The shopping for the dinner party takes time and can be a bit boring or frustrating if you can’t find what you need or the weather is bad or your car breaks down on the way to the market, but these things are all part of the job.
The cooking itself also takes time and there is a great deal of skill involved in getting everything right. The chef needs to consider whether the different dishes compliment each other. Is there a good balance between the different food groups? Are baked beans really necessary? The chef also, of course, needs to know how to cook the food and how to organise the whole event. He/she must think of the cooking time, the seasoning, the presentation, the table decoration. Should it be starter, main course, cheese, dessert, or would the guests prefer starter, main course, dessert, cheese? (My wife and I argue about this on a more or less weekly basis. Personally, I think the cheese should come before the desert, but she just won’t have it. I have to admit, I really do enjoy squabbling about such details).

And let’s not forget the importance of a good aperitif before the meal (in my humble opinion, you can’t beat a gin and tonic with ice and lemon, but I am aware that this is not to everyone’s taste) and then there is the issue of finding just the right wine to go with each course: a chilled, crisp Austrian white with the starter? A full bodied French with the main course? What about a sneaky Californian rose somewhere, when no one is paying attention? It depends, of course, on what the chef cooks, but a professional chef will usually be able to offer some pretty good advice on this, if he/she is worth his/her salt.

Once the guests have the food, the chef can take a step back and leave them to get on with the, hopefully pleasurable, business of eating. It can be helpful if the chef is around to deal with any questions about the food, but if the guests are happily eating, they can be left alone to enjoy the experience. The chef doesn’t necessarily need to tell them how to eat. Of course, this can depend a bit on the food. If the chef cooks something really exotic, the guests may need guidance on how to eat it (I am thinking of that Japanese fish dish that can kill you if you eat it the wrong way. This is definitely not what you want at a dinner party). Anyway, the chef can hang around to give expert advice or direction if needed, but hopefully, once the chef has shown the guests once or twice, or better still, guided them in such a way that they were able to discover it for themselves, the guests can manage on their own thereafter. If the guests dribble some sauce down their chins, they don’t need the chef to wipe their faces; they can sort things like that out for themselves, at least most of the time. It can certainly be helpful though if the chef is on hand to deal with questions or unexpected problems. For example, maybe a vegetarian guest needs to be reassured that his/her food contains no animal products, or maybe a Muslim guest needs reassurance that there is no pork on the menu, or maybe a guest is just interested in how the food was prepared or where the chef bought the spices and just really wants to know more. A good chef will willingly encourage such curiosity.

The chef is there if needed, but doesn’t intrude without good reason.
The chef can serve dessert and maybe chat with the guests over cognac (something else a good chef knows a lot about), thus giving the guests the opportunity to give the chef some feedback. He/she could also answer some general questions about cooking, maybe give some tips on where to purchase good ingredients and what to look for when buying fresh produce, or maybe expound at length on the importance of making fresh, homemade stock if you want to make good sauces or soups (my advice is use lots of bones, carrots, celery and a leek and never let it boil, just simmer gently for a few hours, but it is not the only way).
Perhaps the most positive aspect of the whole evening could turn out to be that the chef’s enthusiasm and obvious love of food and his/her inspirational cooking motivates the guests to experiment themselves in the kitchen, to try things out just to see if they work, and to learn to not get upset when they don’t, but to take real pleasure when they do.

But a good chef knows that he/she is not always needed that much during the meal itself. The guests can eat on their own, as long as they more or less recognise what is on the plate or in the bowl and know how to use a knife and fork or chopsticks (depending, of course, on what has been cooked. Sometimes your hands are sufficient).

However, when the meal is finished, someone needs to clean up afterwards. In my house, when I cook, I clean up. It is part of the job as far as I am concerned. I sometimes think that it would be nice to pay a cleaner to do this dirty work, but, you know, it is my kitchen and I know where everything goes and I would hate it if a cleaner broke the expensive wine glasses I bought in Alsace. Similarly, I would never trust anyone to go to the market to do the shopping for me when I am cooking. I need to be involved, hands on, at all stages of the process. But I also need to know when to stand back and let the guests enjoy the food.

