Daniel Barber, Lewis Lansford, Amanda Jeffries
National Geographic Learning 2017
Food is a ubiquitous coursebook topic, so how can we direct students away from the safety net of kitchen, supermarket and restaurant? The answer in Perspectives, a new four-level series for secondary level, is to focus on a more interesting angle, like robot chefs, street food and weekday vegetarianism.
Perspectives looks like its cousin, Keynote, with arresting photos that we have come to expect from National Geographic publications. There are some sumptuous pictures sure to spark discussion (students in Colombia crossing the Rio Negro canyon using cables to get to school; young men chatting in the Sarawat Mountains, Saudi Arabia; the Train Night Market, Bangkok), all of which give the book a crossing-continents feel. The book sticks to just text and photos: there are no distracting cartoons, pie charts, speech bubbles, infographics or variations in font style and size, so the pages look clean and crisp.
The course aims to explore one theme in each unit from a variety of perspectives in fresh contexts, to ‘develop an open mind, a critical eye and a clear voice in English’, and to ‘look at the world in new ways so that they leave every lesson a little smarter’. Real-world stories are of innovative companies or people, such as Bradley Garrett, an extreme urban adventurer who risks all for the right to roam. He has climbed to the top of The Shard in London and visited all of the capital’s 14 abandoned underground stations.
Tasks which ask students to question what they hear and read, to detect bias, to respond to statements and to evaluate information have been included. With reading texts, a Critical Thinking box encourages such skills as reading between the lines or drawing conclusions; students are urged to check that statistics are from a reliable source and to interpret data for themselves before they listen or read in real life. The Challenge activities following the TED Talk videos (a feature of this series and the Keynote series) are ‘open-ended exercises that go beyond the page’. Students are nudged towards deeper thinking with such questions as Has adversity helped you become who you are? and Tell your partner what you are procrastinating about and why.
The ‘clear voice’ mentioned above is rather prosaically addressed as ‘helping students with pronunciation’, although this is then expanded to the idea of independent learning (dictionary use) and making them expand answers or exemplify during class feedback.
As well as its ten units, there are word lists for each unit, a writing bank with model texts, an irregular verbs list and a grammar reference section. Each unit comprises vocabulary, listening, reading, two grammar points, a TED Talk, speaking and writing. Lesson A deals with vocabulary, plus listening, plus the first grammar point and covers a pretty solid three pages in all. Lesson B focuses on reading, Lesson C addresses the second grammar point, Lesson D is the TED Talk, and Lesson E covers speaking and writing. The lessons are united by the same overarching theme, and these range from Feelings (Unit 1) to Time (Unit 10), with Travel, Sports, Food, Work, Body, Shopping, Communication and Entertainment along the way. Standard B1 fodder, yes, but with a more global perspective and, thanks to the TED Talks, content that is beyond the mundane. If one of the criteria of a good coursebook is that input texts be informative (you learn something new), then Perspectives ticks the box. There is a refreshing contemporary focus in the readings and listenings: freeganism, emojis, medical implants, photorealism, manga and anime all get a look in.
In some units, there is a small focus on weak forms, sentence stress, contrastive stress and some complex grammar (relative clauses and wish/if only), but the bulk of the authentic listening activity is at text level: understanding contrasts; signposts; persuading; following the argument. Thus, the TED Talks are included to provide real-world English with all it comprises: understanding accents, content words, pausing, and reformulating. (As a teacher, I would have liked the scripts to be included in the Student’s Book, as I often use them as a differentiation strategy on the second playing, with the instruction ‘Listen and read at the same time if you want to’.) With scaffolding, learners at B1/B1+ can rise to the challenge of authentic recorded material: background information plus vocabulary in context activities help to build confidence before viewing. Topics include app creation, vegetarianism, sustainable clothing and – one of the most inspiring – deep sea diving … in a wheelchair.
In the grammar reference the spoken grammar form If she was here … and the increasing dominance of the get passive over the have passive (I got some flowers delivered) are both represented.
