Wordlists in ESP

I spent most of yesterday creating a wordlist for one of the books in my series, Cambridge English for the Media. I should be working on the wordlist right now too, but I needed a break. Creating a wordlist isn't exactly exciting. But it's important, I think.

Just to clarify, a wordlist is simply a list of words that apear in a course. There's one at the back of International Legal English, for example, with all the key terms defined in alphabetical order. (OK, so it's called a Glossary there, but you could equally call it a mini-dictionary). My students use it all the time, especially when they want to check my dodgy explanation of a tricky word. Here in Poland, we're lucky to have a bilingual version, which you can download for free from the Cambridge website (which also has plenty of other great wordlists).

There's another wordlist in the workbook for Business Benchmark. Yesterday, one of my students used it to demonstrate that my explanation or agent and distributor had things the wrong way round.

A different approach is to put the wordlist online, as we're doing with my series. For example, there's a unit-by-unit set of wordlists for Cambridge English for Nursing. The advantage here is that space is less of an issue. Even more importantly, you can listen to all the pronunciations by clicking on the icon on the pdf. (Before you print it out, I mean - technology's still not ready for that to work with the printouts). That's a huge benefit with all that hard-to-pronounce medical terminology. If you've ever wondered how to pronounce dyspnoea, apnoeoa and tachypnoea, check out the wordlist for unit 2. Again, there's a bilingual version on the Polish website ... perhaps your local Cambridge website also has a blingual version.

So what can you do with all these wordlists? Well, most obviously, you can use them as a reference, as my business student did last night. Students can also use them to manage their vocab learning. A student preparing for the ILEC exam (International Legal English Certificate) could learn 10 words a day from the wordlist and thereby (sorry) master the whole list in around a month ... and then use these words in his/her exam. Or in real life, of course.

As a teaching tool, they're also really useful. I've already mentioned my cut-up-bits-of-paper game on this blog. That's so easy to do with a printed out wordlist.

I mainly use wordlists to play "blockbusters", a teaching classic that I'm sure many teachers already use. For those of you who don't know it, you have a honeycomb grid, with a letter in each block.

There are two teams, reds and blues. Choose a letter to start with, and read the definition for a word starting with that letter. If students know the answer, they put up their hands (no shouting out, please!). If it's correct, it goes their colour and they can choose the next letter. The aim is for the reds to make a connection from top to bottom and the blues to connect side to side. They can go any route they choose, as long as they end up making the connection. Of course, they end up blocking each other, which is why it's called blockbusters. Good fun ... and of course it's just a vocab test in disguise.

(By the way, I have wonderful interactive whtieboards to make it look great, but I played it for years on ordinary whiteboards and flipcharts - just draw a grid and away you go.)

There's a shorter version of the game too, which doesn't involve a grid. Again, teams (not necessarily two teams) ask for letters to get definitions of words starting with that letter. If they get it right, write that letter on the board in that team's column, and they can choose the next letter. The aim now is to collect enough letters to make a word ... probably best if it's more than 3 letters long. Ideally, the word should be connected, however tenuously, to their ESP field, but that's up to you to decide.

One complication: some letters might not have many words starting with them. My legal English students soon work out that Q always leads to quorum, so they don't wait to hear the question. In that case (and also with Z and X), tell them you're going to ask for a word starting with, say, S, but if they get it right, they still get the letter they asked for. This allows you to focus on words you want to test, rather than the same words over and over again.

Anyway, I could go on all day - I'm really into vocab revision, but this wordlist isn't going to write itself ... I'll let you know when it appears on the site.

Related posts:
Vocabulary revision with a table and a guillotine
Fun with contracts
What do words actually mean?

Freer practice

First of all, sorry for the prolonged absence. As always, I've got far too much work on, and my deadlines finally overwhelmed me before Christmas. I'm working on two huge career-milestone projects at the moment, plus four or five smaller ones, none of which I can even hint at on this blog. Very cool but pretty frustrating.

So with that in mind, I'll mark my return to the blogosphere with something short and sweet.

Last week, with my Upper Int Business English group, we were doing second conditionals. (For those of you who don't 'do' cliches of English grammar like that, please forgive me. I made sure it was business-contextualised and communicative, and my students claimed to find it useful. As adults who've mostly learnt by doing rather than studying, it was new grammar.)