And if I have to cook for the same people the next day, I need to start planning again, thinking about what would best compliment the food I cooked today.

In my last posts, I have suggested that correcting students when they are speaking can be quite a negative thing to do. However, as already mentioned, I am not suggesting that errors should be totally ignored, but students need helpful, supportive feedback on their experiments with the foreign language, not judgmental correction.

In their excellent book, ‘Correction’, Bartram and Walton recommend the use of reformulation when dealing with student errors. Reformulation is a way of providing learners with feedback on their language output without overtly correcting and drawing attention to errors. It reflects real interaction in that the teacher is, in some respects, negotiating meaning with the learner. An exchange might go as follows:

St. I have gone to England for last holiday.
T: You went to England! Great. Where did you stay exactly?
St. First we were in the near of London, then in Hastings.
T. Near London? Where exactly?
St. Richmond. We have stayed by a English family.
T You stayed with an English family, so you had to speak English all the time! Excellent! Was it difficult?
St. It was not so easy. Many new words.
T. But did you have a nice time?
St. Yes, very nice. England is nice. The food was fantastic and the weather was warm and sunny.

Reformulation depends on two important principles:

• Progress in language learning is gradual and often indirect. Learning takes place in many different ways, and not only when the teacher is explicitly teaching.

• Learners will make more progress if they are interested and actively involved in the subject matter.

It the teacher responds in a natural manner to a learner’s linguistic output, reformulating selectively, the interaction becomes real and meaningful. At the same time, the learners are receiving indirect feedback on their linguistic output, whilst communicating successfully. The negative aspect of overt error correction is considerably lessened, yet the learners are being exposed to desirable language models.

I try to get my students actively participating in communicative activities in pairs and groups as often as I possibly can, and as long as they are speaking English, I don’t correct their mistakes. However, I do walk around with a notebook in my hand, jotting down any problems or persistent errors that I hear, and I give the students feedback on these points sometime later, either after the activity or in the next lesson. There is no need at all to point out which students made the mistakes. I just go over some points, and no one gets any negative feedback. Another technique I like to use is to write a list of sentences, some of which contain errors the students made and some of which are correct, and ask the students to go through them in small groups and try to find and correct the mistakes. Then I do a class round up, inputting as needs require.

As far as I am concerned, grammatical errors are a perfectly acceptable price to pay if my students are communicating in English.

I agree with Michael Lewis that successful language use, rather than accurate language use, is a much more useful, and indeed realistic, aim of language teaching. It is possible to communicate very successfully in a language while being inaccurate with grammatical structures. On the other hand, a knowledge of how to form a grammatically correct sentence does not, in itself, mean that a speaker can communicate effectively.

In respect of language learning, I am convinced that any behaviour on the part of the teacher which discourages the students from hypothesising about the language, from trying things out, from taking risks, is seriously detrimental to the learning process and therefore has no place in a classroom.

If you want your students to speak, give them time and space to do so and thus develop as learners and develop their speaking skills. If they are trying to communicate in English, don’t worry, be happy.

That’s all for now. Have a good week.

Phil

How often do you correct your students  when they make mistakes when speaking? What do you hope to achieve by correcting them?  In a nutshell, what is the point of correcting?

These may seem silly and obvious questions, but here is another question for you; why should students speak without making mistakes?  Do native speakers always produce grammatically correct sentences? ‘No’ is the short answer. In their excellent book, ‘Correction’, Bartram and Walton ask an interesting question: Is language a means of communicating or a system to be studied with no relation to real life at all?  This is something Williams and Burden go into in some detail in ‘Psychology for Language Learners’. Here is a snippet:

There is no question that learning a foreign language is different to learning other subjects, mainly because of the social nature of such a venture. Language, after all, belongs to a person’s whole social being; it is part of one’s identity, and is used to convey this identity to other people.

Learning a language sure as hell is not the same as learning mathematics; 2 + 2 = 4, and not 5 or 3 or anything else. It simply has to equal 4, and it is useless if a learner makes it equal something else. But language is not like this; spoken language can be nearly right, and many structural errors have little, and often no, effect on the communication process.

