John Allison and Jeremy Townend
Macmillan Education 2017
I was probably over halfway through my life before I heard the word logistics, and further before I had grasped what it was: it is planning the optimal loading of trucks in a factory in Poland with garden furniture and delivering it in a tight window of time to clients and distribution hubs in Spain and Portugal before the client fines you for delivering half a day late or your boss barks at you for leaving two empty square metres in the vehicle while bearing in mind that you cannot drive heavy vehicles across Germany at the weekend; it is Carson the Downton Abbey butler managing with consummate aplomb a huge staff and household; it is a Scottish raspberry farmer trying to get his fruit to the supermarket distribution centre before they can – at a whim – declare it to be overripe and hence fine him; it is a director of studies putting together timetables so that teachers can whizz around the city from client to client; it is a family with three kids that have to be dropped off at and picked up from school and taken to sports clubs, language academies and music classes, and fed, clothed and washed. It is what makes armies grind to a halt: in Hilary Mantel’s wonderful novels about Thomas Cromwell an English army mutinies in France because the Lord Chancellor hasn’t given sufficient thought to shipping enough beer supplies to keep the troops merry, since the yeomen won’t touch French wine or cider. It is above all about shifting stuff.
This new title, which is a stand-alone in the In Company 3.0 (B1-B2, though more the latter than the former) series, weighs in at a mere 63 pages, but like the ideal lorries chugging across Europe, there’s no space wasted. There are eight four-page units, four interview videos, four single page reviews that finish with a box-ticking section called Learning outcomes (aka Now I can …) and six pages of extra material (quite detailed and meaty), so it’s quite tightly packed. On the inside front cover there is a code that allows you to download the audio, video, photocopiable worksheets, tests, and much much else, and will give you access for four years. Units handle pragmatic topics such as: tracking shipping, processes, handling clients’ complaints, giving directions, insurance claims, issues with paperwork, packing a migrating family’s belongings into a container to ship it to Australia, and it deals more thoroughly with problems and solutions than anything else I know. Yet there is humanity in it; one section deals with extreme dehumanisation of logistics warehouses, like the famous ones you might have ordered books, films and music from. The spirit of Charles Dickens is still alive.
If the book is overwhelmingly practical and functional, so too is the language work. As you would expect with any title that has a Mark Powell connection, it is heavy on lexis and strong on collocation, which is how it should be, and light on grammar. The former includes nice lexical sets like chipped, stained, scratched (etc.), need, want and would like and their colligation, types of container (more than you might think), vague language: gear, stuff, that kind of thing, and of course numerals, times and dates. As a teacher, you know you can pick up any B2 coursebook and not be thrown by any of the lexis, but Logistics 3.0 will sometimes require feverish keyboard clicking before class, lest you be thrown by skid (not what you think), drayage, tote, wave picking, or stockout. In terms of the grammar, it’s not really given short shrift; but it does come like that tinned shredded pineapple, in tiny chunks called Grammar tips: comparatives and superlatives, passives, sequencers, prepositions of place, modals for advice and instructions, noun phrases (though they’re not labelled as such, but as Good description). Well, fair enough. And interestingly, the way should is handled here is: ‘to talk about expected future events’, as in You should receive the goods tomorrow. Again, fair enough; it is entirely appropriate in the context; indeed, this meaning of should deserves more attention in ELT course material. However, I beg to differ with some classifications, e.g. where because / because of / since / as are all labelled as ‘informal’ (p36). We’re all in favour of attention to register, but surely here we’re putting the learner on the wrong scent. Connectors in Logistics 3.0 get classified as formal/neutral or informal; I would argue that we should simply drop the term formal and just use standard (or polite/neutral), in the context of this field.
Every second page in the units has an output task, once upon a time the final P in PPP. There’s a fine range of these speaking and writing tasks, again, all very credible, such as making, confirming and changing arrangements. Indeed, I’m impressed with how much of the real world there is in these pages. The units have mind maps, there is writing from prompts, there is plenty of scaffolding, and logically, role play is central to the course. Most of the references are European, especially the UK, with Asia getting several mentions, Africa a handful, and North America even less. Tantalisingly, some of the same scenarios appear in different units of the book: roses being sent from South Africa to the Netherlands, a panda having problems getting from China to a zoo in Berlin, oven-ready meals making their way from Madrid to Germany and the struggle of a consignment of electrical meters to get from Buenos Aires to Milan. Your heart kind of goes out to them, doesn’t it?
