A lesson in the psychology of learning languages (part 2)

A week or so ago, I posted the background to a problem that I think all teachers, including ESP materials writers, need to address, namely the psychological barriers that prevent people from using English in real-life situations and that prevent them from admitting they don’t understand.

In this posting, I’ll work through a lesson plan to tackle that problem. I won’t say solve the problem – I wish I had a magic wand, but this is actually one problem we can’t solve for our students – they have to overcome it themselves.

There’s a related linguistic problem which is perhaps easier to solve. They may not actually have the language they need in order to interrupt effectively and check information in English. Let me demonstrate that these aren’t as easy as they sound with another example using me as a case study in how not to do it.

I have two sources of paranoia when I’m in a large group of people speaking Polish and I sit quietly rather than getting involved in the conversation. Firstly, by the time I’ve thought of the right words to say, the conversation has moved on and it’s too late. What I need is the Polish equivalent of “Shut up for a second while I think of what I’m going to say”, which is normally expressed more politely in English as “Could I just say something here?”

My second source of paranoia is the panic that even though I understand 90% of what I hear, that 10% might make the difference between success and humiliation. At an integration day at my company several years ago, we had a nice session where we all got musical instruments and the trainer got us to create group music. At one stage, he asked (in Polish) for volunteers to be bell-ringers, so I thought that’d be fine for me and went forward … only to realise, to sniggers from around the room, that he’d put the feminine ending on the word for volunteers … so I made a fool of myself in front of 120 people.

Now, no amount of language could have helped me there, but in smaller gatherings, it’s important to be able to pinpoint misunderstandings. Rather than simply blurt out “I don’t understand”, our students need to be able to ask “Sorry, what exactly do you mean when you say ‘volunteer’?” or “Sorry, you said you’d liked what exactly?”

So … so far I’ve got two aims, a psychological one (learner training) about understanding that we all have crises like these and we need to get through them, and a linguistic one of teaching useful phrases.

Before we go any further with the lesson plan, it’s important to note that the aims come first. Very often, we find a good text or video clip, plan some exercises around it, and only then think about aims (to give reading practice, to give speaking practice, to teach some nice vocabulary). Don’t get me wrong, those are all very important aims, and certainly nothing to be ashamed of. But as I’ve said elsewhere, they’re not enough. The difference between a course and a series of lessons comes down to the aims you start with.

Once you’ve got aims, the next thing you need is a context. Now, because I’m doing this not actually as part of a course, I have the advantage – or disadvantage – of having the whole range of ESP topics to choose from. I’ll make an arbitrary decision to focus on English for Marketing, since that’s a field I have some knowledge of, and also because our new book, Cambridge English for Marketing, is out in the coming weeks. (Look out for it – it’s great!) And within that field, I’ll go for the marketing budget, simply because I remember there was some tricky vocab there.

OK, so now we can start planning stages. Since we’re actually teaching something in this lesson, I think we need an input stage, an analysis stage and an output stage. You could call that presentation-practice-production if you like, but I prefer my own names for the stages, which I think are better descriptors.

What could we do about input? Well, we really need to see or hear some characters doing things badly and/or well, in order to provoke some good discussion and also to model the language for later. I’m going to use Xtranormal for this. I’ve never used it before, but I’ve been very impressed when I’ve seen others use it. I hope it works for me.

Anyway, here’s a dialogue to illustrate how not to do it. I’ll show you the second part in a moment.



Remember, my aim here isn’t to give listening practice, so I think this is a very valid way of presenting a script. For more ideas on this sort of listening activity, see this posting.

I’d better point out at this stage that I’m building a toy lesson. If this were a real lesson with real students in mind, I’d check my facts more carefully and probably make the dialogues longer. But I just want to talk you through the stages in the process here.

So … we’ve got some dialogues. Time to start lesson-building. Three rules are worth remembering at this point. Firstly, personalise. So start with a discussion lead-in based on your students’ experiences … of what, though?

