 2 and 3 (though the proportion is reducing every year), and these kids are not very good at English, but the fact is that they can master basic sentences, and hold a five minute conversation about themselves with a stranger and still communicate effectively.  This is worth far more to the children than being forced to deal with material that they can’t even master in their own language.

And now for the killer advantage – the cost.  It hasn’t cost a penny over the normal budget allowance.  It just required people to be prepared to think, and change the way they worked.

Your comments, questions and ideas are particularly welcome here!

It wasn’t my intention to write a Part 2 to my conference review, but I’ve just finished reading through a twenty thousand word document which I felt needed a comment.  When you think about it, that’s the length of a reasonable degree thesis, so you’ll forgive me (or possibly inform me) if I missed a couple of the finer points.  The document consists of an article about an unnamed conference (ISTEK ELT 2010, in Istanbul) and the discussion that followed it.  Although the original poster claimed that the name of the conference was not important, I feel it is important to name it.  The comments in the article, and indeed in this article pertain directly to this conference, and no amount of playing with words should allow the impression that any other conference is being discussed here.

You can read the article, if you haven’t already, here.  There are a lot of claims made, but for those who aren’t inclined to read the article and comments, I will list the points with which I take issue. (Unfortunately, the author completely deleted the article and comments after receiving more criticism regarding an initial attempt to edit them.  I’m sure that copies of the original post and comments, and the edited version are available somewhere though.)

• The author’s faith in PLNs has been shaken
• There was “appalling elitism and favoritism” at the ISTEK ELT Conference
• Foreign presenters were treated differently to local presenters
• Staff from the schools organising the conference were forced to work there
• People are scared to speak out
• Turkish teachers get paid less than native speakers
• Because of Twitter, friends at conferences “are being separated  from each other.”
• The author’s PLN often didn’t offer support

This is quite a hefty list, and the article elicited some considerable response, and inevitably, some criticism.  I didn’t see the article when it was posted, and by the time I read it the author had chosen to close the comments “in the interests of promoting harmony.”  There is also a remark, that the content will be edited to remove all references “to specific events or people.”

The problem is that this article was not general in nature and the convoluted attempt not to name ISTEK was reminiscent of a ham-fisted attempt at satire.  I attended this conference, as a foreign delegate.  I was neither invited, nor paid, nor sponsored.  I paid my own way, and wrote about the experience in a previous post.

Now, the author’s faith…  (OK, are you getting bored with me avoiding the authors name and gender?  Silly, isn’t it?  Anyone who is aware of this issue knows full well who I mean.)

Now, Nick’s faith in his PLN is shaken.  Some of them didn’t back him up when he asked them to, and some were hostile to his suggestions.  This sounds entirely plausible, since a personal learning network is not a marketing team.  It’s not a team in any sense of the word, although it may on occasions act like one.  It is a network that someone chooses because they feel that the individual members have something to offer when it comes to their professional development.  A PLN is not a club or team with a common goal.  That is the strength of the PLN.  A bunch of people who just agree with me are only useful for an ego-trip.

Frankly the claims of “appalling elitism and favoritism” are bunkum. I have rarely been to a conference where the key speakers were more accessible than at ISTEK.  As a normal delegate, I spoke to all of the plenary speakers and a number of the workshop leaders. To suggest they were hidden away in a separate room is a lie.  I’m not sure how Nick chooses to interpret elitism, but it’s a country mile away from what I experienced in Istanbul.  The local delegates I spoke to gave a completely different picture to the one Nick paints.  Maybe he was just unlucky and got a bad sample – it happens in statistics every now and again.  I can’t put a number on the amount of local delegates I spoke to  but it was enough for me to trust the impression I got, and that was overwhelmingly positive and proud that they had the chance to experience such a high calibre group of presenters.  I’ll state this categorically: I did not hear one word of criticism of the treatment of the foreign presenters.  And just to be equally clear, I have spent long enough in my life in environments of fear and repression (and here, for once, I choose not to elaborate) to recognise fear when it is present.  No-one gave the slightest indication of being afraid to speak.