The four videos are thematically related to the two units they come after. Questions appear on the screen and the interviewees (two male, one female, two of whom appear in each video and all three of whom have south-east England accents) give their clear but unscripted answers that strike a fine balance between conciseness and appropriate detail. These monologues are filmed in the speakers’ offices, so come with the benefits and drawbacks of authentic speech, except – mercifully – external noises. These audio-visual texts come with a page of exploitation each that includes some – but not a great deal of – attention to phonology, under the heading of Natural Speech. Although the tasks (comprehension, lexical) are achievable in themselves, B1 learners who are not in an English-speaking environment will still find the speakers slightly tough. To be fair, nobody is asking learners to understand everything that is said. In terms of length, they are approximately four minutes, though the video exploitation pages deal with them in several different sections.
I believe the authors have done a brilliant job in coming up with an attractive, teacher-friendly, learner-friendly, fairly complete package that manages to be credible and interesting. Now I know some of you out there will still be thinking that logistics is a dull area to wring a whole book out of, but OUP saw fit a few years ago to produce a short course on it as part of their fine Express series, and it is worth bearing in mind how important this shifting of stuff around is to the modern world. Recently I was putting together a lesson about the history of containers (never thought I’d find myself typing those words) for a group in an international drinks logistics company, and I found out that a typical cargo ship in the mid-1950s might have 200,000 individual items of freight on board and took a week in port to unload and load at a handling cost of $5.86 per ton. Container ports came along and did the same work for under 16 cents per ton and less than half the time. It meant that manufacturers no longer had to have their bases close to ports or to their customers in order to reduce shipping costs. It means that people living in Northern Europe or North America can have fresh strawberries at Christmas, and that it costs just $10 to get a TV set from China to the UK or 10 cents to get a bottle of wine from Australia to the Unites States, a fraction of what it costs to shift the same items 200 miles by road in the same country. Globalisation, like it or not, without containers would be like playing a footy match without a ball. Watch out; you may just find yourself getting interested in logistics. More than just shifting stuff, you might call it thinking inside the box.
Brian Brennan
Brian Brennan is the Language Training Manager at International House Barcelona Company Training.
Helbling Languages 2007–2017
As we have now come to expect from graded readers, each comes with its own audio CD, and there is a secret personal access code to enable the reader to log into an e-zone for support activities. Pre-reading, while reading and after reading activities are included in each text. There are also Fact Files, background information about the individual authors and the books, and the three higher level texts all conclude with suggestions for projects.
The table, therefore, is beautifully laid, but questions remain about the quality of the fare. The Happy Prince works, but only because both stories are fairy tales which allow themselves to be retold in the simple present. What is less successful is information like ‘(Oscar Wilde’s) first book, Poems, is published in 1881’. Adapting narrative into the present tense does not, ultimately, make for easier understanding. It superficially simplifies the grammar, but the present simple and the present passive work at different levels of acquisition.
The same is true of The Hound of the Baskervilles. This book has a rather complicated plot, with Sherlock Holmes missing for much of the story and a ‘sister’ who turns out to be a wife. It does Conan Doyle no service when Dr Watson is forced to narrate in the syntax usually employed by football commentators, and in this adaptation, the rather faded water-colour meets sepia tint illustrations fail to enliven the text or convey any sense of horror.
This criticism cannot be levelled at Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The colour scheme of the illustrations relies heavily on orange, using shades of blue for the faces of the slaves. This, however, sits poorly with the narrative (past tense at last), which is literally told in terms of black and white. This novel has always attracted fairly justified criticism for being both sentimental and a piece of propaganda. This adaptation removes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s overtly Christian message, but her hero remains an absolute paragon. With the exception of little Eva, who is basically an angel in waiting, all the white characters are inept, cruel, selfish or otherwise generally inferior in every respect to Tom. He remains a walking example of the fallacy that suffering ennobles.
To a modern audience, familiar with the evils of slavery (Roots; Amistad), it is difficult to appreciate the impact that this novel had on its first appearance in 1852. ‘In the first year of publication it sold more than 300,000 copies’ (p7) but then there were publication difficulties, and the novel really took off after it was reprinted in 1862. Stripped of sentiment and religiosity, the evils it documented remained true and their passing is regretted by only a handful of neo-Confederates. For this reviewer, moreover, the suggested After Reading Project (p88) was inspiringly appropriate. It offers the iconic photo of Tommie Smith and John Carlos from the 1968 Olympic Games along with a series of socially significant research questions.
Should that approach worry some teachers by being too overtly political, then The Secret Agent will also pose problems. This is perhaps Conrad’s darkest novel, with no redeeming hero, a seedy, conspiratorial backdrop and an appropriately nihilistic ending. This adaptation is illustrated with a series of equally dark interiors, and there are two excellent Fact Files regarding the activities of a genuine 19th-century agent provocateur and the Cambridge Spy Ring of the 1930s. Again, the last pages of the book contain a first class definition and history of ‘terrorism’. This enhances the early section, About the book, and demonstrates that home-grown terrorists have been at work in Europe for the past two centuries.