While some of the Writing Bank models and tasks seem sensible and real-world (a social media update; an auction site seller ad; an informal email), I wish coursebooks would do away with letters of complaint. I don’t think I have written one of these for 20 years. Do today’s teens and young adults really need this?
Unit 7, Shopping around, begins with a vibrant, eye-catching photo of a Thai night market and a useful overview box of the unit’s learning objectives. A speaking lead-in is followed by vocabulary. Words are taught with their collocates, so students get the chance to learn shop around, on special offer, pay off debts, browsing for bargains. There is some useful focus on getting them to work things out for themselves – here, the differences between pairs of words (spend v waste money; win v earn; brand v logo, etc.). Grammar exponents are embedded in the listening and here too students are nudged towards working out the rules for themselves.
In the C Lesson students get to choose how they want to continue the topic: create and present something, conduct a class survey and report back, or write an opinion essay. This approach is based on the idea of learner motivation, ability, time constraints and available resources. These optional extras are good as homework tasks.
In the D section the TED Talk has the intriguing title of ‘Grow your own clothes’. The pairing of sustainability and biodegradability with clothing and fashion makes Environment a more appealing topic than usual.
Going back to the book’s title, we are asked to see money and shopping from the point of view of the spender, the saver, the alternative shoppers, the anti-consumerists, the service users and the eco-fashion designer. Would the idea of ‘perspectives’ be clear to students? My suggestion would be to highlight it from the beginning. My students often ask for clarification about people’s names (man or woman? what nationality?), and Perspectives, with its global citizen slant, has a Fumio, a Chosing, an Aditi, an Akiko and a Rochd.
In terms of sufficiency, Perspectives is complete enough to stand on its own – the teacher doesn’t have to produce masses of extra material to make a lesson work. As a teacher for 30 years. a great swathe of my general knowledge has come from students and from coursebooks. And now I can tell you that adidas are grilled chicken feet, commonly served at food stalls in Manila, and that ‘time’ is the 55th most common word in English.
Clare HendersonClare Henderson has been a teacher in Cambridge since 1994 and her interests are Contemporary English and Testing.
Nicky Hockly
Pavilion Publishing 2017
Interaction Online: Creative Activities for Blended Learning
Lindsay Clandfield and Jill Hadfield
Cambridge University Press 2017
Keeping up with technological developments in teaching is never easy. Whether you have been suddenly gifted with new software you do not know what to do with or asked to put together a blended learning programme and do not know where to start, the challenges of having to develop skills in an area you do not feel confident in can be quite daunting. Even those of us who feel quite confident with adopting and adapting new technology, the knowledge that there is always something out there which may render what we are currently using obsolete means that we constantly need to be on the lookout for new ways of doing things.
ETpedia Technology targets both novice and experienced teachers. It is a comprehensive work, containing advice on a range of issues including how to prepare yourself to teach with technology in the first place. If you feel a bit behind in technological matters, it provides basic explanations of the terminology in texts which assume a greater level of knowledge. Having said that, there are enough ideas to inspire teachers who have been working comfortably with technology for years.
For a recently published book on technology, ETpedia Technology looks and feels slightly old-fashioned – a ring-bound book with photocopiable worksheets at the back. While I believe that less confident teachers might be reassured by this format, the risk is that those more technologically able will overlook the wealth it contains.
The section on the use of smartphones and tablets is one that many will find immediately applicable to their own situation, whether their workplace has a lot of technology or not. Among my favourite tips were fun ways of using QR codes as a treasure hunting exercise (maybe it could be adapted into an updated version of a running dictation), and the idea of using voice recognition software to help learners check their own pronunciation. But ETpedia Technology is more than just a grab-bag of fun ideas to make your teaching more exciting. It contains a very comprehensive account of the many different ways technology can be incorporated into teaching, both face-to-face and online. It also deals with wider issues such as staying safe online for classes with younger students.