And I'd better admit it ... it was the next thing in the book.

After the little presentation in the book (some contextualised examples, which we analysed) and a few short written practice exercises, they were ready for a bit of freer practice.

I'm not sure if that's a universally recognised term - I use it all the time, but just in case, it's the type of practice exercise that bridges the gap between controlled practice (gapfills, transformations, drills, dull stuff like that) and free practice (role-plays, debates, simulations ...). The problem with free practice, as I'm sure you all know, is that students promptly forget to use the target language, being so engrossed in the task itself.

So the trick with freer practice is to make the task not quite engrossing enough for them to forget the aim of the exercise, which is to use the target language - to take risks with it, to play with it, to experiment with it, to get their heads around it in the heat of semi-fluent speech. I think those are valid aims.

Usaully, it's enough simply to tell students to use the target language, and also to get them to police each other (e.g. by asking questions with the target structure, or insisting on some risk-taking from their partners).

The exercise in the book didn't sound very promising. Discuss with a partner: If you set up your own business, what would it be? What problems would you have? It's a fine context, but I could see those questions lasting about a minute at best, so not much of a discussion.

So before we started, I drew/elicited a mind-map onto the board. In the centre, I wrote 'own business', and then there were arms coming out of the centre saying 'name', 'type of business', 'location', 'premises', 'clients', 'competitors', 'source of finance', 'number of employees', 'business philosophy', and so on.

This turned the activity into a proper interview. From two questions we now had around a dozen. The interviewer had plenty of questions to ask, making it more of a dialogue than the monologue it could have been. In fact, the interviewer probably practised the target language (second conditionals, don't forget) more than the interviewee. But that's fine - everyone had a chance at both roles. And it generated tons of target language. Bucketfuls. Very nice.

(Whether they'll go on to use the language in free practice and then real life is another question, but we teachers have to be optimistic, I suppose.)

As a final flourish, I asked them to feed back to the group, but not about their own business plans, but about their partners'. That made the feedback session much more interactive and engaging - and also very funny, as the feedback included the ridiculous or silly ideas, not just the ones that survived the discussion.

In the next lesson, I did my cost cutting worksheet from Professional English Online, which demonstrates and practises the real business benefit of being able to distinguish between first and second conditionals when discussing proposals.

Between them, I think my two freer practice activities did actually go some way towards convincing them that the language is useful and not too difficult, and helping them to get their heads round it and feel a bit more confident about using it. And we had fun in the process.

Related posts:

• How did PPP become a dirty word?
• In defence of course books
• Instant roleplays

How did PPP become a dirty word?

Recently I’ve been doing quite a lot of walk-throughs – presentations which involve guiding an audience through a unit of a course book to explain the deeper methodology behind it, to show how exercises build up to achieve a sub-aim, sub-aims build up to achieve aims and aims build up to create a coherent section in a coherent unit. Another reason for these walk-throughs is to elicit ideas for how to use the materials in class – supplementing, personalising, adapting, that sort of thing.

The first time I did it was in my analysis of Business Opportunities and Business Objectives, and a couple of weeks ago I walked through a unit of Introduction to International Legal English (see photo below, taken by one of the co-athors of that book, Matt Frith). And I was at it again at the BESIG conference, walking through our wonderful new book, Cambridge English for Nursing Pre-intermediate. This afternoon I’m flying off to Austria for a training event in Klagenfurt tomorrow, doing yet more walk-throughs for two of the books in my series, Cambridge English for Engineering and Nursing Intermediate+.)

But there’s something worrying me in the back of my mind as I’m talking about the wonderful methodology. I feel guilty every time I mention or even hint at the idea of presentation-practice-production – the famous PPP model that we were all taught on our initial teacher training (like my CTEFLA, or the CELTA as it is now).

On my diploma course we learnt that the PPP model is actually extremely naïve and something to avoid at all costs. It’s as if these staples of English teaching methodology are an embarrassing relic from the bad old days.

Or at least that’s the message I took away from my training – perhaps my trainer was les extreme and I got overexcited.

So is PPP dead? Well, certainly, the purest form of PPP would be a disaster. Teacher stands at front of class and gives a presentation. Students do a solitary practice exercise. Students do a freer productive task to demonstrate what they’ve learnt, but … ooops, they haven’t learnt anything.