So, why do teachers correct, and what do they hope to achieve by it?

Many teachers, I suspect, correct reflex fashion; they hear an error and automatically correct without really thinking about why or how they are doing it. That’s how our teachers taught  after all, so that’s how it works. It may never have occurred to some teachers that there may be good reasons not to correct students. Some teachers feel they need to correct because that’s their job, and they do not want to give the impression of not doing their job properly. Some teachers correct because students  expect them to. And there are, unfortunately, a few teachers who use correction as a weapon, a way of exerting their authority on the class. This is tantamount to abuse of power in my opinion.

Many committed, well-intentioned teachers correct because they think their students  will learn from it. But do learners learn a language as a result of being corrected? Just think of how often you have corrected students who failed to use our beloved third person ‘s’. How many of your students continue to make this mistake, despite being corrected several million times? And how many teachers are reduced to pulling their hair out and banging their heads violently against the nearest wall in suicidal frustration because students persist in making this ‘stupid’ mistake. Maybe, just maybe, asking ourselves why they continue to make such a mistake might be more useful than constantly correcting it and foaming at the mouth with rage.

So, do students learn as a result of being corrected? Well, it is pretty doubtful. I don’t know of any research evidence that indicates that they do. In fact, I would argue that in many situations correcting can have an adverse effect on the learning process and is, therefore, absolutely the WRONG thing to do.

No matter how well-intentioned the teacher may be, correction is, fundamentally, a negative feedback. It is a message to the student that they have got it wrong. They have failed. Again! It is a constant reminder of how much they don’t know. Over a period of years, negative feedback is a disaster for the learner.

If students  are afraid to take risks when speaking a foreign language, they are not likely to learn very much. It is hard to learn a language, there is no doubt about it, and students have to feel safe and good in the learning environment if they are to be successful:

Students need to feel – no, they need to know – that it is  perfectly acceptable to try things out, make mistakes, and then try again. They are unlikely to feel okay about trying things out if they have to live with the constant fear of negative feedback in the form of correction. They are more likely to play it safe, saying as little as possible, and saying things they know for sure are correct:

Correcting a student who is speaking is negative for a number of reasons. It focuses on what the student got wrong and ignores any positives. “I buyed a coat yesterday” is a sentence which contains one small, (although perfectly logical) error, but which otherwise appears to indicate the  student actually knows how to form regular simple past forms, to use the simple past when referring to finished time as well as indicating a good understanding of the conventions regarding  word order in English. The student obviously does not know everything about the simple past, but then again one’s knowledge of a foreign language is always incomplete, no matter how long one studies or lives in the country.

I am  trying to make a simple point. In the above example there is considerably more that is right and  positive, than is wrong. But if the teacher automatically corrects the one error that the student makes, then the only feedback that the student is getting is negative. Furthermore, the teacher is giving the student another message, namely “I am not interested in what you actually say, only in how you say it” or “I am not listening to you, only your language.”

A key concept of the communicative approach is that learners learn largely through the process of struggling to communicate, by solving communication problems in the target language. If the teacher interrupts a student during this process with correction, then the learning process itself has been disturbed at a critical moment.

I think all of us teachers need to remind ourselves of the importance of this notion. The point of the classroom is that the learners learn things and develop their potential. Everything the teacher does should be directed towards this.

However, I am not suggesting that errors should be totally ignored, but students need helpful, supportive feedback on their experiments with the foreign language, not judgemental correction.

That’s all for now. Have a good week.