The second rule is: content before language. The language focus (as well as the learner training) will come after the listening. At the beginning, we need to focus on the story – what they’re discussing in the dialogue, in this case, marketing budgets.

The third rule: contextualise. Before we listen, we need to have a good idea of what we’re listening to and why.

So let’s start with a lead-in discussion:
- Have you ever been involved in planning a marketing budget?
- What did you do?
- If you haven’t, what stages do you think it involves?
- What different approaches might there be?
- How difficult would it be to get the relevant information?

And so on.

It’d be good here to do some work on the theory of marketing budgets, such as matching six popular approaches with explanations. This is actually a task in our Marketing book, so I’ll leave you read up on it here.

Now we need a first listening task. We’ve already personalised and contextualised to some extent, so we can focus on the actual interaction here. Perhaps first get students to predict who the two people might be, at what stage in the development plan they should discuss the budget, which approach they should choose and what sort of data they’d need to collect. Then watch the clip to compare it with their ideas. I nearly said ‘watch to check’, but that would imply that my answers are somehow more valid than theirs, which is unlikely given that they’re probably marketing pros and I’m an English teacher who’s making it up as he goes along.

Lead-in, predict answers, watch to compare.

Now we’re ready for the meat. At the end of the clip, the woman asks ‘What’s the problem?’, so let’s turn that into a class discussion. This is where all my psychology comes in (see my previous article). Get them to tell anecdotes about times they sat in silence instead of admitting a lack of understanding, or share your own stories of foreign language paranoia (or you could tell them some of mine). I won’t go too deeply into the discussion for two reasons. Firstly, this kind of open-ended discussion can’t really be planned too deeply – as long as you know the key points you want to cover (see my article), you’ll be fine. Secondly, I’ve got another lesson on exactly this topic, which I wrote some time ago for Professional English Online. It’s not been published yet, so I don’t wan to pre-empt it, and in the meantime I don’t see much point in reinventing the wheel.

OK, now we’re ready for language work, so we’d better watch the second clip. But … remembering the rule about content before language, we need comprehension questions first.

How about these:

1. When the woman talked about competitive parity, what did the man think she was saying?

2. Why did the woman start talking about golf?

3. Why did the woman talk about the standard of his work?

4. What exactly is competitive parity?



Right. Now we really are ready for the language work. An old favourite here is a gapfill. Students predict what could go in each space and then watch again to check. Here are the gapped sentences.

I’m sorry. I don’t know _____ _____ _____ _____ the word ‘party’ in this context.

I’m sorry. I don’t know _____ _____ _____ _____. I don’t play golf.

_____ _____ _____ there’s something wrong with my work?

I’m afraid I still _____ _____ _____.


Now we can elicit some more ways of checking information, of pinpointing the exact word that’s causing problems. Perhaps we could also focus on the language the woman uses to explain the concepts. Also, I haven’t done anything on interrupting and all those other functions I mentioned at the beginning – let’s save those for next time and do them properly.

Perhaps there’s room here too for another discussion: in both parts, the man looked a bit stupid. But in which part did he look more stupid? In which part did he overcome the problem?

Then we just need a role-play to bring it all together. You could follow my procedure for instant role-plays (here), but make sure you elicit before you start some really tricky vocab that can serve as the focus of the role-play. (But remember my lesson when this policy went wrong). Tell students they have to use the techniques and language from this lesson (including phrases that they generated themselves).

So students do the role-plays in pairs. Perhaps they could swap roles and do it again. A nice bit of feedback and discussion. Homework: use the techniques and language at work some time before the next lesson and be ready to tell us how you got on.

The end. Simple as that. Try it out, let me know if it works or falls flat, or if you improve my rough ideas into a polished lesson. Good luck.

Related posts:
A lesson in the psychology of learning languages (part 1)
Listening: What’s the aim? (part 2)
Instant role-pays

Listening: What's the aim? (part 2)

In a posting last year, I listed what I consider to be five valid aims for listening tasks in ESP courses. To recap, these are:  

1. To provide listening practice.
2. To teach listening skills.
3. To provide an interesting topic for discussion.
4. To present useful language in context.
5. To serve as a model for speaking activities (and, by extension, for real-life situations).

