Today it's back to prison -- I think I’ve missed the place. If you put a lot into your lessons it takes a lot out of you and I must say that when I finished last year's course it actually left me feeling more than a little drained. I wasn't really aware of it until the times I thought about starting again, and then I really wondered “Am I ready for it yet?”
Nonetheless, it was certainly one of the most important teaching experiences in my rather long career, immensely rewarding on different levels - but I suppose that as in other things, the reward is in proportion to the challenge.
So, a new challenge today. In half an hour from now it will be ID checks, metal detectors, steel gates, echoes and cages. And -- my students: 16 of them apparently. Who knows how things will turn out?
Later ……….
The usual suspects – the pen-pushers got things off to a poor start. At the post metal-detector stage one of the guards who I often saw last year - and was never the most enthusiastically co-operative - recognised me and mentioned with a wry smile that he thought that when I reached the library section I would find no-one waiting for me: he thought that the official papers were not there. He was right. I was greeted by the duty warden’s blank expressions followed by lots of flicking through ledgers and stacks of photocopies – all to no avail. Fortunately, with some friendly pressure from the man who co-ordinates all voluntary programmes, phone calls were made and , yes, the course was authorised and due to start today.
Half an hour later a couple of my students showed up and we were ushered to our classroom – old school-desks and bare browny-grey partition walls which are as sound-proof as a stain. There wasn’t really time to do that much – and I wanted to wait for any others to turn up, which happened in dribs and drabs.
First lessons with new groups are always testing – as a teacher you need to make lots of inviting space for your students to feel at ease about stepping into. You need to see and hear as much as you can – the people you are teaching are probably strangers to each other and they want to sound things out too. In a normal classroom it requires intuition and experience to handle these situations in a way that creates enough space for information to transmit without putting people on the spot. In a prison the pressures are probably significantly greater - in any group of young(ish) males who meet for the first time there is going to be a lot of sizing each other up and a degree of wariness. Basically what you want to achieve is a sense of ‘respect’: you are there to do a job and do it seriously. You take the task at hand seriously, and you take the people who are there seriously, and you want to walk away feeling you’ve all achieved something worthwhile. What you need is to engender ‘consensus’ – that’s the vehicle that will carry everything forward.
In the end I had seven students: two Italians, three Romanians, one Colombian and one young man from North Africa, I think – the acoustic interference from the next room was too much and I had already asked people to repeat things so often that I got a serious glimpse of what it means to be hard-of-hearing.
From what I learned we have a big range of levels – there’s a 19-year-old Romanian whose English seems excellent: he says he started learning when he was three. “That’s unusual” I said, “I’m not a usual guy” he replied. One of the Italians speaks reasonable English too: I asked those who knew a few words to introduce themselves, and invited the others to tell me what – if anything - they had understood or guessed. The Italian man had studied English at High School and university and had used English in his work in Zurich where he was in the financial field. The rest are – or claim to be – beginners, although one of the Romanian men understood everything. He also came across as rather intense: “We have to get a lot from this course,” he told the others, “we mustn’t waste time with simple things – we must do this intensively if we want results.” Hmmm.
Next lesson I hope to have the full group – apparently down to twelve now - and the real challenge will begin. Things are not helped by circumstances: I had asked for two one-hour lessons weekly, like last year, but they can only let me do one 90-minute lesson a week, which, in addition to the extreme range of levels, I’m seriously worried might reduce all our efforts to little more than enjoyable time-killing. Mind you, with these guys often spending 22 hours a day in a cell the size of a caravan with three others, enjoyable time-killing could even be all right.
Dec 13, 2011
Nov 24, 2011
TESOL conference Rome: Mr Perez, pens and Tunbridge Wells
TESOL conference Rome: Mr Perez, pens and Tunbridge Wells
Last week I went to the TESOL conference in Rome: probably the major teaching event in the annual calendar. Attended primarily by English teachers at high school and middle school, there are nonetheless a fair number of representatives from private schools (PLS’s to use publisher’s jargon as I learnt). Over the two days there is a wide and varied programme of presentations and workshops -- around 60 in all.
We were present with a stand in the exhibition area, along with the big-boy publishers and examination boards. It was our first public outing and although attendance at this conference was worryingly down on previous years, it proved to be a useful experience.