Phil

Red Card/Green Card
I mentioned above that it is important the teacher knows if the speaking activity they want to do in class is accuracy focussed or fluency focussed, as the role of the teacher changes dramatically as a result. However, it is equally important that the students know the difference too. Therefore, it is really necessary to explain to the learners that some activities focus on form and during such activities they will be corrected, and that some activities focus on fluency and communication, in which case the teacher will not correct their mistakes. One way I thought of making this easily clear to students is to use a card system in the manner of a football referee, as football is something pretty much everyone can identify with (which, tragically, and despite my best efforts, is just not the case with cricket).
Here is how it works. When you introduce an accuracy activity, once the students have understood what they have to do, hold up a red card, like a football referee, and tell the students something along the lines of:
‘This is a red activity. Red means STOP and THINK about the grammar because I am going to correct you if you make a mistake’.
When you do a fluency activity, hold up a green card and say something like:
‘This is a green activity. Green means GO! Talk, talk talk! As long as you are speaking English I am going to leave you alone. Now, GO!’.
With this system, the students know what is expected of them, which creates a feeling of security. In a green activity they know they can relax and try to express themselves without the stress of constantly being corrected. Hopefully, this creates a much more positive learning environment and a more positive attitude towards the target language.

That’s all for now.

Have a good week.

Phil

These activities have little to do with communication. They are about form and structure. That is not to say they are useless. They still have a place in the language classroom. (Hopefully, however, a significantly smaller place than was previously the case).

Fluency activities, on the other hand, are concerned with developing learners’ communication skills and the interaction can be student-student and student-teacher. Fluency activities frequently do not involve finding a correct answer. They focus on the process rather than the product. How you get there is more important than what you find when you get there. They are about doing the activity, not finding the correct answer.

Communicative language teaching has traditionally divided fluency activities into information gap, reasoning gap and opinion gap activities. Anyone who has ever used a course book knows information gap activities. Student A gets one set of information, student B another set, and the teacher sets a task which requires them to exchange this information. These activities are fine as far as they go, and are very important at lower levels, but as one gets to intermediate and above, I think their value is somewhat diminished. Ultimately, it is a fake communication. The students are like actors performing roles and do not communicate anything of real significance.

Reasoning gap activities involve students attempting to solve problems in groups. However, the problems are not to do with language, but with logic or reasoning or social awareness. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter at all if the students are able to solve the problem or not. It only matters that they have to communicate in the target language in order to attempt to solve it. These activities can be very useful indeed and students frequently enjoy them enormously.

Opinion gap activities require students to tell each other what they really think about a given topic. By answering a questionnaire or asking and answering questions on cards, the students get the opportunity to say what they really think about something, to discuss a topic in depth and to express their emotions. The teacher may need to pre-teach certain vocabulary items and/or a specific structure, but once the activity begins, it is up to the students to express themselves.

By far and away, the best book of opinion gap activities is ‘In My Opinion’ written by, well, me actually

Have a look here if you have nothing better to do:

http://www.prolinguaassociates.com/In_My_Opinion/index.html

Actually, the reason I wrote the book was because I really do believe in this type of activity. I also believe strongly that getting the students to speak about topics that are meaningful and relevant to them is the best way of getting them to speak the target language.

Anyway, that is all for this week.

Have a good week.

Best

Phil

Speaking in a foreign language is difficult. Getting to an advanced level of oral ability in a foreign language takes a lot of time and is, for most people, very hard work. This contrasts sharply with the incredible ease with which we pick up our mother tongue. I find it quite astonishing that little children, who are not able to perform simple arithmetic, have no capacity for logical argument and who certainly can’t understand the rules of cricket, can nevertheless communicate effectively in a highly complex language system. And some can even do it in more than one. My wife is Turkish and we have several little nieces in Vienna, who are all fluent in both German and Turkish. It never ceases to amaze me that they seem to have no problem dealing with these two entirely different and extremely complex languages, never seem to mix them up and never get confused about which language to speak to whom. And these little girls have managed this without labouring over grammar exercises, memorising vocabulary lists or being forced to take tests.

Acquisition and learning
Obviously we acquire our mother tongues rather than learn them. The ability to acquire language at a remarkably young age is a fundamental human instinct, perhaps the most important difference between us and our closest relatives, chimpanzees.
Foreign languages, on the other hand, usually have to be learnt in a formal setting, and the process is time consuming, difficult and often frustrating, but, and this is the good part, it keeps me and, seeing that you are reading this, I guess you too, in work.
Why is speaking a foreign language so difficult?
Speaking involves the ability to accurately express ideas within a particular social context. In other words, being able to find both the right language for the message we wish to convey and the right way of saying it for the particular social situation we find ourselves in. We need to find the words, then use the grammar to move the words around, and then adjust for appropriacy. There is a world of difference between ‘pass the salt’ and ‘could you possibly be so kind as to pass the salt please, if it is not too much trouble’, although the function (i.e. the reason why the sentence was uttered in the first place) is pretty much the same.