Interaction Online is a more specialised resource, which focuses on extending the use of technology outside the classroom with a range of blended learning activities. The main emphasis is on how to get the most out of online forums. The idea behind the activities is that they can be used on any platform where written interaction online takes place; they deliberately do not limit themselves to a single platform as things have a tendency to evolve. Having said that, within my current context, I personally pictured all the activities as taking place on a Moodle forum although they would work equally well in other contexts. The book is meant for general English teachers but EAP teachers will also find it useful. There is a good section on setting up and managing online interaction. This would be really beneficial to teachers new to blended learning who want to get an understanding of how this type of teaching can be made interactive. A particular benefit I have found is that it enables shy students who struggle to participate in a classroom lesson to find their voice as they have more time to formulate their ideas and are not constrained by more confident students dominating the conversation.
As well as general principles, there are sections on setting up specific types of interaction – personal, factual, creative, critical and fanciful – with suggested forum activities that can be done with each. It also contains invaluable sections on feedback and assessment, and task design. One of the activities my group really enjoyed was one in which they created their own memes – a really good way to get them to engage with topics that they might otherwise find inaccessible or uninteresting. It also showed them how easily false ideas can be spread around the internet, making it a good introduction to critical thinking and engagement with sources. Despite the many ideas, this is not a how-to manual. It will not tell you how to create a meme and, unlike ETpedia Technology, does not really suggest specific apps or websites – you’ll have to Google them yourself (it is actually fairly straightforward). It offers suggestions which would need to be followed up elsewhere, but if you have the confidence and skills, there is a lot here to enhance your teaching online. One of the advantages of this print/online bundle is a link to an e-source, so you only need to cut and paste instead of having to type out forums and activities.
Each of these books has something to offer teachers at different stages of their technological journey. If you are looking for a recipe book full of different ideas, websites and apps, then ETpedia Technology is for you. If you are a more confident user who wishes to improve their teaching in a blended situation, then Interaction Online could be of more interest.
Personally, I think both books would make a good addition to staffroom shelves.
Elizabeth Hollis-WattsElizabeth Hollis-Watts worked as a teacher, teacher trainer and manager for 12 years in Australia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the UK. She is currently working in London.
Richard Cauldwell
Speech in Action 2018
A Syllabus for Listening – Decoding is a companion volume to Phonology for Listening (Cauldwell, 2014), a book which has been widely acknowledged as transformational in its treatment of listening. A Syllabus for Listening expands on the main premise of the first book that teaching listening needs to take a full account of the sound structure of spontaneous speech. It supplies more detail of the factors that make authentic oral production such a difficult barrier to successful second-language listening and provides a framework and activities for activating a spontaneous-speech approach in the classroom.
Part 1 introduces the basic concepts and metalanguage used in the book. The decoding in the title of the book is explained as the process of separating out speech sounds and attaching meaning to them. This task is complicated by the fact that speech comes to us in a rush where word boundaries are not respected and sounds change in the pressure of real-time interaction. Richard draws a fundamental difference between the ‘sight substance’, what is written and read, and the ‘sound substance’, what we say and hear. These are two very different media, but teaching has represented the sound substance as basically equivalent to the sight substance, with the result that decoding has been neglected as a competence that can be developed in learners. The belief that you get better at listening just by exposure alone, probably modelled on the benefits of extended reading, persists despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Reasons for this head-in-the-sand approach are provided in Part 2, a critique of training, theory and practice. Teacher training tends to perpetuate pedagogically convenient models of teaching listening which are at best half-truths. The standard listening lesson follows what John Field (2009) has called a comprehension approach. The teacher has a long context-setting stage; the recording is played once for a gist question and then again for detailed understanding; the language of the text is exploited and/or there is a skills exercise, typically a discussion activity. This leaves no time for decoding and it strongly resembles a reading lesson. Richard, based on his own classroom experience, makes an excellent point that we are governed by ‘the smiling class imperative’, whereby we want to keep the learners/customers happy at the expense of teaching them something actually useful. Decoding is not as intrinsically interesting as running around the classroom doing a Find somebody who … exercise so it is dropped.