In that posting, I tried to deal with aims 1 and 2, and I promised I'd come back to the meatier ones later. So here goes with aim 5.

What about 3 and 4, I hear you cry? Well, aim 5 happens to be the one that was very prominent in my ESP Consultancy in Cyprus last week, so I thought I'd deal with it while it's fresh in my mind.

So ... listening as a model for speaking activities. It's a bit of an odd aim, since it's not really a listening aim at all. But here's why I think it's important:

• I believe a key part of ESP is situational, i.e. training learners to cope with real-life situations that they are likely to encounter and that are likely to cause them problems in their professional lives.
• If we're going to train them for those situations, we need to provide functional language input and opportunities to practise in controlled and less controlled activities.
• Rather than providing that functional language input in isolation and out of context, I believe we need to provide good models of successful communication in those situations. The models should include not just useful language, but also communication strategies (e.g. the importance of interrupting or clarifying) and professional skills (e.g. active listening or empathy skills).
• The models can be presented as a written script, but it's far more satisfying to hear people actually acting out that script, or even watch them on video or live.

Before I go any further, I need to say that of course there's far far more to ESP than that, and that teaching functional language is not the be all and end all. It's a messy business, as I'll explain in another post soon.

Anyway, if you're with me so far, we need scripts and we need them to be performed. Tricky. There are three potential sources.

Firstly and ideally, we'd find a ready-made script tailored to our students' needs somewhere in a coursebook. That's actually one of the big reasons my own books are so full of listenings and situational dialogues - because I think they're important and because I think they're hard for ESP teachers to find or create by themselves.

Secondly, we'd find some useful clips online. This is actually quite tough, even in these days of YouTube. It seems most of the videos you can find online seem to be non-situational, i.e. they don't represent the sorts of situations our learners are likely to find themselves in. There are plenty of interviews with experts, plenty of talking-head monologues, plenty of clips with not much useful language at all ...

But you can find them if you try. A year or so ago I set myself the challenge of finding something on YouTube for each of the first four books in my series. This was a bit superfluous, since I already had all the scripts I could want for those four areas in the books themselves, but it seemed like a reasonable challenge. Here are the results.

For Nursing, I found a clip from a BBC drama series, Casualty, which is about doctors and nurses in a hospital. I can't say I've watched the programme (I'm not one for TV dramas, I'm afraid), but it's worth remembering that there are plenty of dramas around. Of course, you might not find a drama series relevant to your ESP learners, but it's worth a try.

For Engineering, I searched YouTube for "cool engineering demonstration", and found this one, which indeed is really cool. The point is, the presenter is using the same type of language that real life engineers need to use when explaining their gadgets. There seem to be plenty of light entertainment programmes with engineers explaining things too, like Robot Wars and Brainiac (search YouTube if you haven't seem them - they're nerdy but excellent).

For Jobhunting, I searched for "funny job interview", and found all sorts of examples, including one from Monty Python, but the one I chose was a brilliant interview for a job with a box manufacturer ... which has been removed from YouTube. Shame. Anyway, here's another one. Comedy series in general are great for how-not-to-do-it, and often contain some great functional language, although the really funny ones always seem to contain some strong language (which I'll leave you to discover).

To help me get over my disappointment at finding my favourite Jobhunting video missing and the other good ones full of swearing, here's another great ESP/HR video from Big Train, this time about losing a job.

Finally, for English for the Media, I wanted to find an example of a debriefing meeting at a TV company, and came across this clip from a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Again, documentaries can be a great source of authentic situational language.

So ... there's stuff there if you look hard enough for it, but ... it's a bit hit and miss. There's no guarantee the clips you find will match your course aims in terms of content and target functional language. And of course there's the next problem: transcribing the useful language and making exercises out of it. I've tried that a few times recently, such as this lesson on recycling televisions - useful for engineers explaining what's happening in different parts of a factory, etc. But it's hard work.