But does anybody really teach like that? And just because the pure form is rubbish, we shouldn’t dismiss the model. We just need to fix it.

If you think about it, PPP, if done properly and sensitively, is a completely logical way of going about things. Of course many teaches make a hash of it (as I’ll explain below), and of course there’s much, much more to teaching than PPP.

But as long as there is actually some sort of input involved in teaching (and it’s not all student-generated self-teaching), that input needs to presented somehow. It needs to be practiced somehow. And students need a chance to use in a more natural situation. And … er … those three steps need to be in that order.

(Before you start spitting at the screen, I’ll deal with that issue of order in a second when I mention TTT).

Imagine you want to learn to paint, or to be a belly dancer, or whatever. You go along to your evening class and what do you expect? Well, perhaps someone to show you what to do, then a chance to analyse it and master it, and then a chance to apply your new skills in as natural, integrated situation.

(My big sister’s a world-class belly dance instructor – I’ll ask her one day if that’s how she does it).

So what’s wrong with PPP? Let’s look at the stages in order, starting with the presentation. 

I once observed a lesson taught by a very nice but rather inexperienced teacher. The lesson started with her drawing all sorts of wonderful timelines on the board (past simple and past continuous, if I remember correctly), with plenty of example sentences and counter-examples. I got a lot out of it, but I’m not sure if the students did. The teacher forgot (a) to find out what they already knew – perhaps they already knew all of this already, and (b) to involve them in the presentation. If the teacher had done those two things, she could still have done the same presentation but it would have been much better. The students would then have been happy to be confirming what they knew – even showing off to the teacher about how good they were, and much more ready to ask about things they didn’t understand.

A presentation doesn’t have to be teacher-led, and it doesn’t have to involve timelines. Everything we teach, be it vocab, phrases, pronunciation techniques, business skills, collocations, learner training skills, whatever – there’s always some form of presentation.

One of the simplest techniques involves teaching useful phrases from an audioscript. After they’ve listened, students read the script to underline useful phrases. Or you could give them the phrases with the words on slips of paper to sort. Or present them as a gapfill. It doesn’t really matter. There’s useful language in there, and it’s the teacher’s role to make the students aware of it. Ideally, the student should be fully involved in discovering the useful language and selecting whether it is in fact useful. But they still need support and guidance from the teacher.

What of TTT (test-teach-test)? This is often presented as an alternative to PPP, but it’s not – it’s just a sensible extension of it. The initial test could be a role-play or exercise or game or discussion, where the teacher has a good laugh at how badly the students perform the task. Or sees that the students can already do the job really well, and therefore abandons the presentation and pulls plan B out. (Stick a video on, perhaps). The test informs the presentation, practice and production – in other words the teach and test stages. So TTT is just TPPP.

The second P is practice. My diploma trainer used to say PPP stood for piss-poor practice. (He was much more vulgar than me – sorry about that). But of course that’s incredibly easy to fix.

Er … just do more and better practice. Loads of it. Not just gap fills and error correction but controlled speaking, less controlled speaking, moving-bits-of-paper-around games, moving-students-around games, vocab revision games, …

The key is this: as long as the practice activities are useful and varied and fun, you can do no end of them. You can also do them in a non-linear way – so when you’re in the middle of unit 4, you can go back and do more practice from unit 1 and unit 3.

Moving on to the third P, practice. (I feel like I’m doing a conference presentation … there’ll be time for questions at the end).

As a new teacher, I was always disappointed when students completely failed to use target language in their free practice activities (discussions, role-plays, simulations, etc.). As soon as they relax, they fall into their old bad habits, their lazy, safe, easy ways of speaking. Simple tenses, simple vocab, simple phrases (“I disagree”, rather than “I’m not sure I completely agree with you”).

Well, that’s just one of the hazards of teaching, and we need to get over it. We’ve absolutely got to provide lots of practice opportunities, and we’ve got to encourage students to use target language (if, of course, it really is useful to them, which is a completely different issue – but a very important one). Tell them explicitly that you’ll be listening out for the target language during the production task, or get them to listen out or each other. Praise the students that use the target language, and gush about how wonderful it sounds. And keep noticing it, praising it and nagging about it in all subsequent speaking tasks.

