New English360 video

Some time ago, when I got my new job at English360, I promised to explain what it is and how it works. Predictably, I've been far too busy to blog (still am, but I'm hoping to be a lot less busy in the new year), so I never had the time. Fortunately, though, this nice new video has just been released which sums it up pretty neatly.



I'll be back in the new year with solid evidence of the work I've been doing - ten new books, at last count, mostly due out in 2011 - to prove I'm not just a lazy blogger!

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

Factory tour

I spent most of the first half of my teaching career in factories, including half a year in a paper factory (where they turned trees into boxes) and three and a half years in a cigarette factory.

That was where I first got into ESP, although at the time I didn't know there was a name for what I was doing.

In the very early days, I had one-to-one lessons with the Health and Safety Manager, so every lesson we used to go through her huge H&S Manual (which was in English) and see where it would take us. I called that course English for Health and Safety. I did something similar with a group of accountants preparing for their ACCA exams (English for Finance) and the team of junior managers who were being trained in their new SAP computer system in English (English for SAP Coordinators).

A bit more sophisticated was my first course on sales, English for Regional Sales Managers, where I actually wrote some of my own materials, and English for Company Chauffeurs (for the A1-level drivers who ferried VIPs around and needed to say "Let me help you with your bag" instead of "Give me bag!"). My final course in the cigarette factory, English for Production Trainers, was my most ambitious. The students were the factory's top engineers who had become trainers within the factory and were being groomed to train in other factories around the world. In English, of course.

So at the end of my stint in the factory, I had a pretty impressive ESP CV (although the names for my courses didn't show much imagination - a tradition I'm pleased to say has continued with the series I edit for Cambridge University Press). But in fact the courses in those days were based on the simplest of teaching techniques. One of my favourite such techniques was the fabulous Factory Tour.

Basically, this involved the student(s) showing me round their part of the factory and explaining everything in English. ... er ... and that's it. Of course I did error correction and noted useful new vocab, but otherwise there was no input from me. What I loved about the tours (apart from the fact that I could get away with a whole lesson with no preparation) was that I got to know the factory really well - better in fact than most of the employees. When you've been shown the same machine by a production manager, an accountant, the H&S manager, an engineer and the factory boss, you get a really deep understanding of how everything works.

But there was always the nagging feeling that I should be providing more input, rather than just correcting the output. At the end of last year, I stumbled across a video of an authentic factory tour on the BBC news website - well, actually it was a tour of a TV recycling plant, but the language of the tour is what I was interested in. So I set about analysing the language of describing processes as part of a factory tour. Here's what I came up with:

a. What you can see here is the conveyor belt which takes the circuit board away.
b. Over here is where the glass is cut and dropped down a chute.
c. What we do here is we use a rotary diamond blade to separate the back glass, containing lead, from the front glass, which has some hazardous coatings.
d. What happens next is the TV yokes are sent to another specialist recycling plant.
e. What we have to do next is separate the glass section from all the other components.
f. This is where the old televisions are brought in to the plant.
g. What’s going on here is the televisions are taken apart.

So lots of great what-clefting, as well as a few more such introductory phrases - phrases which focus the listener's attention, and allow the main content of the utterance to come at the end, where it'll be more prominent. What-clefting is one of my favourite grammar structures: once you start noticing it, it's everywhere.

Anyway, you can find my activity on Recycling Televisions here, and the BBC clips here and here. You don't actually need internet access in the classroom to try the activity - and you don't need to be in a factory. If you do use this lesson, I'd love to hear how you get on with it.

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.