So I'm coming to the conclusion that it's better to write and record your own scripts ... which is the long-awaited "thirdly" in my list of three sources. But that creates its own problems. And since it's now very nearly midnight, I'll have to save that for another post.

Related posts:

• Listening: What's the aim? (part 1)
• Factory tour
• ESP consultancy, Cyprus

Listening: What’s the aim? (Part 1)

In home-made ESP courses, listening tends to be the neglected skill. It’s easy to make text-based lessons – just find something on the internet and turn it into a lesson. Easy peasy. Speaking is also easy to do – as long as you’re happy with spontaneous discussions. Role-plays are a bit harder to set up, but they’re still a piece of cake. Writing … well, you need to come up with some tasks, but after that, the students do all the work for you. 

But listening … that’s a different matter.

For many years, my preferred technique for incorporating listening into home-made courses has been SLTTTSE – Students Listen To Their Teacher Speaking English. Somehow, by some sort of osmosis, students get better at listening by interacting with their teacher. 

Actually, it’s not such a crazy idea – we do learn by doing, and in many ways a teacher is infinitely better as a source of practice than an audio CD, because the teacher is interactive. That means students can learn real-life strategies for dealing with communication breakdowns (e.g. “Sorry, could you speak more slowly, please?”, “Sorry – I didn’t catch that last word” and “What?”). Those techniques won’t get you very far with a CD. 

And that's how I've always justified it to myself as a teacher.

But I got caught out with this technique earlier this year. I was doing reports at the end of a course I was writing and teaching for a group of students from the National Audit Office, and I needed to give a mark for “listening”. So I used one from a BEC Vantage practice test book. Not especially relevant to their jobs, but at least it’s a scientific (?) assessment of their listening skills, which is what I wanted. 

Most of the students did quite badly – it seems I hadn’t prepared them during the course with the listening skills they needed to complete the task. And afterwards, one of the students said to me, “Jeremy, it’s so nice to hear real English for a change. Can we do more of this?”

And she was right. I don’t speak real English – I speak teacher English. (Of course the actors on the CD weren’t speaking real English either, but you get the point.) 

So it made me think again about how I should be integrating listening skills into my home-made courses. (I keep saying home-made, by the way, because the published courses I’ve worked on have always been stuffed full of listenings, for reasons that I’ll make clear later.)

As I see it, there are five valid aims for listening activities. The best activities should achieve (or at least support) more than one of these aims.

1. To provide listening practice.
2. To teach listening skills.
3. To provide an interesting topic for discussion.
4. To present useful language in context.
5. To serve as a model for speaking activities (and, by extension, for real-life situations).

Now you know why I called this posting ‘part 1’. There’s plenty to say about each of those aims, so here I think I’ll confine myself to 1 and 2 (even though in ESP I think the real meat is in aims 4 and 5).

So … listening practice. As I said above, it’s not unreasonable to assume that students get better at listening if they get lots of practice. It’s not very systematic, and it’s not really teachable or measurable. At the end of your lesson, you can’t tell whether your student is any better as a result of your lesson than before, which may or may not be a problem (depending on how you have to report progress). But it’s still a valid aim.

And if that’s your only aim, there are all sorts of ways to achieve it. SLTTTSE, for example, or BEC Vantage practice tests, or indeed listenings from regular course books. (Obviously you wouldn’t want to photocopy pages from those books – here at the British Council we have class sets of 12 copies available for such activities.) There’s also the internet, of course – YouTube being the obvious example, but also many news sites (e.g. BBC) often have short films to accompany topical stories. The list goes on … listen to songs, watch films or TV programmes, with or without subtitles, etc etc. You don’t me to tell you that.

But the point is, it’s not very systematic. It’s important and it’s hugely better than nothing (or than SLTTTSE by itself), but I think we can go beyond that. That’s where the other aims come in.