One of my old favourite games is to print the target phrases on slips of paper. Before the speaking exercise, students have done something with the slips (like sort them into categories according to function or level of formality or whatever). Then during the speaking activity, they have to use as many of the phrases as possible. When they use one in an authentic way, they can take the slip of paper from the desk. At the end, the one with the most slips is the winner. Of course some students will be silly and overuse the phrases, but even so, the results usually sound great. Again, praise the students – tell them how nice it sounded, even though it was only a game.

So, to recap, PPP is fine, as long as it’s done intelligently. In fact, as long as there’s still some teaching involved in teaching, it should be a staple tool for all teachers.

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.

Vocabulary revision with a table and a guillotine

This is my absolute favourite technique for vocabulary revision. I use it all the time. It's almost certainly been 'discovered' thousands of times already - it's hardly revolutionary, but I think it's the simplicity that makes it so cool.

(I've made a little 5-minute film using Jing to show me working through the process, which means I'll explain a bit superficially here and then hopefully it'll all make sense when you watch the film at the end. The technique involves creating a table with MS Word, adjusting column widths, tidying up borders, deleting columns, sorting alphabetically, etc. I discovered on a recent training course that I was running that many teachers don't know how to do these things, or are unaware of many of the time-saving tools on MS Word. So as well as showing you my teaching technique, I'll also use this post to showcase the wonders of the Tables and Borders toolbar - one of my top three toolbars.)

First the old version - the one I used to do. I've been making vocab revision worksheets for years - using the 'tables' function on MS Word to create a 5-column table (with 20 to 30 rows for the actual vocab items). In column 1 you type the word, or the beginning of the collocation, or whatever. In column 5 you type the definition, or the end of the collocation, etc. In column 2 you insert numbers 1 to 20 (or however many rows you've got) and do the same with letters in column 4. Column 3 stays empty - it's for students to draw connecting lines from numbers to letters.

The next step is mixing up the two halves of the sentences. The quickest way to do this is to cut the last column and paste it somehere else. Then use the 'sort' function to sort it alphabetically (don't worry - I'll show you how in the film). Then you just paste it back in its original position. Hey presto, a matching exercise. You still need to adjust the column widths to make it look pretty and all fit on one page, and clear the borders in the middle column (so students have space to draw their lines), but once that's done, it's ready to print.

As I say, that's what I used to do. It's good for revising vocab, but it's not much fun to do in class, so I used to find my students wanting to do it as homework, which kind of defeated the object. (Which was, of course, to fill up some class time).

So I had the brainwave one day of cutting it up and turning it into a 'sort-the-slips-of-paper' exercise. Now this is a vast improvement. Where before students were working alone, in silence, a bit bored, now they were working in teams, standing up, moving around, racing to be the first team to complete the challenge. It's communicative! It's kinaesthetic! It's a change of focus! It's fun!

There were still a couple of teething troubles. the slips of paper were too small and fiddly, so I found a quick way to make them bigger (see my little film). Students preferred to have something to take away with them, so I started printing a class set of non-cut-up worksheets for them to keep. This had the additional advantage that early finishers could start matching the words on their complete worksheet while the slower groups were still messing around with slips of paper - so nobody is sitting around bored or feeling cheated because they didn't have enough time. Of course the second time they match the words (on the worksheet) it's much easier - that's because they've learnt something. There's even a chance for a third time: they fold the worksheet vertically (through column 3) so they can only see the beginnings and then test themselves or a partner to try to remember the endings.

And that's the technique. It's useful (vocab revision is one of my key obsessions), it's fun (a challenging team game), it's great for classroom management (when they're looking a bit glassy eyed, you can pull out the game) and, best of all, it takes about ten minutes to make.

(If you're really clever, you can plan carefully to save time at the guillotine too. If you make sure all the rows are the same height and all start at the same point on the page, you can slice up a whole set for one group (say, 4 or 5 pages) at the same time - no need to sort them into separate little piles afterwards. I've got some good techniques for guillotines, but I can't work out how to film that on Jing, so you'll have to take my word for it.)