What we are subjecting learners to is what Richard calls a careful speech model that blinds learners to the realities of spontaneous speech. The central metaphor in the book is that of the Greenhouse, Garden and Jungle, a cline from citation forms to rule-driven connected speech to basically ‘What on earth was that?!’ In the Greenhouse each word is pronounced separately with the sounds carefully and fully articulated so that they are like plants kept in separate pots, easy to identify and tend. Out in the garden, word endings change or converge, thus did it is pronounced as one unit, but such phenomena are predictable and rule-governed, pleasantly arranged like flower beds. In the jungle, words often become almost unrecognisable as they are twisted out of shape or even disappear. For example, two whole consonants in did it are lost resulting in dii. Richard’s issue is that listeners spend too much time in the greenhouse and not enough in the jungle. A greenhouse approach is fine, even advisable, for teaching pronunciation, where the goal is clarity, but to become better listeners it is necessary to venture out into the jungle.
The laws of the jungle are given in Part 3, the heart of the book as it sets out a syllabus for listening. Most teachers will associate a syllabus with a list, particularly a list of grammatical items. So what does a syllabus of listening list? Not words. Part 3 begins with a very convincing argument as to why single words are unsuitable as items of analysis. Words are pronounced in different ways in different contexts by different speakers and the result is just too many sound shapes for second language learners to cope with. Richard illustrates with six different versions of (be) able (to). Instead, the syllabus consists of word clusters, often referred to as lexical chunks, or prefabricated phrases in the ELT literature, and streamlining processes whereby words are prosodically reshaped in real time. The significance of word clusters, defined as reoccurring sequences of two to six words, for example you know and do you know what I mean, is that the process of decoding them trains listeners to be sensitive to connected speech. Word clusters contain a large proportion of function words, underlined in do you know what I mean, which listeners have traditionally been taught to ignore. However, breaking down word clusters and recognising how the internal sound shape has been moulded is critical to listening competence. Streamlining covers a wide range of connected speech phenomena, for example the delightfully named d’eth drop (p110), the discarding of that most English of sounds ð, as in the and this. Streamlining is the norm in the jungle and listeners need to experience it as a combination of processes which can distort an utterance beyond comfortable recognition.
Part 4 is the practical section of the book in that it provides ideas, tools and activities to teach listening in the direction proposed. There is a wealth of material here and it is varied enough to suit classrooms of any ilk, both technology-free and technology-rich. Three that caught my eye were the botanic walk, earworms and YouGlish. The botanic walk is a TPR activity where the teacher puts pictures of a greenhouse, garden and jungle on different walls and moves between them to illustrate the different pronunciations of the same unit. Earworms utilises those catchy snatches of lyrics you can’t get out of your head by having students repeat and memorise them in almost mantric fashion. YouGlish is a free platform where you can get multiple sound shapes of the same unit: 54,000 renditions of that cluster be able to in US English alone (p213). Many of these activities would also be transferable to pronunciation teaching, but they are set up as bespoke listening tasks.
It is a cliché in reviews to round up with a ‘This book is essential reading for …’. However, this is absolutely true when it comes to A Syllabus for Listening. Anyone involved in ELT needs to read this book and change their practice, whether that’s somebody teaching an evening course at a language school or a textbook writer integrating listening into their material. With its firm anchoring in theory, wealth of real-world examples and classroom activities, there can be absolutely no excuse to ignore its contents. We can make learners better listeners, hence massively improving their effectiveness as communicators as well as their success in high-stakes situations such as examinations, but this can only happen if we teach listening differently. A Syllabus for Listening shows the way forward and provides a more than helping hand on this journey.
Cauldwell R (2014) Phonology for Listening: Teaching the Stream of Speech. Speech in Action.
Field J (2009) Listening in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wayne RimmerWayne Rimmer is a freelance teacher, trainer and materials writer, recently contributing to the Cambridge Empower series of coursebooks.