The basis for the criticism that foreign visitors were treated differently to local ones seems to rest solely on one party after the Pecha Kucha.  If that’s a hanging offence in Nick’s eyes, then I don’t ever want him as a boss.  It’s a simple fact that the big names on the presenters roll was a prime reason for the success of the conference.  For a new conference to get such selection was the thing that first caught my eye.  However talented and qualified the local experts are, I would not have travelled to Turkey to see them because I have not heard enough about them, and Nick should really ask himself if he really believes that we would have experienced a full auditorium of predominantly Turkish participants if the line up had been purely national?

As for staff being forced to work on the conference, this happens in every industry.  Staff in all professions are occasionally required to help out over and above their normal duties.  I’m really not sure what point is being made here.

Discrepancy in pay scales is also nothing new and nothing that is confined to Turkey.  It is also a problem in for Latin American immigrants in the US, women in Germany, and foreigners in many African countries.  It’s not fair, but then the world isn’t a fair place, and to single out the ELT industry in Turkey ignores many far more serious examples.  Campaign, by all means, but don’t be surprised if many people don’t put it at the top of their list of priorities.

I’ve never experienced a more useful tool than Twitter for brining people together at conferences.  The idea that it separates friends defies all logic.  I would be really interested to know if Burcu Akyol took the time to compare Jeremy Harmer’s Twitter followers with those of Lindsay Clandfield and Gavin Dudeney to decide where they should sit at the restaurant table.  Neither did I notice Ken Wilson and Shelley Terrell being kept apart by the organisers because of their Twitter exchanges.  I certainly wasn’t separated from any of my Turkish Twitter friends.

Having read through all the comments after the post I can only come to the conclusion that Nick has an agenda that is not yet public.  Of course, it’s extremely difficult to be open about an agenda when you refuse to name the event (even though everyone knows what you are talking about).

Given that all ELT professionals are in the business of promoting communication, I think it’s important for us to communicate clearly.  Innuendo, straw men, and political ranting have no place in an intelligent debate.  Comments are welcome.  It is not for me to decide when the debate is over. I will leave that to the people who wish to add their views.

Finally, if the views of my PLN differ from mine, then I will ask myself why.  I most certainly will not ignore them.  I chose them because I feel their opinions are valuable for me, not because they agree with me.  If my views change as the result of any exchange here I will post that accordingly.  I will never alter the original text.  Doing so didn’t help Winston Smith and it doesn’t alter what was originally said.

It will be up and runnig properly in the next day or so, and then I’ll be able to write about it here.

Until then, keep checking back, and I promise I’ll be back in the swing by the end of the week.

The standard was not high, it was stratospheric. At the opening, we were asked to think during the weekend about the one thing we would take away from the event, but as time went on it became increasingly clear that one thing would not be enough. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

I arrived early the day before the conference, having taken an overnight flight (I hearby swear that I will spend the extra money and book a flight at a sensible time in future!) The cheapskate in me also said that I would get from the airport to the venue by bus – cheaper than a taxi and more opportunity to see some of the real Istanbul. Now I pride myself in being able to get by in a handful of languages including one or two exotic ones, but in trying to get on the bus I realised that I have no knowledge whatsoever of Turkish, not a single word. OK, so adopting the Churchill principle (which co-incidentally, Andrew Wright referred to in his opening address) I spoke loud slow English and was promptly directed to another bus. From that bus, I was sent back to the original bus which had by then departed. With the next one I sent off into Istanbul. Given my sleep-deprived state, I was very pleased that the organisers at Yeditepe University had a room immediately available. A couple of hours’ sleep did the trick.

(c) ISTEK, via Flickr

Registration was painless and the tickets for the concurrent sessions were available in sufficient quantities. I would have liked to see a list of the workshops on the website before I travelled, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe the organisers could publish them sooner next time, but that’s a small point. The choice was good and the each one was available twice so you had some flexibility in planning your time. For the opening session, which like all the plenaries was streamed live over the Internet, two hosts appeared. I was immediately reminded of the painful experience of the Eurovision Song Contest which uses a similar format to devastating embarrassment of most viewers, but those worries vanished the moment they spoke. They were great and they deserve a public thank you for making the event move along smoothly. Vanessa Hatoum and John Barth, you both did a terrific job!