Anyway, here's the film (it's my first attempt at film-making, so excuse me if it's a bit "experimental". You may hear my son playing in the background!):


By the way, the text I used was one from Management Today on 'Offsetting'. If someone tells me how to insert the actual documents into a blog post, I'll upload those too. Cheers.

In defence of course books

The blogosphere seems to be buzzing at the moment with reasons for not liking course books – most notably coming from Kalinago English (here, here and here), but also this wonderful parody of Headway on the TEFL Tradesman (although I’d warn sensitive readers that the humour is very close to the edge). Now, of course there’s plenty wrong with many course books, but that’s the same with any market for goods or services – there are good items and less good items, items of mixed quality and some truly dreadful items. But that doesn’t mean the whole concept is rotten.


Of course I would say that, wouldn’t I? – I’m an editor and writer and I’m seriously hoping course books will one day pay my mortgage and enable me to spend more time at home with my kids (and less time with other people’s kids). But I also think this is very true for me as a teacher … especially as a teacher of business English and ESP.

First of all, there have been some great books. You can read my article about two of my favourite old classics, Business Opportunities and Business Objectives, both by Vicki Hollett, here. What I liked about these books was the way they approached and practised grammar in a very systematic way, with plenty of personalised discussions and role-plays designed to practise whatever grammar point was the focus of the unit. The functional language syllabus was also excellent.

Secondly, and this relates closely to my debate on non-experts in ESP, certain course books have opened up new fields of ESP to non-expert teachers. The best example here is International Legal English, which really did transform the teaching of LE for many many teachers. Where before we had to make do with home-made materials of variable authenticity, quality and usefulness, now we had a solid syllabus and authoritative answers to guide us as teachers. Even more important, we now had realistic situational dialogues to listen to and to use as models for our students’ speaking.

Of course there are flaws in the book (just as there are flaws in BOpps and BObjs) – things that I would have done differently, exercises which don’t work as well as they could, but overall this is an incredibly important book. (Again, I don’t want to sound like a salesman – I know I have a kind of vested interest, having written the teacher’s book – but as a teacher I can’t help comparing the standard of my teaching of legal English before and after ILE was published.)

That was the guiding principal behind the Cambridge English for … series, but again I’m wary of sounding like a salesman.

Now I’ll be the first to admit there’s a lot to be said for course-book-free teaching. (I’ll avoid calling it dogme, because I use this technique as part of a course-book-led syllabus, which I’m sure goes against the dogma of dogme). I had a one-to-one student earlier this year who thrived on long discussions about her work, with error correction and spontaneous input from me. It was very satisfying for both of us. But it only worked because she was an expert in her field (IP law) and a naturally talkative person (also, I humbly admit, it helped that I knew more or less what she was talking about, thanks to my experience in this field, and was able to interact intelligently). It also helped that I always had plenty of teaching materials in my bag ready to use if and when the conversation dried up or stopped being useful.

But that wouldn’t have worked with my other students – my less experienced lawyers, my less talkative one-to-one, my low level group ...

Earlier this year I had two business groups that I was teaching without a course book. For the first few weeks, it was wonderfully liberating for all of us. I had plenty of texts and discussions and home-made exercises and student-generated exercises. But then the courses started to drag … and we all wished we had a course book.

Anyway, for most of my teaching, I need a course book to provide: 

• expertise;
• listenings – semi-authentic situational dialogues;
• language input;
• a springboard for discussions – even lesson-length discussions that go off at a wonderful tangent;
• ideas to practise the language;
• a sense of progress – both for my students and for their employers;
• a sense of structure – a psychological crutch that we were having a course, not just lessons (see my thoughts on DRIFT here);
• and, last but not least, a fall-back, a safety net, for when the ideas run out and you still have 20 minutes to fill.

OK, that last one may come as a shock to certain wonderful teachers, but I’ve had the sick-stomach feeling enough times. My wonderful worksheet, intended to see me through 60 minutes, has limped on for 40 and the students have had enough. Or it was too difficult. Or too easy. It’s at times like these that the trusty course book pops up like a loyal Saint Bernard to rescue you from the deepest, snowiest crevasse.

(Oh no, I’m getting into metaphor. I’m really sorry about that. It won’t happen again.)