Another problem is time pressure, and this is a major difference between speaking and most forms of writing. When we write something, we usually have time to think about what we want to write. We can re-read and correct our text, and we can check reference books and so on.
When we speak, on the other hand, we have to make split second decisions on a whole range of factors. Most speaking is a response to something said, which means we have to perceive the sounds directed at us and recognise them as language. We then have to decode the message, i.e. what was said, and then we have to understand the function, i.e. why it was said, and then we have to gauge the tone, i.e. how it was said. Then we have to decide how we feel about all of that and decide on our response, in respect of both what we want to say and how we want to say it, and then we have to find the language for this response and then produce the necessary sounds to utter that response in such a way that the other person can make sense of it. And all of this has to take place within a second or two, otherwise people will either get bored or think we are weird. Or both. And if we do manage to do it, it is very likely that another utterance will come back at us and the whole business will start all over again. Furthermore, all of these split second decisions and reactions take place within the framework of highly complex language systems, involving, depending on the language, tenses, cases, articles, prepositions, idioms, word order rules, forms of address, inflections…..Well, I think you get the point.

If you stop and consider all the things we have to be able to deal with in order for oral interaction to work, it seems pretty amazing that the idea ever took off in the first place. I can well imagine that at some point it might have crossed the minds of our ancestors that maybe sitting in trees, eating bananas and grunting hadn’t really been so bad after all. But by then, of course, it was too late: mobile phones had been invented.

So, speaking a foreign language is difficult, no doubt about it. In the next posts, I will write more on this topic.

Have a good week.