After the darkness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Secret Agent , it might be expected that Sense and Sensibility would come as a charming chronicle of young love, where all ends happily. This adaptation, however, offers two Fact Files that place the financial considerations of early nineteenth century marriage centre stage. This is important, because even modern, native-speaking British audiences can easily overlook the massive loss of social status involved in Elinor and Marianne’s relocation from Norland Park to Barton Cottage in Devon. Furthermore, to students in the Arab Gulf, John Dashwood’s treatment of his step-mother and half sisters, in allowing the relocation to take place, is reprehensible to the point of scandal. To Gulf Arabs he makes partial amends by suggesting that Marianne might marry Colonel Brandon, but it remains an open question how a modern European readership responds to this alliance between a teenager and a man old enough to be her father. At this level, therefore, Sense and Sensibility works rather well, provoking the intelligent reader with a series of debating points.
On balance, therefore, these graded readers are a welcome addition to our current stock. The higher CEF levels work better, primarily because they use the past tense for narrative. Helbling might do well to change their house style in this regard. Simplifying the grammar does not always simplify the decoding of the plot.
Neil McBeath
Neil McBeath teaches at the Sultan Qaboos University, Oman.
Shaun Wilden
Oxford University Press 2017
For the techno-wary or techno-weary, the statistics presented on the first page of Mobile Learning should be inspiration enough to keep reading. These include the following:
‘There are more mobile devices on the planet than people.’ ‘The number of mobile devices in use is currently growing five times faster than the global population.’
‘Adults look at their device on average once every six minutes.’ Put simply, we can’t take the digital revolution for granted because it is infiltrating every sphere of life. It would be completely irrational for education to isolate itself from this phenomenon but, as Shaun points out in the Introduction, that is often what happens. Teachers’ discomfort with change and technological developments in particular are coupled with concerns that technology is dumbing down education or compromising learners’ security. The aim of this short practical guide (102 pages) is to raise awareness of the massive potential of mobile learning, used judiciously, to enrich the language teaching-learning process and complement other domains of education and life.
Mobile devices are defined as ‘multimedia tool[s] you can put in your pocket and carry around easily, such as a mobile phone, tablet, MP3 player, or an e-reader’ (p12). Although technology is all around us, this does not mean it is any more effective than traditional tools of the trade, so a key part of the argument justifying mobile devices is the SAMR model (p24):
There is a clear linear progression from tasks which basically replicate what is already out there, the only difference is that they are digital, to tasks which take learning into a completely new direction. To give examples of the model from the book:
These examples show the scope of the book and its very practical focus. There are activities which are very recognisable from traditional teaching or everyday uses of technology, such as text message dictation, and a few which seem verging on science-fiction to an old-school teacher like myself, such as the affordability of headsets and increasing availability of 360 degree videos bringing virtual reality into the classroom. However, the message throughout is consistent: mobile devices are not in competition with traditional tools, they are just another option, and both definitely have a place in the classroom, often complementing each other, for example exploiting the print coursebook by getting students to take photos contextualising the phrasal verbs covered.
To cherry-pick the material and indicate its relevance, I’ll start with the exciting field of voice recognition. There is actually a great deal of pronunciation technology out there but nothing I’ve seen can be called transformative in terms of the SAMR model; often, it is just a digital rehash of the listen and repeat methodology still going the rounds from audiolingualism and language labs (remember them?). Voice recognition involves activities as simple as students asking their devices a question and judging the effectiveness of their language, especially pronunciation, based on the response they get, which could be oral or written. This is potentially transformative as it allows students to be creative – never a consideration in drilling – while maintaining a high focus on form (wrong pronunciation and the utterance will simply not be recognised). Shaun makes a crucial point that ‘students can find pronunciation difficult because they don’t know how they are mispronouncing a word or phrase’. Visual feedback, the digital reformulation of what the device heard, means that students can see their mistake on screen and self-correct. Voice recognition is a good example of how the transformative does not need to involve all sorts of fancy, and expensive, equipment, as almost all mobile devices include this feature for free.
Mobile devices also offer a new dimension to the age-old art of storytelling. The options outlined in Chapter 7 on Digital storytelling range from photo stories to videos to animation, all characterised by the intrinsic motivation which comes from achieving an end product that is learner-generated and collaborative. I checked out the Story Dice and found it attractive because it does not require any literacy skills for learners to create their own stories but provides scaffolding for elaboration of the main features of a narrative. A more advanced idea I’d like to try out is making a movie trailer and Shaun illustrates with Apple’s iMovie, which includes templates for various genres. I wouldn’t be worried about steering into unfamiliar territory here as I’m sure my learners would know a lot more than me and be motivated enough to learn the tools that they need to get things done.