Anyway, I’m glad dogme is recognised as a legitimate and solid approach / technique / methodology. I was getting sick of trying to justify to observers and even some students why all my lessons started with about half an hour of student-generated discussion and language work. But I think course books have their place, and would be sorely (Soar-ly? … Oh no, it’s ELT puns now!) missed.

Imagery in Financial English

Have you ever noticed how rich Financial English is in terms of metaphors and imagery? I use metaphors and imagery all the time in my teaching to explain vocabulary, and I consider it to be an incredibly powerful memory tool. I'll tell my story first, and then come back to this important general point.

A few weeks ago, I did a reading text from the BBC on Over-the-Counter Derivatives with several groups of students. I'll admit now that I wasn't very creative with the text - most of the students had forgotten to bring their books (again) and I happened to have the text in my bag. I already knew it well after preparing this Jargonbuster exercise for Professional English Online (PEO). So we just did a predict-read-discuss-vocab lesson. (And you thought I always prepared immaculately polished lessons?)

I should also point out that my students weren't financial experts at all, but all seemed to appreciate this crash course in financial jargon. I also really enjoyed playing the expert: I'm actually pretty clueless about financial English, but I've had to do lots of research for my regular activities and jargonbusters on PEO, so I've started to get a general understanding of the murky world of finance.

It was as I was going through the vocab that I was struck by the beautiful imagery of financial English. Here are the key words from the text, in the order they appear (and I suggest you read the text quickly now before looking at this list). Notice all the pictures I ended up drawing - something I'll comment on at the end.

• Curb: This word originally meant the piece of metal between a horse's teeth, which the rider pulls to slow the horse down. [I drew a picture]. Nowadays curbs refer to anything that slows something down.
• Derivatives: Just as the word 'curb' derives from a piece of metal, derivatives derive from simple financial instruments like mortgages. [At this point I drew a diagram to explain how Collateralized Debt Obligations derive from mortgages - see this posting for the source of this diagram.].
• Over-the-counter derivatives: I explained the difference bewteen over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and prescription drugs, and elicited the parallels in derivatives markets.
• Convergence: I drew arrows to show converge and diverge, and gave examples from the history of languages (e.g. British and American English have been diverging for a long time, but in some ways they are now converging again).
• Regulatory framework: My students know frame as in picture frame, so I first made them think of the framework beneath a skyscraper - all those metal girders beneath the flimsy-looking glass exterior. From there it was easy to get to framework = underlying structure.
• Conduct (= behaviour): They knew conduct as a verb (with the accent on the second syllable), so I started with this. I elicited what you can conduct (e.g. a meeting, research, an orchestra). "What do you think it means if you conduct yourself in a particular way?", I asked. They worked out that it meant behave, so it was a short step from here to the noun (with the accent on the first syllable). For good measure, while we were on the noun, I also elicited professional misconduct and gross misconduct.
• Core problems: I drew an apple core.
• A build-up of sth: I used an exploding pressure cooker as an example.
• Leverage: I drew a picture of a fridge and a stick person (me, of course) trying to lift it. Then I gave my stick-self a crow bar to act as a lever. Suddenly I can lift something very heavy without much effort (shown on the diagram with a big upward arrow and a small downward arrow). This led me to a simple financial example of leverage: using my savings of £10,000 to buy a house worth £1 million. (NB In my dreams!) I then went back to my fridge picture to elicit what might happen if you take leverage too far: your lever breaks and your fridge falls on top of you, just as happened with banks that used too much leverage.
• Shock absorbers: I drew the suspension system in my car.
• Margin: I showed the margin of the page. I then elicited other types of margin, such as a profit margin or a margin of error to show how these could act as shock absorbers.
• Liquidity: I drew some bananas in a food blender (seriously). The bananas are fixed assets, but they can be liquidated  (well, actually liquidised, but I figured the financial term took priority over the cooking term) i.e. turned into banana milkshake (= cash) quite easily. I then drew a coconut - another fixed asset, but one which can't be liquidated so easily. So liquidity is the extent to which our assets are like bananas rather than like coconuts - how easy is it to turn them into milkshake (cash). You face a liquidity squeeze if your assets are long-term things like a house with a mortgage (which you can't just sell tomorrow to pay your short-term debts). Liquidity is another type of shock absorber.
• Cushions: I elicited a situation where a cushion could act as a shock absorber (e.g. if someone punches you, a cushion might make it hurt a bit less).
• To withstand sth: I drew a stick man trying to stand despite strong wind - to withstand the force of the wind. Then I related this back to the punching-a-cushion image - it's easier to withstand being hit in the face if you have a cushion. (Sorry for the silly imagery - the important thing is that it should be powerful and memorable, not necessarily realistic or pleasant).
• To contain a risk: I used the image of a hospital trying to contain an outbreak of a nasty stomach bug, by isolating the ward and imposing tight controls on people coming and going.