I hope Andrew Wright would forgive me for saying he looks like everyone’s favourite uncle, but he not only looks like him, he tells stories like him too. He clarified the importance of stories in teaching and showed us all how the richness of the language plays a part in the learning experience. A great opening to a conference, which immediately shifted any thoughts from grammar and vocabulary to the power of communication.

Nicky Hockly (@TheConsultantsE) brought home the value and challenges of the Web 2.0 world.  This is a vital development area in ELT and, as a theme it causes much confusion as to what is just new or what is new and actually useful.  The clarity of voices likes Nicky’s are important for anyone searching for information and inspiration in this direction.  The Personal Development work that she is offering in Turkey sounds really useful, and hopefully we will get some feedback from her on this in due course.

Lindsay Clandfield (@lclandfield) gave an upbeat, Twitter-friendly, plenary on the role of culture in ELT complete with key points in Twitter format to enable easy updates by the Twitterazzi in the audience.  It was nice to see that as an aspect of his presentation and is something that will hopefully be copied by others.

Jeremy Harmer (@harmerj)gave a top talk on what is English – in some ways this is a standard, predictable topic, but he took the subject to a new level. The issue of what flavour of English you should teach if hotly debated and I am completely opposed to the system in Germany which insists on a year of learning American English. This simply creates mistakes in the future and disrupts the acquisition of syntax and orthography just at the time when learners are acquiring self-confidence.  Jeremy came down strongly on the side of being consistent and making the learner aware of diversity. For me, this promotes learner autonomy and still allows the teachers to keep a unity in their teaching approach. He also stated, using a number of examples, that Shakespeare may be great fun, but it doesn’t develop communication skills in English. (Which makes you wonder why it’s in so many school coursebooks!). I also learned that “slap” is London teenage slang for make-up – quite an interesting word, and amusing to think of how it came about, but about as useful as Shakespeare when it comes to relevance to English teaching.

(c) ISTEK, via Flickr

Herbert Puchta, the doyen of English book writers in primary schools in the German-speaking world, talked about making the difference to learners.  Just how can you help students relate to the classroom culture?  Using examples from The Freedom Writers Club, he brought home to the delegates the full force of making the difference.

Luke Prodomo wound up the plenaries with an inspiring address on good practice.  Often the last session is a tough one for the presenter, but Luke captivated everyone with tales of inspirational teachers.

The choice of workshops was such, that you simply couldn’t attend everything that appealed (I wish every conference was the same!) so I can only comment on the ones I attended and add a bit of hearsay on a couple of others.

Lindsay Clanfield presented a new product from Macmillan called the eWorkbook which belong to their Global range. Very clever. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into ease of use and range of content. Interestingly, this is also available in SCORM-compliant format which will allow schools and providers to import it into their own moodles. This is the future of English training and it will be interesting to see how the other publishers react, because this product is the first which actually adds value to a standard coursebook.

Shelley Terell (@ShellTerrell)gave us a fascinating crash tour of the world of social networking and value of PLNs to teachers. Even as one of the converted and having a basic background in this, it was great to get the big picture. Getting this message out to teachers is vital because the PLN is still a long way from being standard in the teaching world, and I sincerely hope that the teachers present at her workshops not only develop their own PLNs, but bring Shelley’s message to their colleagues.

Anita Kwiatkowska (@l_missbossy) opened up the fascinating area of using documentaries in teaching English. She proposed the use of controversial subjects as a springboard to for discussion, and provided a great list of free resources where in-depth documentaries can be found.

Nicky Hockly offered great inspiration to those of us who use or want to use more video in our classrooms – from getting the best out of online material, to creating your own and editing it, this workshop clearly left the people keen to try out the ideas they’d been shown.

The feedback in the corridors was universally good. I heard Sean Banville‘s and Ken Wilson‘s names mentioned several times, and it seemed as if everyone was talking about the practical tips they got in Marisa Constantinides‘ workshop.