The end matter includes a helpful glossary (I’d never understood the difference between an emoji and an emoticon) and a list of useful apps and websites. I’m not really savvy enough to judge how comprehensive the latter is but I can only assume Shaun has not included his own excellent TEFL Commute Podcast (www.teflcommute.com) in the Podcasting section through modesty. The list does include references to cybersecurity, such as the Bullying UK website, an important inclusion as school-age learners are probably the most open to mobile learning but the most vulnerable to the risks. In fact, throughout the book Shaun points out areas where teachers need to exercise caution, for example frequent reminders that you need to have students’ / guardians’ written permission to use videos and photos of them.
Technology is not going away and teachers who stick their hands in the sand, or worse try to restrict it, are not going to be relevant to a generation of digital natives that expect language learning to mirror what is happening in their world outside the classroom. If this shocks you, read Mobile Learning. If it doesn’t shock you, read Mobile Learning anyway because it will further convince you that teachers can make a difference, but through technology not because of technology.
Wayne Rimmer
Wayne Rimmer is a freelance teacher, trainer and materials writer, recently contributing to the Cambridge Empower series of coursebooks.
Penny Ur
Cambridge University Press 2016
‘I know something. I’m excited about it. I want other people to know,’ says Penny Ur on the YouTube video. Idea-sharing has been the motive behind other of Ur’s books and now at the end of a 40-year teaching career, she has a wealth of practical information to pass on to a new generation of teachers.
This slim, 120-page compendium is ‘a comprehensive set of ideas touching almost every area of teaching’. Ur hopes that the activities are practical and doable, cultivated through personal experience, not culled from other writers. There are 100 tips in 19 different areas of classroom teaching. Topics are listed alphabetically and tips appear at the top of a page, followed by comments that include personal teaching anecdotes, examples of classroom procedure and, where applicable, references to research or internet sources.
Topics include Grammar, Listening, Pronunciation, Reading comprehension, Speaking activities, Vocabulary teaching, Writing, Beginning and ending the lesson, Discipline, Group work, Error correction, Interest and Teacher talk.
Indeed, the book is an easy read. It feels like a ‘going-back-to-basics’ manual, and may be ignored by experienced teachers but for myself (with 30 years under my belt), it served as a reminder of what constitutes good practice and I started to re-train myself to implement some things I had let fall by the wayside. The contents are thus ‘old friends’. While the majority of her tips are Dos, there are some Don’ts: Don’t give homework at the end of the lesson; Don’t worry about the topic, Don’t always pre-teach vocabulary; Don’t make students read aloud, and Don’t use written texts.
To support her point about pre-teaching vocabulary, she quotes the research of Chang and Read (2006), which found that out of four types of strategy to help with listening comprehension, the pre-teaching of lexis helped least. Ur’s suggestions include teaching important vocabulary well in advance and reviewing them before the actual listening task; teaching only one or two vital items and thus lessening the memory load; or (I think rather controversially) simply using easier texts.
These alternative takes on pedagogy make certain sections of the book more accessible to experienced teachers. Another one: ‘Talk a lot because teacher talk is an excellent source of comprehensible input’. (Too true, but I don’t think it’s ever condoned on initial training courses…)
Guidance on ‘differentiation’ comes in the section Heterogeneous (mixed-level) classes and Ur’s tips reflect the three categories of differentiation: by task (setting different tasks for learners of differing abilities); by outcome (setting open-ended tasks and allowing learner response at different levels); by support (giving more help to certain learners by monitoring and helping in class and by careful pairing). They include: allowing students some choice in the items they want to answer; giving wait time to weaker students before getting feedback; using mostly open-ended questions or cues; limiting tasks by time not amount.
It is interesting to see how some of ELT’s poo-pooings of the last 50 years are now not only credible but desirable (‘When they are based on full utterances rather than single words they are a surprisingly good way to practise listening comprehension at elementary levels’); use of the mother tongue (to help explain grammar, sounds and errors); and the teacher reading a text aloud while students follow.
Another attitudinal shift relates to pronunciation teaching, since ‘The goal of speaking like a native speaker has been largely replaced by the aim of being able to communicate in a variety of situations worldwide, usually in interaction with other people whose mother tongue is not English.’ Ur talks of ‘listener comfort’ and how teachers should isolate and drill those sounds whose mispronunciation leads to learner discomfort. She also advocates the teaching of ‘international’ pronunciation – ‘the pronunciation of any word in the way which is internationally most acceptable, even if the overall result is a mixture of British and American’.