And that's it. You can imagine what my sheet of paper looked like by the end of the lesson, with a car, a blender, a horse, an apple ...

Anyway, the point of all this isn't just to teach you some financial jargon (for which I would refer you to a good dictionary rather than listening to me!) or even to show how to teach these particular words. Rather, I wanted to hammer home the importance of imagery as a teaching tool. All of those pictures I drew were quite time consuming, and in terms of getting the message across, probably unnecessary. But in terms of making them memorable, I think they're well worth it. An abstract concept like core or withstand is very difficult to learn unless you can attach it to a picture. And as I hinted above, the pictures may be silly, unpleasant, weird ... but as long as they're memorable, they're great. Ideally, they should be personalised too, so I used my car, my mortgage, someone punching you in the face, which is much more memorable than simply any old stick man.

The same goes for the words I explained without pictures. I think there's a fair chance my students will remember the chain from conDUCT a meeting through conDUCT yourself well to a code of CONduct and then gross misCONduct. Even if they don't remember it consciously, next time they see a word and momentarily wonder what it means, it may trigger a memory deep within their subconscious.

So today's tip is: make vocab memorable through imagery, metaphors and chains.

PS I promised a few months ago to tell you when my lesson on financial English videos was available. Well, it's here. If you try it with your class I'd love to hear how you get on.

PPS By coincidence, Karenne Sylvester has also been writing about images in financial English, and she seems to have spent a lot longer preparing her lesson than I ever do. [I thought she was supposed to be into dogme ...?] Anyway, you could use Karenne's techniques with my article, or the other way round, or both ...

Fun with contracts

I've just finished a 3-day teacher training course - Teaching Legal English - which went very well, but which completely took over my week. (Apparently it's been hot and sunny ...)

One of the great things about teacher training is that it forces you to hunt back through your old materials from years ago, looking for inspiration. This week I stumbled across some work I did about 5 years ago, when I first got involved in legal English. Like most materials writers, I tend to dismiss my old work as hopelessly naive and embarrassing, but revisiting old stuff can remind you that it wasn't so bad after all.

Anyway, the materials I found related to extracts from contracts - how to understand them and how to write them.

The first exercise is about commas: students have to draw lines to show relations between different types of commas: list commas (e.g. A, B and C) and enclosing commas (e.g. ... including, but not limited to, the following ...).

Sorry if you can't read it clearly - I've copied the text below this paragraph just in case. Anyway, the point is, when you've done the intial matching, you find you're left with about 4 commas that don't match up with anything ... or rather they match up with each other over long distances. In the above extract, for example, the comma before "in each case" leads all the way back to the one after "expenses", 5 lines above. This sort of untangling exercise REALLY helps me to understand the complex relationships within monster sentences like the one above. So I guess they should help students too, not only when reading such sentences but also when drafting their own.

(a) The Partnership shall indemnify, to the fullest extent permitted by law, the General Partner and its officers, directors, employees, partners and agents ("Indemnified Parties") from and against all costs and expenses, including attorneys' fees, judgments, fines, settlements and/or liabilities incurred by or imposed upon any Indemnified Party in connection with, or resulting from, investigating, preparing or defending any action, suit or proceeding, whether civil, criminal, legislative or otherwise (or any appeal thereof), to which any Indemnified Party may be made a party or become otherwise involved or with which any Indemnified Party may be threatened, in each case by reason of, or in connection with, the Indemnified Party being or having been associated with or otherwise acting for the Partnership, or having acted as a director, officer, employee, partner or agent of any Entity in which the Partnership had invested, or by reason of any action or alleged action, omission or alleged omission by any Indemnified Party in any such capacity, provided that the Indemnified Party is not ultimately adjudged to have engaged in gross negligence or wilful misconduct, and provided further that the Indemnified Party acted in a manner that he reasonably believed to be in, or not opposed to, the best interests of the Partnership.