And what of aim 2? By listening skills, I’m referring to micro-skills that we can try to focus on in our lessons, which may be a bit more measurable than just ‘listening practice’. They fall into three broad families:

Top-down processing: The idea here is that if you know enough about the context / topic before you listen (contextualisation), and if you can relate it to your own knowledge / experiences / attitudes (personalisation), you can understand a huge amount, even if you miss plenty of individual words. The brain fills in the gaps.

That’s why we do so much pre-listening work – discussing the topic, relating it to our own ideas, predicting based on pictures and titles, etc. And it’s also why we tell our students not to get hung up on the meanings of difficult words, but instead to try to get a general understanding.

It’s also one reason why pre-teaching vocab may be valid. It’s a way of doing a bit of predicting and avoiding the hang-up issue at the same time.

As teaching techniques to enable students to understand a particular listening text better, these are all invaluable little tools.

But I’m not just talking about these as teaching techniques. Can we teach them as a life-skill? Something they’ll start doing more outside the classroom as a result of our lesson? Well, yes and no. I think most top-down processing is done subconsciously – you don’t usually decide to predict something or to relate it to your own experiences. It’s difficult to decide not to get hung up on something. It should come naturally.

But sometimes it’s difficult to spot something that should be obvious. Some people do need to be told not to get hung up on every word, or to read the questions on the exam paper before the recording starts. So for some students in some situations, I think this is a valid life skill to teach.

Bottom-up processing: This is the opposite set of skills – the idea that you hear particular patterns of sound waves, which your brain turns into phonemes, which are then assembled into words, which in turn are processed as chunks of language with meaning. If you think about it, there must be a lot of this going on. If top-down processing fills the gaps, bottom-up processing provides the gapped text itself.

Can we teach it? Yes, I think we can. Most obviously, we can do things like dictation exercises (and related activities where students write what they hear). Not much fun, perhaps, but good for bottom-up skills. Especially at lower level, we can work on helping students break down a continuous stream of noise into discrete words. But at higher levels, I think it’s more a question of building up their vocabularies – a huge job.

Communication strategies: These relate to the idea that real-life listening is usually more active than classroom activities. I’ve already mentioned a few phrases for dealing with communication breakdowns, but there’s lots of work we can do here on clarifying and checking information, active listening skills, asking the speaker to speak differently, etc.

We can also teach (or at least advise on) psychological techniques, e.g. the fact that it’s actually acceptable to ask for clarification, that it’s better to look a bit silly by asking questions than to look like an idiot by failing to understand an important instruction or by attending a meeting where you have no idea what’s going on. Easier said than done, of course, but simply by telling students that they’re not the only one with these crises, you’ll take the first steps towards breaking down the barriers.

Anyway, I guess that’s enough for now. I’ll deal with the other three aims soon, but for the time being, I’ll summarise by saying that (a) STTTSE isn’t enough by itself and (b) listening for the sake of listening practice is fine up to a point, but we can be much more systematic. That said, even the techniques I’ve suggested won’t guarantee quick results. There’s no quick fix, but at least we can try.

Financial English videos

This week I've been spending a lot of time watching and analysing suitable videos for Financial English, so I thought I'd share a couple of clips with you, and pass on my ideas for very simple lessons.

The reason I've suddenly taken an interest in Financial English is that I write activities every month for Professional English Online, Cambridge University Press's site for teachers of Business English and ESP. This month I felt it was time to bite the bullet of Financial English, an area that I'd managed to avoid up to now. I chose to do a video lesson because, again, this is something I'd avoided. Also, the videos on YouTube are so good as introductions to the subject of Financial English.

So here are a couple of great tutorials:

• Untangling Credit Default Swaps: One of a series of tutorials from Paddy Hirsch, Senior Editor at Marketplace, illustrating various complex financial concepts using metaphors, diagrams and simple examples. All of his tutorials are excellent, but this is the one that helped me most.
• Collateralized Debt Obligations: another clear and simple illustration of a complex topic, this time from the Khan Academy. The Khan academy seems to be a great source of knowledge on a wide range of subjects - check out all their videos on YouTube.
• The Crisis of Credit Visualized: my personal favourite, and the one I chose for the activity on Professional English Online (mainly because the visuals are so much cooler).