I can’t finish the review without mentioning two things. The Pecha Kucha evening was simply fantastic. The art of presenting under the strict rule of having precisely twenty slides which are shown for precisely twenty seconds each demands real mastery to hold an audience in awe, and we were treated to world class entertainment. Lindsay Clandfield hosted the show and introduced the event and described Pecha Kucha using the Pecha Kucha format – content stemming from function at its finest and a live demonstration of good teaching practice. Jeremy Harmer was again in fine form again warning people to be aware that things can go wrong in presentations and the classroom and you have to be able to cope. The trick he pulled to demonstrate this was brilliant and I’m not going to post it here because I’m most certainly going to use it in my workshops and I just may be dishonest enough to claim the idea as my own!

John Moorcroft stole the show with his musings on the world of football jargon and utterances in a hilarious tour of the topic which will dominate the summer pub gossip. Suffice to say, I never thought I would hear the quotation from the kung-fu kicking, footballing philosopher Eric Cantona mentioned in the realms of an ELT conference – “when the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea” – but somehow it now makes sense!

The closing ceremony concluded with a truly amazing performance by a dance group. Now Riverdance is not my thing, and folk dancing is definitely not my thing, but oh my God, this was stunning – power, style, stamina, beauty and elegance, this was a performance with everything. I was just blown away.

So, all in all a great weekend where learning, personal development and networking blended perfectly into one. What did I take away from it all? A lot. I can’t say more now it will take a while for everything to sink in. I’m sure that in the course of time things will come back to me and provide me with ongoing inspiration to adapt what I do and develop my own skills further.

A final thanks must go to Burcu Akyol who headed up the organisation with charm and elan and to ISTEK and Yeditepe University for hosting an event that gets my vote for a permanent fixture on the ELT calendar.

(c) Wesley Fryer, via Flickr

So, I’m sitting in a train on my way to the airport to catch a flight to Istanbul. The ISTEK ELT Conference is taking place there this weekend. I’ve been looking forward to going for several weeks, but now I’m angry. The train’s on time, and I haven’t forgotten my passport, but travelling by train gives me time to make plans or brood (depending on whether the planning is finished or not). No, the reason I’m fuming mad is because of my colleagues.

Let’s go back a few days… On the last day of term the conversation in the staff room turned quite naturally to the holidays. The activities varied from doing nothing to moving house to going away somewhere – all quite normal, until I said I was going on a training course and then attending a conference in Istanbul. Actually, the reaction didn’t surprise me too much. Some people were surprised that I was going given that I was not being sponsored, others couldn’t see the point (without even asking what the conference was focused on), and a sizeable group stated flatly that they would never do such a thing in the holidays. Even the professional conference attender on the staff wasn’t prepared to give up time during his holidays for such an event. No-one expressed any interest in getting feedback after I returned, though many wanted a report from a colleague who was going to Mallorca. As I said, I wasn’t particularly surprised by this, and I got on with more important things in my life. Until this train journey. No planning to do. Time to brood…

I began to think back over some of the discussions I’ve been involved in on Twitter over the past few days. One of the opinions you see a lot in #edchat is that schools should not be like factories. Now I intend to talk about this theme in another post, so I won’t go into too much detail here, but this comment shows a lack of understanding of modern factories. What the teachers saying this mean is that schools shouldn’t be like the old-style mass production factories. I agree completely. But Formula 1 racing cars are built in a factory, Morgans are built in a factory, and Meissen porcelain is made in a factory. These have a completely different mindset to that required by the Ford Model-T factories which people have in mind when they criticise factories as a model for schools.

But what really angers me is that my colleagues, who are by no means unique, adopt precisely the attitude that they don’t want to produce in their children. They have the old-style mass production mentality – turn up, do the job, go home, live for the holidays. Of course, they’re not quite so good at time-keeping as the old shift workers, but the thinking is the same.

I know to a certain extent I’m preaching to the converted here, so ask yourself this – how many of your colleagues spend twenty to thirty minutes a day on personal development? This applies to general education as well as language schools. Let’s call it an hour and a half a week. Maybe the word “marking” is drifting through some peoples minds as a stumbling block? Yes, marking is an activity that takes time, but a teacher complaining about the time needed to mark assignments is like the person who buys a house dirt cheap at the end of an airport runway and then complains about the noise. The same applies to lesson preparation. That the job is stressful can’t come as a surprise either – it’s been reported regularly in the news for at least the last thirty years. That the education system is never top of the list when it comes to handing out money and resources is also nothing new, despite what politicians say before every election. Anyone who thought it was, or would be, different is in desperate need of a reality check.