Before I move on, did you notice the mistake in the above clause? I'll tell you at the end. (It's very satisfying when a mere English teacher can find holes in an apparently beautifully-crafted legal text.)

OK, here's the next one:

Students have to complete the boxes, using this sentence from a contract:

During the course of your employment and following termination of your employment for any reason, you are required not to use, reproduce or disclose to any person, firm or company any information coming into your knowledge or possession which relates to the affairs or the business of Shark or any client or to the work performed by you, …

Again, this is really useful for understanding complex relationships within long sentences. (Speaking of which, can you spot the mistake when I made this 5 years ago?) Once the diagram's complete, of course, you can also get students to cover the text and recreate it orally or in writing using only the diagram. As a follow-up, get students to create their own diagram of a different sentence. And then get them to draw a diagram using their imaginations (based on, say, a role play) and then use the diagram to write a perfect sentence/clause. Fantastic!

The third example is very similar to the last one, but the answers are already filled in.

Again, here's the sentence it was based on:

C. The Company possesses, and will continue to possess, information that has been created, discovered or developed by, or otherwise become known to, the Company (including, without limitation, information created, discovered, developed or made known by me during the period of or arising out of my employment by the Company, whether before or after the date hereof) or in which property rights have been or may be assigned or otherwise conveyed to the Company, which information has commercial value in the business in which the Company is engaged and is treated by the Company as confidential.

How about cutting it up (each box on a separate slip of paper) and giving students some string and glue, as well as the original paragraph, so they have to physically move the pieces of paper around and show the relationships with string ...

A bit too TEFLy, perhaps ... but let me know if you try it (or any of the other activities)!

OK, I promised to tell you about the mistake in the first contract clause. It's here:

... any action, suit or proceeding, ... to which any Indemnified Party may be made a party or become otherwise involved or with which any Indemnified Party may be threatened ...

There's a mix-up with prepositions: party to, OK, threatened with, OK, but involved to?

As for the second exercise, my mistake was to have the 'why' arrow pointing from the wrong box. For whatever reason relates to termination of your employment, and not, as I've shown it, required not to. Oh well, you live and learn ...

One last thing: the contracts all come from http://www.onecle.com/, a fantastic free source of thousands of authentic contracts and legal documents.

A wish-list for ESP course design

Over the last 6 months I've done lots of presentations to promote the books in the ESP series I edit, Cambridge English for ..., which were launched at the BESIG conference last November. (In case you haven't noticed them yet, they're on proud display down the side of this blog).

Mostly these presentations have been on the topic of finding out and providing exactly what ESP students need. I built the presentations around the idea that there are some quick and easy (Q&E) techniques for ESP course design (e.g. creating a lesson out of a text from the internet), and there are other techniques for designing more useful and authentic materials (e.g. creating a credible dialogue to introduce and teach essential functional language for a given area of ESP). Unfortunately, these are much more difficult and time-consuming to produce, which is why I call them wish-list techniques, i.e. things we as teachers would love to do for our students if we had all the time and energy in the world.

So it may come as a surprise to anyone who saw my presentations that, so far, the lesson ideas in this blog have been from the Q&E side.

The reason is simple: most of the lessons that I write for my own teaching are actually very quick and easy to produce. I seem to be permanently rushing around, juggling with scary deadlines and trying to squeeze in a bit of quality time with my children, so I don't often have the luxury of spending four hours to create a one-hour lesson.

That's where the books come in - the ideal ESP book should, in my opinion, provide all those wish-list things like authentic and useful dialogues, leaving me as a teacher to supplement it with Q&E topical and personalised materials for my students. That at least has been one of the guiding principle behind the Cambridge English for ... series.

I'll try to work my way through some of the techniques from both sides over the coming months in this blog. There are quite a lot of them - my BESIG presentation had over 100 slides, which I tried to squeeze into a 45-minute presentation. (Yes, I know that was a silly thing to do).

But expect to see quite a few Q&E lesson ideas too - every time I create something for my students I'll blog about it.

In the meantime, I'll hand over to you. What's on your wish-list? What would you love to do with your ESP students, if only you had the time?