Nick Thorner
Oxford University Press 2017
How far can teachers motivate students? A simple question with few simple answers. On the one hand, motivation has been researched and discussed for many years, both informally in staffrooms and more rigorously in academia (e.g. by Zoltan Dörnyei and Ema Ushioda, 2009; 2010). There is considerable understanding of factors affecting motivation, such as clarity of goals, level of identification with the L2 culture and even physical well-being.
On the other hand, teachers encounter unmotivated students every day: students sent on summer courses by parents who want a holiday; students pushed by families to get a business degree; and, of course, pupils in compulsory education obliged to study a second language as part of their curriculum. Even learners who are motivated in one area, for example speaking, may lose enthusiasm when it comes to reading texts or writing essays.
‘Motivation,’ writes Ushioda (2013: 1), ‘is widely recognized as a significant factor influencing success in second or foreign language (L2) learning.’ Without motivation – that sense of having a reason for learning and even enjoying the process – acquiring a second language becomes a hard slog, often doomed to failure.
In Motivational Teaching Nick Thorner tackles the problem head-on. He starts by acknowledging that, ‘there are limits to how far teachers can affect motivation, particularly in the case of language learning’ (p9). Progress, he points out, depends a great deal on what happens outside the classroom, and students inevitably bring their own attitudes and expectations to the learning process.
However, teachers, he insists, can and do inspire students. The aim of this book is to help them do that. Organised as a ‘recipe book’ of advice, activities and judiciously-selected research snapshots, Motivational Teaching shows teachers exactly how they can motivate students. Primarily aimed at teachers of young learners in full-time education, the book also contains plenty of ideas that can be adapted for – or even used unaltered with – adult, business and academic learners.
The book is divided into three parts: The Individual Learner; The Learning Context; and Issues in Motivation. Each contains between three and five chapters. In Part 2, for example, the chapter on Teacher Behaviour is divided into four sections: Welcoming Students, Starting Work, Demotivation, and Ending Lessons. These are further divided into sections containing advice, activities and background information.
Following a brief introduction Thorner offers us a starter activity that can be used immediately with classes. In Chapter 3, Seeing progress, this revolves around students exploring and creating learning goals. In Chapter 6, The learning environment, teachers are encouraged to engage students in the layout of the room, asking them to produce plans for appropriate furniture arrangements. And in Chapter 10, Students as individuals, he dives in with a YL-focused activity called ‘vocabulary musical chairs’. None of the activities is radically innovative, but each is practical and do-able, and generates motivation.
In support of these activities Thorner adds Getting it right boxes, which offer useful advice to novice teachers and old hands alike. In Chapter 3, Seeing progress, for example, he reminds us that ‘learners are often a little too ready to declare words learnt’ before encouraging the use of vocabulary boxes (something I’ve found invaluable with my own classes), while in Chapter 9, on Task design, he reminds us not to reinvent the wheel and to look for good task-based activities in resource packs. Another practical tip for the time-pressed teacher!
Of course, not all suggestions will work for all classes, and not all teachers will welcome advice like, ‘avoid saying words that may trigger negative associations, e.g. take notes, memorise this list’. This may be true for YLs but adults, particularly those in a university setting, will need to understand such phrases and may appreciate their directness. As with all such books the key is to pick and choose according to our own classroom needs.
Why this works boxes come at the end of each chapter and offer research-based advice in simple language. Just a paragraph long, they serve as quick reminders of the wider context and can be motivating for teachers themselves. I find these a positive addition, with one reservation. In spite of a couple of mentions for authorities such as Zoltan Dörnyei and Gregory Montalvo, and a list of eight websites at the back of the book, there are no references as such. Adding a couple to each box would be very helpful, especially for teachers on a Delta course.
Threaded throughout the book is the notion of ‘reward’ and how it can be used to prompt positive learning behaviour. Motivating teaching is teaching which generates ‘the sense of pleasure or satisfaction we get from an event, an activity or a situation’ (p9). Feelings of pleasure and reward lead to a positive sense of anticipation and it is this which is at the heart of motivation. From an environment rich in sensory stimulation to a teacher who builds rapport and respects students’ individuality, motivation makes learning possible. But how does this work in practice?