The Teacher's Perspective (c)DeathByBokeh, via Flickr

Teachers rightly emphasise their role as leaders, and they have the chance to be a major influence on their learners’ attitudes. But leaders who are out of touch with their workforce and are using tired old arguments and tools are not going to inspire anyone. To garner the respect that the job deserves (and yes, the job really does deserve respect!), teachers need to be star performers. And one of the key aspects of stars is their ability to reinvent themselves. They develop. They live their role.

So, how many of your colleagues have got a PLN? Do they even know what a PLN is? In teacher training sessions, I always begin with a short introduction on the value of a PLN (particularly Twitter which I blogged about here.) I am invariably met by a sea of blank faces and I ask myself how can you be interested in teaching and not have heard of PLNs? If teachers can’t demonstrate the value of learning in their own behaviour, how can they expect their learners to adopt the same values?

My question was, are teachers like factory workers? The answer is quite simply, no. The problem is that a large section of the teaching community acts like factory workers of a bygone age, and until that changes it is going to be very difficult to reform the education system. Changing the conditions in schools is one thing, but real change will only come when the mindset changes.

A final thought… Many reform-minded teachers say that reform starts in their classroom. This is true and admirable, and is a stance that every reformer should adopt. But this is an isolated solution. For me effective reform starts in the staff room – that’s where leading by example can have an exponential effect. To that end my colleagues are damn well gong to hear about my experiences in Istanbul, together with my take on what we can draw from it. I can’t make them listen, but I can ensure they hear me. It’s a start.

There’s no mistaking however, that Didacta is a very important show, at least in the German-speaking area of Europe.  It rotates round three venues – Hanover, Cologne and Stuttgart – and if you are involved in teaching, then you really should plan at least a day there to catch up on what’s new as a lot of publishers and manufacturers time the releases of new products to coincide with Didacta.

One thing you notice immediately about Didacta is that this is clearly the only trade fair that many teachers ever attend.  Stopping in the middle of gangways to chat with friends is not particularly nice to the 500 people that get held up by this action.  Dragging suitcases large enough for a round the world trip is also not particularly practical when 10,000 people are trying to get from stand to stand, and don’t get me started on the teachers who bring children in pushchairs!  Please, I can promise you, those kids get nothing from the experience, and I’m sure a teacher must be capable of organising child-care for 1 day a year (Especially a day when the teacher should be in school anyway – or do they take their kids to school too?)

(c) mac steve, via Flickr

Didacta has set itself up as the magic bullet.  It tries to cover everything from kindergarten through to adult education and staff training.  For the most part it does the school aspect pretty well, but the rest is starting to look like padding.  School books are still  a major part of the show with the big three in Germany, Klett, Cornelsen, and Westermann all having a significant presence.  When it comes to classroom technology the coverage is more patchy – in this respect, Didacta can’t compete in any way, shape or form with BETT (see also my article on BETT2010).

It comes down to this: Is it worth a couple of days of my time plus travel and overnight costs to go to a trade show like Didacta?  The short answer is “yes” (only just) and the long answer includes the “but”.

I’m going to start with books because that’s possibly the prime focus of the show and it certainly draws the most visitors.  From the ELT standpoint, it’s good to be able to make a quick comparison between what’s on offer from the different publishers, but the publishers themselves don’t help the visitors here at all.  You’ll find their main coursebooks plastered all over the stands, but frankly they’re not really interesting for the vast majority of the teachers – after all, it’s very rare that a school changes coursebook.  It requires a lot of money, plus time and effort from the teachers.  Equally, all the major publishers send plenty of free samples directly to the schools where it’s much easier to compare them in peace and quiet.  The really useful things here are the supplementary materials, but you have to look a lot harder to find these.  Good supplementary materials make teaching a lot easier and can really improve the learning experience for the students.

When it comes to classroom equipment one thing quickly becomes clear: if it’s suitable for schools there is a significant (or even massive) price premium to pay.  Some of the items are so expensive it makes you wonder if it wouldn’t be cheaper to buy it at Ikea and keep replacing it when necessary.  Also, some of the providers of technical equipment must live from orders from gullible commercial buyers because no school I’ve ever seen could afford automatically retracting electrical sockets that come down from the ceiling when needed.