There are also some nice comedy sketches about the financial crisis, including plenty from John Bird and John Fortune (such as this one - perfect apart from some mild swearing towards the end). The financial sketch that really made me laugh was this one from Little Britain - although it's probably not ideal for your financial whiz-kids.

So, coming back to the tutorials, how can you use them in class? Well, it's all a question of aims - a subject I'll go into much more deeply in a later post. To me, there are up to four valid aims here,

1. to provide listening practice and/or teach listening skills;
2. to introduce/teach/practise some financial terminology;
3. to improve your and your students' understanding of difficult concepts;
4. to teach some techniques and/or functional language that can be transferred to real life speaking situations.

So, taking the first aim first, students will get something out of just watching a clip. But they don't really need to pay you for that privelege! Your job is to manage the process so they get more out of it than they would without your help. That means breaking it into manageable chunks (probably no more than 2 minutes each), and providing questions that will support them rather than trick/test them. A nice technique here is true/false statements or yes/no questions, where you focus the student's attention on a particular fragment of the video and they only have to understand generally what's going on in order to answer your question, and they only have to write one letter (T/F or Y/N) while they're listening. At the end of the section, they discuss their answers with a partner (make sure they see this as speaking practice rather than just a list of true-false-false-true) and finally go through them with the class. If your questions are well designed, your students should now have a very good idea of what the whole section was about - and they'll have the impression that they understood much more than they perhaps really did. Very good for confidence. As I say, use your questions to teach rather than trick.

What about listening skills (as opposed to just practice)? The obvious one here is the skill of prediction - knowing what you're going to hear before you listen. Here again, the questions will be a great help: students discuss what they expect the answers to be, and then watch the clip to check. Also, get them to predict at the end of each section what will happen next.

Coming on to my second aim, financial terminology, this will make the student feel they've got something meaty out of the lesson. Rather than just "We watched a video - it was quite interesting", they'll tell their friends "We learnt some new words". (Well, perhaps they won't really tell their friends ... but these are finance people, don't forget). The best thing to do here is a gapfill: transcribe a handful of sentences from each section of the video and gap the target vocab. Put all the gapped words in a box below the sentences, and get students first to predict and then to watch the video a second time to check their answers. That second viewing is really important, by the way, because that's when they'll feel that they understand everything, and they'll feel great about it.

My third aim, understanding difficult concepts, isn't really an aim ... let's call it a secondary aim. I think students will appreciate learning something new about their own subjects, or perhaps they'll like showing off that they already knew it. But you, as a teacher, can really benefit from the kind of close analysis that comes from creating a lesson from a video clip.

My finaly aim is about techniques and functional language. Some good techniques incuded in the videos above are: using diagrams, using metaphors, using simplistic examples, etc. The language technique best illustrated by these clips is that of discourse markers to signal and manage an explanation, things like:

• In other words ...
• So, as you can see,
• But have a look at what's happened over here.
• Rhetorical questions: But what happens if we ...?
• Clefting: What I'm going to talk about next is ...; What happens is that ...

So there we have it. I'll end with a brief summary of how to manage a sample 1-2 minute extract from a video:

1. Students predict answers to T/F statements in pairs. Support them with vocabulary from the statements. Brief feedback in class.
2. First viewing to check.
3. Students discuss (and I mean discuss) in pairs. Feed back in class. Focus on the content and students' reaction to it - not just the language.
4. Students attempt gapfill in pairs.
5. Second viewing to check.
6. Students discuss in pairs. Feed back in class.
7. Predict with the class what will happen next.

That's enough for now. Good luck.

Jeremy

PS Please let me know if you use any of these ideas in class, or if you can recommend any of your own Financial English videos. I'll post a link to my activity on Professional English Online when it appears there.