Ur’s one concession to the tech bandwagon is in texting. Why not use mobiles for writing and reading practice? It’s a fun and natural way to get students to write for real communication, for example, as an icebreaker by sending each other ‘getting-to-know-you’ questions, though as jolly as this sounds, there might be safeguarding issues with students knowing one another’s phone number.
I bought this book just after publication and marked various activities to try out. With three different closed groups of teenagers, I chose several sentences to do with classroom language and gapped them to raise the challenge; students worked in pairs to complete them: … do you pronounce this word?; What page are we … ?; Please … you write it on the board? I’ve also used the suggestion of teaching non-native speaker teachers common checks and questions, and feedback phrases for the classroom, as well as common phrasal verbs used in classroom management.
I was happy (smug?) to see that Ur’s thoughts on the importance of rituals (Begin and end clearly) were the same as mine and that I had already been implementing one of her ideas for years.
To recap: this is not a list of 100 activities classified according to level, timing, skills/language focus, procedure, variations (like Ur’s invaluable Five Minute Activities) that can be immediately implemented. Some of the topics contain more practical ideas than others; some of the suggestions seem self-evident; some will seem alarming to the novice. That said, there is probably more in the book to suit the teacher who is just starting out With a menu that includes Bingo, Chants, Games, Humour and Ping-pong interaction, I’m sure both newbies and old-timers will find at least one useful tip and leave the reader with a ‘smiley’ feeling.
Clare Henderson
Clare Henderson has been a teacher at Bell Cambridge since 1994 and her interests are Contemporary English and Testing.
Chang AC-S & Read J (2006) The Effects of Listening Support on the Listening Performance of EFL Learners. TESOL Quarterly 40 (2) 375–397.
Edited by Christopher Jenks and Paul Seedhouse
Palgrave Macmillan 2015
For many years, teachers and researchers have been interested in the dynamics of classroom interaction. One of the earliest approaches to the systematic analysis of the phenomenon was Flanders Interaction Categories, which comprised seven broad categories of teacher talk, and three others: pupil-initiation, pupil-response, and silence or confusion. Observers in live classrooms were trained at three-second intervals to identify and classify teacher and learner verbal behaviours, then tally the results and provide descriptive statistics of verbal interaction. The subsequent advent of convenient tape recorders from the 1970s enabled more detailed post hoc analyses of the verbal interaction that was captured, and over the past three decades the increasing sophistication of video cameras has enabled both verbal and nonverbal language to be recorded and analysed with greater sophistication and precision. Research into classroom interaction is particularly relevant to English Language Teaching (ELT), not least because of the global spread of both English as an international language and the importance attached to selecting appropriate methods and strategies to apply in the classroom.
This book edited by Christopher Jenks and Paul Seedhouse has brought together a collection of 11 empirical studies covering a wide range of national and educational contexts, focusing on different pedagogical issues, such as computer- and web-mediated learning, multilingualism and Content and Language Integrated Learning, and employing a variety of research methodologies: conversational analysis (CA), corpus-based analysis (CBA), discourse analysis (DA), ethnomethodology (EM), multimodal interaction analysis (MMIA), and Processability Theory (PT). In a short introduction the editors set the scene for the following case studies by discussing how classroom interaction can be conceptualised and studied. They also point to the wide range of ELT contexts that have been investigated in the past, and to those represented in the current volume. The table on p86 sets out some basic information about each of the 11 studies.
The 13th chapter, written by the editors, concludes the book. They begin by highlighting what was clearly in evidence in the previous chapters – that an extremely useful approach to understanding the (language) classroom as a complex social setting is to explore the interactional architecture of pedagogical activities, strategies and language choice. They review and discuss several key issues which have emerged from the case studies. First of all, ELT classrooms are multilingual spaces in which teachers and students have to constantly negotiate what language to speak, to whom, and for what purpose. A related issue is that language learners can, and should be encouraged to, call upon a range of different linguistic, cognitive and social resources to enhance their language development. Thirdly, the ELT classroom is no longer a matter of ‘talk and chalk’ but a multimodal site where actions and movements may speak louder than words and where the latest technological developments are harnessed to enhance language teaching and learning in face-to-face or virtual environments. Another issue is how to match the delivery of linguistic or other content to the learners’ language proficiency; this is of particular concern in CLIL classes and where English or curricular subjects are mandated to be taught (exclusively?) through the target language. The final topic in the book is the state of ELT classroom interaction research. The editors point out that it is clear that the use of video t