Another rather sad point was that the service providers in the elearning section showed that whatever their online skills are, they have little idea how to present to real people – half the booths were unidentifiable  when it came to what service was being provided and the rest were more interested in their laptops than potential customers trying to work out what the posters were trying to communicate.  In general, I found the standard of the stage presentations to be somewhere between low and abysmal.  The presenters seem to think that listing features in a monotone speech will impress the viewers.  It doesn’t.  None of them told me how they were going to make my life easier or improve the quality of my work – I was apparently supposed to work that bit out for myself.  Marketing was different when I studied it…

It wasn’t all bad news though.  Despite the distinctly average standard of presentation and content at a lot of the stands, there were more than enough experts there who were more than willing to talk about their products and the industry.  Networking is great at Didacta because the vast mass of visitors are only on the hunt for cheap offers.  If you are looking to build good relationships and develop long-term strategies, the reps on the stands are more than willing to talk to you.

I came away after two days with three or four good ideas, a couple of books and the business cards of some useful contacts.  I also made decisions to order two products.  All in all that wasn’t a bad result, but it could be so much easier.  Too many of the people there are deeply entrenched in the comfort zone and they don’t need to work hard on the service aspects.  That’s sad.  Didacta is an essential resource for teachers.  It’s not a shopping trip and both providers and visitors should adopt the standards they would want their kids to experience in the classroom.

For me, the best thing that exhibitors and visitors could do to improve Didacta would be to visit BETT and learn from the experience.  The focus there is clearly on improving the quality of life for teachers and the visitors are there to learn, not to pick up cheap marker pens.

I know this isn't the current logo, but it's my favourite!

There are times when I consider myself very lucky to do the job I’m in.  I love technology and have the chance to teach it, but my main role is that of English coach and every now and again I get the chance to combine the two.  This week is Cebit in Hanover which, according to the organisers, is the largest IT trade fair in the world.  Of course, the linguist in me wants to know if largest refers to area, exhibitors, or visitors, but hey, who cares?  It’s a big show and there is more than enough to keep you occupied for a day.

Now some of my colleagues are a bit suspicious of my motives for taking my English class to the show.  In the eyes of many of them I’m a geek, so it smacks of self-interest.  (OK, I know half a dozen command line orders in Linux, and I’ve got a fluffy Tux on my desk. If that makes me a geek… )

The real reason I take the English class to Cebit is that it gives them the chance to practice their English skills in a real-world environment – something which isn’t all that easy to simulate in the middle of Germany!  The more you can get the subject out of the classroom and into the real world, the more chance you have of getting the kids to connect with it.  Course books are full of trips to adventure parks and stories of crimes solved by kids which is all well and good, but doesn’t necessarily present the learners with the lexis they will need after they leave school.  In a world where cleaning ladies learn English because the handbooks for their machines are only issued in that language, we have to look more at the subject material of what we teach and ask ourselves if it is really relevant.

The great thing about Cebit, from the English point-of-view, is that there are a huge number of exhibitors (often from the Far East) who don’t speak German.  If you can talk to them in English you have a distinct advantage when it comes to getting information.  In addition, all the companies have English advertising materials which alone provides enough content for months of teaching.  The kids are confronted with different accents and sometimes the exhibitors are not very good at English.  This gives them a real communication challenge.  They see at first hand, classic intercultural competence situations, from handshaking to personal space issues, to eye-contact, to small talk.  They experience that English isn’t a neatly packaged subject which comes in 45 minute blocks, but rather a dynamic issue where knowledge acquired two years ago is suddenly needed now.

The kids have to do presentations on what they found that was interesting or just plain incredible.  Given my reputation for being “technology-aware” they know they will have to search well to find a good subject.  In the past, some groups have even videoed conversations with exhibitors – proof, if I needed it, that they really were using their language skills.  Of course, I don’t expect the kids to go around all day talking English – that’s not the point of the exercise, but they come away seeing that English skills are relevant today and that the requirements go a lot further than ordering a beer and a hamburger on holiday.

What tactics do you have for getting English out into the real world?