On the whole it was very encouraging to see so many teachers’ curiosity and interest in something different. There was fairly general acknowledgement among teachers that, for several all too well known reasons, getting a good job done in prevailing circumstances proves arduous and elusive far too often. We had to point out that SpeakYourMind is currently available only through associate private schools: not because teachers at private schools are ‘better’ than those with in the education system, but simply because, in theory at least, private schools are able to establish better conditions for successful learning - primarily in terms of class size and in terms of streaming classes for level and, ideally, ability.
Talking there to teachers I did perceive a sense of predictability: the publisher's new products tended to be not much more than new marketing. New ideas were only new to the people who hadn't encountered them yet: certainly in the few presentations I was able to attend there was nothing particularly original. Corpus linguistics is extremely revealing and helpful but it’s also a popular and spacious bandwagon: some of the conclusions I heard drawn from corpus ‘evidence’ were open to different interpretations, and I think that reliance on these sources can be distracting to teachers in the front line. ‘Authenticity’ and ‘motivation’ were other popular themes, although it’s disappointing when speakers and writers cook up the evidence to suit their own menus – such as presenting examples from out-of-date Peruvian course-books to highlight the demotivating effects of ‘artificial’ language (“I am Mr Perez – are you Mrs Perez?”) and therefore the advantages of using ‘authentic’ language (“… and she’s like, ‘why did you do that?”).
Back to the exhibition area and our encounters with teachers: among the interest and curiosity there was naturally enough a more critical voice. I had been expecting this but was surprised by the vehemence when it happened. I can't help thinking of this teacher as ‘disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ – she did rather fit the stereotype. As we spoke (spoken preliminaries, rather than ‘discussion’) and I was looking for a student book to illustrate how the course was organised and the content presented, I could see her eyes guiding her towards the beginner’s course-book - and instinct guided me towards deflecting this move: I had a premonition of the ensuing confrontation. “This looks like a Berlitz book from the 50s,”' she scoffed. She had me at an unfair advantage here, not having taught then myself. I began to explain that the course incorporated ideas and procedures from different traditions and approaches and reworked them in the light of newer thinking, but she would have none of it.
Flicking to the opening pages she found the food required to fill her outrage: “Pen, clock, table! Haven't you people heard of communicative teaching?”. “Yes of course - and we have moved on from there.”
“Have you indeed! How can you teach ‘pen’ and ‘book’?” “It depends what you have in mind - in a classroom teaching situation it can be a useful way to get things started.” I tried to engage her in an exchange of views but her raised hackles got in the way. “I'm not interested, I'm not interested”, and off she marched, her sensibilities thoroughly offended.
Well, being addressed as ' you people ' hardly creates the rapport that allows the kind of communication that this teacher was such a stern proponent of in the classroom. Also the suggestion that ‘we people’ had been living in some sort of cave for the last thirty years was a bit objectionable too.
However, I knew where she was coming from. I am not a diehard fan of pens, pencils, clocks, phones, doors and windows; but at the same time this long-standing Situationalist approach to teaching beginners is not as harmful as some teachers believe. They formed the basis of drills used to ‘imprint’ structures in the 50’s - because structures were the key to language, so the thinking went. Of course, now we know that mastery of structures does not automatically lead to communicative autonomy, but that, in turn, does not mean that structures or sentence patterns have no place in language learning.
In the SpeakYourMind course we are very clear about recognising the limitations as well as the uses of starting in this way. There are advantages of teaching the words for the things that occur in your physical surroundings, learners can see them and touch them - it's very direct and immediate. In the initial set of objects and words that our beginner learners encounter they come across almost the complete range of phonemes, as well as beginning to learn about stress patterns - so important in English – so it’s not just ‘structures’.
Teachers and students are aware that starting in the classroom with classroom objects is purely a convenient way to get going – it kick-starts the language learning. As language quickly grows, the confines of the physical classroom dissolve, and more likely and plausible interaction can emerge. Even the very early lessons involving pens, watches, phones, switches, tables and so on can, in reality, become challenging and fun in the hands of a talented and informed teacher - it's not a question of some brutal taskmaster squeezing the life out of language and chipping away at the poor learners’ brains to engrave words and structures indelibly and inalterably.
But I think the most important point to dispel is the idea - common among many teachers - that when we are teaching language we are in some way reliving the learning experience that occurs in growing individuals as they learn a language.
Of course, no one would set about teaching their toddler in such a formal restrictive and disciplined way. Children ‘discover’ language in all its complexities and subtleties, and learn over the course of years and through hundreds of thousands of different types of experiences and encounters.