Phil

So, why have I started this? Well, recently I discovered, quite by accident, that the domain name www.philkeegan.com had, very much to my surprise, not been taken by anyone and so I immediately bought it, without having any idea at all what I would do with it. It was a bit like looking at a new gadget or a new pair of shoes in a shop window and just knowing that you had to have it/them. Then I started wondering what to do with this domain and, well, this was all I could come up with. In the meantime, I am really hoping that this blog and the forum will develop into a centre for happy and enthusiastic debate about the world of ELT.
As for me, as I mention on the webpage, I have been in the ELT business for 25 years all told, and I still really like it. I am a teacher, teacher trainer, writer and also have a fair bit of school management experience. In the future I would like to concentrate my efforts on teacher training, academic management and writing. I have a couple of book projects in the pipeline and hope to see them through to publication in the next couple of years. Watch this space.
The question I want to raise today is, how important are teachers?
I am going to say something about my experience of teachers.
In 1971, at the age of 11, when I started secondary school, I thought the most exciting thing in the world (well, the second most exciting thing after watching Bobby Charlton play football for Manchester United) was to learn foreign languages. My school only offered French and my goodness I was desperate to learn it. My French teachers could not possibly have had a more motivated student than me, but, in a fairly short space of time, they managed to completely kill my interest with their dull, monotonous, learning by rote, never actually speaking the language teaching. After a couple of years of truly atrocious teaching, I had lost all interest in learning French or any other foreign languages. Looking back, I think this was practically criminal. To be honest, I was sent to catholic secondary school and the teachers were primarily concerned with brainwashing us into becoming good, obedient catholics rather than with giving us a decent education. I can only remember one good teacher at secondary school. Appropriately enough it was my English teacher, Miss Barry, whose love for and knowledge of English literature was delightful (She also always liked my stories and essays, so she was clearly a woman of refined taste! ).
I got out of catholic school as soon as I could, which was when I was 16, and went to a local college to do A levels. I was determined not to study French anymore, but, to my great annoyance, I got stuck with it because of a timetabling quirk. And, what do you know, I found myself in the classroom of a brilliant French teacher, Madame Noel. This tall, skinny French lady with a big nose managed, in a very short space of time, to undo all the damage done by my secondary school French teachers and bring back my innate love of languages. Talk about amazing luck. I will never forget this lady and I wish I knew where she now lives so I could thank her properly.
Madame Noel was the first teacher I had who made foreign language learning fun. She was nice, she was witty, she treated us as intelligent human beings and, shock of all shocks, she spoke French to us! I couldn’t believe it. My French teachers at school never spoke French unless they were conducting one of their interminable and tedious drills or reading loud from the text book. Madame Noel spoke to us in French, greeted us in French, told jokes in French, told us off in French. This was a serious shock I can tell you.
Mainly because of Madame Noel, I went on to study Humanities at what was then called Huddersfield Polytechnic (now the University of Huddersfield), majoring in French with Politics as my minor. My secondary school education had been poor, catastrophic even, but Huddersfield Poly was fantastic. There were a lot of young (well, youngish) highly motivated teachers, and the atmosphere was stimulating and challenging. Some of my teachers’ names stay with me till today – David Loosely, Marie Cheetham, Jean-Claude Aragon, Glynn Williams in the French department; Tony Payne and Andy Taylor in politics. These teachers really challenged us. They were provocative and probing and, more than anything else, they insisted that we thought for ourselves, that we formed our own opinions and hypothesizes and learnt to defend them. Great, great teachers, every one of them, and I wanted to be like them.
When I finished my degree in 1984, I wanted to do a PhD and got accepted at a couple of places, but for financial reasons I couldn’t manage it. Shame really, I think I would have made a pretty good fist of it.
So, what did I do? Well, I knew that I wanted to travel and learn other languages. The great holy grail of TEFL was standing there, welcoming me with open arms, and into the arms I fell.
And it hasn’t been at all bad really. I have worked in England, the USA, Germany, France, Turkey and Austria.
During all this, in 1993, I got the chance to study again, I was working at International House Hastings (which, tragically, is no more) and was able to do my RSA Diploma there too (it is usually called the DELTA these days). This was a huge turning point in my life. I got lucky once again and had two inspiring, brilliant teachers, Jim Scrivener and Allan Bramall. I also worked with a truly amazing bunch of colleagues and it was here that I also started working as a teacher trainer. It was a massive stroke of luck that I ended up at IH Hastings and I can’t really imagine what would have become of me professionally if I had not spent this time there.
It was at IH Hastings that I was introduced to humanistic psychology and the works of Carl Rogers. This was another massive shock to my system. If you don’t know Rogers’ work, I really recommend Freedom to Learn and On Becoming a Person. This guy was a real genius. I think that the whole idea of student centred learning comes from his work and I really cannot over estimate the influence these books have had on me as a teacher and, indeed, as a human being.
From there, I have always been interested in psychology and humanistic thinking and have read many great books. One that I always recommend is by Irish psychologist (and former teacher) Tony Humphreys. It is called A Different Kind of Teacher. I really think every single teacher in the world should read this book. One sentence from this book could really sum up my philosophy of teaching:
How you teach is at least as important as what you teach.

So, how important are teachers? I might be somewhat biased, having spent half of my life teaching, but I would say they are damn important. Look what Madame Noel did for me! After five years of hell at secondary school, she brought back my love and fascination for foreign languages. My teachers at Huddersfield Poly and my Diploma tutors at IH Hastings inspired, challenged and motivated me to become a lifelong learner – something I still consider myself to be. What I really remember from these great teachers is the tremendous enthusiasm they displayed for their subject matter and, indeed, for the classroom itself. They wanted to be in the classroom; it was/is their domain. Furthermore, I, the student, wanted to be there too. I looked forward to the lessons and felt invigorated and inspired by them.
I really don’t know at all where I would be today if I had not had the incredible luck to have sat in the classrooms of these amazing teachers. I will be grateful to them all till my last day.
Thanks for reading.
Have a good week.
Phil

I am planning to blog about all aspects of ELT as and when the mood takes me and I hope you find something useful and/or entertaining here….if not, well, it didn’t hurt, did it?

There should soon be a forum where you can initiate discussions.

That’s it for now……things are still somewhat in the baby stage, so be patient please.

Talk to you soon.

Phil