(c) Michael Sarver, via Flickr

I listened to a disturbing conversation last week.  I was standing at a buffet table with two experienced teachers who I’ve known for some time were discussing the relative merits of the English curriculum in their respective states in Germany.  Quickly it broadened out into a debate as to which of the major publishers produced the most curriculum-oriented course book.  One major publisher apparently only focuses on competences, another is slavish in following the prescribed pedagogy.  Part of my job is to know what’s on the market, so the opinions on the books were interesting.  However, as the conversation went on my irritation grew and eventually I felt forced to add an opinion.  The two teachers stared at me as if I had suddenly grown another nose on my face and ignored my question completely and continued discussing which publisher taught Shakespeare better.  What had I said, that was so totally unimportant?

“Don’t you think it would be better to focus on the kids being able to communicate in good English?  If they can do that then they’ll fulfil the requirements of any school curriculum.”

In some subjects a curriculum is a relatively straightforward list of topics and standards that should be met by certain stages and will be tested at some point in the school program.   In language it is, I feel, a lot more complicated.

Take the example of a learner with relatively little experience or knowledge.  However, this learner can really use the limited grammar and lexis well.  She doesn’t need passive forms or mixed conditionals, because she can apply what she knows and can explain what she wants to explain.  The second learner has far more experience and knowledge, but hasn’t really internalised it.  The result is that the less-experienced learner gives the impression of being better in English than the higher level learner.  I’ll go further – the less experienced learner is better in English.  I see this on a daily basis and it has very little to do with talent in the subject.  In the majority of cases, I can trace the lack of communicative skills back to the teaching style that the learner has been subjected to.

Now this isn’t a communication v. grammar rant – both are needed and a balance has to be struck between them, depending on the circumstances.  This is far more important.

Publishers are obsessed with curriculum and many teachers are obsessed with the course book.  The problem is that curriculum writers are often more concerned with filling up the timetable than producing a modern, progressive course.  Milestones are arbitrary, and stage tests need to prove that the curriculum is a success.  Just about all the stage tests I’ve seen are pitched well below the level of the learned content.  The only reason for this is grade inflation (which is then used as proof that everyone is doing a good job).

Obsession with the curriculum dramatically increases the pressure to teach to the test.  If the curriculum states that at the end of Year 7 a child should be able to write an email on a given topic, then this will be practised. It will, of course, be a handwritten exercise.  Can’t ever remember getting a handwritten email, but I’m sure Professor Doctor Soandso knows better.  If the noble Professor had read Michael Lewis’s The Lexical Approach, he’s know that reported speech is incredibly rare among native English speakers, but that doesn’t stop it taking up several weeks of teaching time. (Could it be because it’s easy to correct?).  The present continuous is also a pretty rare form in English – around 5% of usage if I remember rightly – so why is it a major part of the first book in nearly every course?  In one course book it is even taught before the present simple.

This is what I found so disturbing about the conversation I mentioned at the beginning.  Two highly qualified teachers, who both speak impeccable English, have been conned into thinking that the curriculum is more important than the mastery of the subject.  For me this is putting the cart before the horse.  The system has become the more important than the people it is supposed to be serving.  How do I know this is a bad thing?  It’s because I conduct far too many interviews for companies where the school-leaver has good marks in English, but basically can’t hold a simple conversation.  In many cases they have excellent marks, and they perform well in written diagnostic tests, but are orally incompetent.  On the other hand, I meet very few candidates with good oral skills but unacceptable written skills.

I called this article, “Keeping on top of the game.”  The problem is that many teachers are playing the wrong game – they are competing with the curriculum instead of taking on the language.  Keeping on top of the language game requires stronger nerves that doing battle with the curriculum.  You might need to ignore the book for several weeks, you will certainly need to do things in a different order, and you will get more bad marks in the stage tests.  But when it’s all over and the final whistle is blown, you’ll have learners that are far better equipped to deal with communication than those who have simply collected points along the way.

I tell my young learners this:

“It’s not about getting good marks in the next test.  It’s about being able to speak good English in 5 years’ time.”

That’s often hard for them to grasp at first, but once they develop the trust, progress comes in leaps and bounds.

For teachers I have another message:

“If your learners can speak good English, they will do well in any fair test.”