N is for Note-taking

N is for Note-taking

teaching tips
“Now, remember, don’t tip your hat to another witch unless she tips hers first—you’re still an apprentice. And if you should come across some fellweed, be sure to pick it, but only if it’s the four-leaf variety. The five-leaf kind will rot your fingers.” “Yes, Grandma.” Mason made a mental note not to touch anything with five leaves. Cowel made a mental note not to touch anything. (Anderson, 2007) I can’t remember the book in which I first read the term mental note, but I remember the author used it excessively. My 12-year-old self was following the adventures of some junior adventurer who used these mental notes as a cheap plot device to foreshadow further adventures and drum up anticipation. But I found the idea enchanting: my own brain could…
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J is for Jokes

J is for Jokes

teaching tips
It felt like hours. The joke my student was trying to tell perhaps took no more than three or four minutes, but it involved many clarification moves on my part (“I’m sorry, do you mean …?”) and repair moves on his part, hesitating, saying the wrong word, and then backing up to explain (“I mean ….”). At the end of it all, the disjointed story (“Oh, before that, I meant to say ….”) coalesced into an anecdote he’d read about a diner receiving a free meal at a restaurant after finding a cockroach in his soup. Afterward, the apologetic server humbly escorts the diner to the door and helps him with his coat when, unfortunately for the diner, a bottle full of cockroaches spills from the coat’s pocket. I smiled…
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I is for Intensive Reading

I is for Intensive Reading

teaching tips
Many teachers cringe at their early memories of learning a language through the teacher-centered grammar-translation method. Rule driven, with a focus on accuracy over fluency, it’s the oldest formal methodology, dating back to the teaching of Latin in the 1500s. Over the centuries, other languages were taught in the same way, and when the first modern language textbooks appeared in the 19th century, they tended to use the grammar translation method as well. Internationally, it continues to be popular in many countries, in part because teachers, unless trained otherwise, tend to teach the way they were taught. In the 20th century, dissatisfaction with the grammar-translation method saw the rise of many competing approaches through the 1960s. Since then, teachers have increasingly embraced variations of the learner-centered communicative approach or use…
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H is for Hypothesis

H is for Hypothesis

teaching tips
“I’m a researcher! Why has no one ever told me?” Teachers are inherently researchers, driven by natural curiosity to understand their students’ problems and to consider ways of addressing them. Sometimes they apply old approaches and methods that may have been key to their own first or second language acquisition. Sometimes teachers become creative and innovate new approaches and methods. In doing so, they tend to follow the scientific method: ask a question research the question construct a hypothesis (a guess) test the hypothesis with an experiment analyze the data and draw a conclusion share results For example, a teacher asks a question: Why are students doing poorly on tests? She is surprised because she thinks they know (or should know) the content on which they’re being tested. Doing some…
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G is for Games

G is for Games

teaching tips
“Why are they playing games and not learning something?” Games are among the most misunderstood pedagogical strategies in the teachers’ toolbox. Parents, other teachers, and administrators can misinterpret students’ enjoyment of games as having fun at the expense of more serious and productive learning. But the opposite is often the case; the casual competitive nature of games suppresses students’ self-consciousness and helps them focus and learn more than during other classroom activities. However, to be fair, sometimes teachers play games in the classroom without a perfect understanding of the benefits that games carry and the ways in which they can be tailored to better address student needs. In such cases, teachers may only use games as filler activities, as a way of keeping more able students busy while others catch…
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F is for Frequency

F is for Frequency

teaching tips
Here are two key questions related to frequency: What are the most frequent words in the English language? and How frequently do we need to be exposed to new words in order to acquire them? To answer the first question, in every language certain words tend to appear more often than others. A common list of the most frequent twenty words in English typically includes the, be, and, of, a, in, to, have, to, it, I, that, for, you, he, with, on, do, say, and this. Many would agree that these twenty words seem extremely common, but any comprehensive list of words tends to be drawn from a selective corpus, or body of words. The selective nature of any corpus influences what words will appear to be most common. For…
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E is for Error

E is for Error

Uncategorised
Coming home one afternoon from my job teaching English to university students, I found my four year-old son prancing around the kitchen with a beach towel cape around his neck, fighting evil superheroes with a wooden spoon. “Spencer,” I said, “How was your day?” “Good,” he replied. “I swimmed with Mommy.” “No!” I sternly reprimanded him. “The verb swim has an irregular past tense verb form!” No, of course I didn’t. It’s not the language or the attitude one uses with a four year-old. Instead, I employed what is called a recast: “Oh, you swam with Mommy.” “Yes,” he confirmed. “I swam with Mommy.” Spencer’s use of swimmed is a common but intriguing utterance that gives us an insight into childhood language acquisition. It is highly unlikely that he had…
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D is for Discourse Analysis

teaching tips
Discourse analysis is about understanding what is not said. Consider this conversation: Speaker 1: Do you think we could watch a movie? Speaker 2: Ah, yeah. That’s gonna happen. Have you practiced piano? Speaker 1: I’ll just get a snack first? Speaker 2: Sure. We can eat it during the movie. If you are a native speaker of English, the conversation will strike you as easy to understand and, hopefully, humorous. But that’s because you were able to recognize a series of subtle linguistic cues. These cues are typical in any conversational exchange, but also in written discussions, such as in texts and emails. It’s worth looking at eight types of discourse analysis cues in detail, and seeing how they would apply to this short conversation. The first cue has…
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C is for Collaboration

teaching tips
It’s your first day of work at a new office and, because you’re eager, you arrive early and locate your cubicle. Looking around to make sure you’re alone, you race around madly to each desk, snatching up everyone’s stapler so you can hide them all in your filing cabinet. As other workers trickle in, mystified conversations erupt about the missing staplers only to be silenced by your ominously evil “Bwahahahaha!” cry of triumph. Seriously? No. In office environments and most other work environments, we mostly stress cooperation and collaboration, which make it all the more mystifying why our classrooms so often stress competition. Competition is normal and healthy but it is not the only way to meet objectives or to educate students. Imagine suddenly informing your language class students that…
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B is for Bell Curve

Uncategorised
First, let me leave nothing to the imagination: I hate the Bell Curve. Because I teach assessment statistics to graduate students, I know I shouldn’t callously bully an innocent graph of achievement, but it isn’t the tool itself I object to, but the wicked uses to which it is put. Bad beginnings The Bell Curve was first called “the normal curve of error” by Abraham de Moivre in 1733. He used it to explain games of chance, but by the 19th century, the Bell Curve was being misapplied to justify differences in society such as to support Francis Galton’s theories of eugenics, a pseudo-scientific movement to breed humans to produce a master race. It was only the Nazi party’s horrific love of the idea that led to its belated rejection…
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