One of Thorner’s first suggestions is to draw students’ attention to the English they already encounter in their environment – on packaging, clothing and, of course, in the media. Opportunities for recognition and personal connection are valuable, he emphasises, because ‘recent research has shown that understanding new words in context produces a similar reaction in our brains to eating good food’ – and that’s motivating! He encourages teachers to highlight a relevant daily word (e.g. performance if one is happening that day) or to explore the use of onomatopoeic words in comic books. Such ideas can, of course, be adapted to students at different stages in their careers. My own business English learners, for example, enjoy puzzling over idioms or phrasal verbs from current news stories.
The book also encourages playful but meaningful activities such as ‘back-chaining’ or speaking to a metronome to find the rhythm in a language, and suggests allowing students to ‘play’ with dialogue, rapping it or reading it with exaggerated accents, for example. Music and illustration are likewise employed to connect learning with pleasure. Nothing new in these ideas, of course, but Thorner links them to behaviourist theories about enriching experiences and positive habit-formation, making the obvious but often overlooked point that ‘if teachers can stimulate good learning behaviour regularly enough in class for it to become a habit, they may reduce the chance of motivation becoming an issue’ (p43).
This emphasis on the teacher’s ability to foster positive learning outcomes is the most energising aspect of this book. In a world where so much can be done online and where Sugata Mitra famously suggested (albeit in a somewhat different context) that teachers can be replaced by a ‘school in the Cloud’, Thorner’s faith in the ability of effective live teaching is very welcome. He sees no discrepancy between teachers actively moulding students’ behaviour and students gaining greater independence. Indeed, the book implies that smart teaching will lead to smart learning.
This is particularly evident in Part 3, where teachers are encouraged to customise their approach according to factors such as age, gender and social roles, special educational needs (SEN) and aptitude (or rather students’ beliefs about their own aptitude). For teachers about to tackle a new classroom demographic there are some invaluable tips here, particularly regarding teens. One I particularly like is the use of Class Charts software to group students according to objective factors rather than the teacher’s (possibly unpopular) decision.
I also appreciated the short section on Personality, which includes a reminder that ‘making lessons lively isn’t always appropriate’ (p86). Teacher training has traditionally emphasised activities appealing to extroverts, perhaps because such students tend to dominate classes. Nowadays, there is greater recognition of personality types, both within classrooms and across ethnic groups. Am I the only reader who would like to see this section expanded in a future edition?
Balancing skilful classroom management with learner independence is also applied to testing, where even the most enthusiastic student can lose motivation. Thorner recognises that classic performance goals ‘may demotivate weaker students’ (p28) and instead presents a series of ideas for individualised goals and ‘opt-in’ tests. Ideally, he argues, students should be able to choose when to try a test and if this means students taking tests at different times, so much the better; they won’t then be caught up in comparing themselves to others.
Teachers may well respond ‘but my school insists all students be tested together’ or ‘what about cheating – won’t they just share answers?’ Thorner’s focus, however, is not on external or official term tests, but rather on the positive backwash of tests linked to meaningful progress. ‘We can strengthen good learner behaviour,’ he argues, ‘by designing classroom activities that aim to assess it.’ He encourages teachers to praise students ‘for the actions they took’ rather than the measurable outcomes, an approach which ties in with the current emphasis on developing a ‘growth mindset’. In other words, rather than accept the ‘fixed mindset of – I’ve reached the limit of my ability, I’m not that good at English – teachers should nurture that growth mindset of – I’m not there yet but with more experience and study I can get there.
‘Research,’ Thorner reminds us, ‘consistently emphasises that there is nothing more likely to increase student motivation than a teacher who shows passion for what they do.’ And while not all the ideas in this book are new, Thorner’s emphasis on the how and why of teaching (rather than just