We cannot try to replicate this experience - and we certainly don't have the time to do so - in the classroom. When adult or teenage learners come to a classroom, they come with the benefit of many learning experiences with different degrees of formality and modality, and are well equipped to cope with learning strategies that do not correspond exactly to what might be described as ‘natural’ or ‘real’. But of course, a classroom is a classroom and not the ‘natural world’ or the ‘real world’ (but ‘real worlds’ have classrooms too).
To assume that an approach which is evidently contrived and artificial will somehow necessarily impair learners’ receptiveness, or ‘damage’ them in some way, is to do little justice to their intelligence.
Of course if a teaching programme continues to present a language in a lifeless and implausible way, learners will lose interest and motivation, and as experience has shown, will not provide learners with the skills required to become confident and effective language users.
Yes, we have heard of the communicative approach and we well appreciate and approve of its aims, and we recognise the advances and benefits that it has brought. Communication is at the heart of what we teach, although we would make a distinction between communication as the exclusive ‘means’ and as the ‘end’. Communication is a consequence of what happens in the classroom more than being the starting point of what happens at all costs.
This is what I meant when I said to disgusted of Tunbridge Wells that we can move beyond CLT, which so often seems to end up becoming trapped in a hall of mirrors. So I am genuinely sorry that pens and books figure in our first lessons, but we do not live in caves and we do not use the pens to club our students into submission.
Last week I went to the TESOL conference in Rome: probably the major teaching event in the annual calendar. Attended primarily by English teachers at high school and middle school, there are nonetheless a fair number of representatives from private schools (PLS’s to use publisher’s jargon as I learnt). Over the two days there is a wide and varied programme of presentations and workshops -- around 60 in all.
We were present with a stand in the exhibition area, along with the big-boy publishers and examination boards. It was our first public outing and although attendance at this conference was worryingly down on previous years, it proved to be a useful experience.
On the whole it was very encouraging to see so many teachers’ curiosity and interest in something different. There was fairly general acknowledgement among teachers that, for several all too well known reasons, getting a good job done in prevailing circumstances proves arduous and elusive far too often. We had to point out that SpeakYourMind is currently available only through associate private schools: not because teachers at private schools are ‘better’ than those with in the education system, but simply because, in theory at least, private schools are able to establish better conditions for successful learning - primarily in terms of class size and in terms of streaming classes for level and, ideally, ability.
Talking there to teachers I did perceive a sense of predictability: the publisher's new products tended to be not much more than new marketing. New ideas were only new to the people who hadn't encountered them yet: certainly in the few presentations I was able to attend there was nothing particularly original. Corpus linguistics is extremely revealing and helpful but it’s also a popular and spacious bandwagon: some of the conclusions I heard drawn from corpus ‘evidence’ were open to different interpretations, and I think that reliance on these sources can be distracting to teachers in the front line. ‘Authenticity’ and ‘motivation’ were other popular themes, although it’s disappointing when speakers and writers cook up the evidence to suit their own menus – such as presenting examples from out-of-date Peruvian course-books to highlight the demotivating effects of ‘artificial’ language (“I am Mr Perez – are you Mrs Perez?”) and therefore the advantages of using ‘authentic’ language (“… and she’s like, ‘why did you do that?”).
Back to the exhibition area and our encounters with teachers: among the interest and curiosity there was naturally enough a more critical voice. I had been expecting this but was surprised by the vehemence when it happened. I can't help thinking of this teacher as ‘disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ – she did rather fit the stereotype. As we spoke (spoken preliminaries, rather than ‘discussion’) and I was looking for a student book to illustrate how the course was organised and the content presented, I could see her eyes guiding her towards the beginner’s course-book - and instinct guided me towards deflecting this move: I had a premonition of the ensuing confrontation. “This looks like a Berlitz book from the 50s,”' she scoffed. She had me at an unfair advantage here, not having taught then myself. I began to explain that the course incorporated ideas and procedures from different traditions and approaches and reworked them in the light of newer thinking, but she would have none of it.
Flicking to the opening pages she found the food required to fill her outrage: “Pen, clock, table! Haven't you people heard of communicative teaching?”. “Yes of course - and we have moved on from there.”
“Have you indeed! How can you teach ‘pen’ and ‘book’?” “It depends what you have in mind - in a classroom teaching situation it can be a useful way to get things started.” I tried to engage her in an exchange of views but her raised hackles got in the way. “I'm not interested, I'm not interested”, and off she marched, her sensibilities thoroughly offended.
Well, being addressed as ' you people ' hardly creates the rapport that allows the kind of communication that this teacher was such a stern proponent of in the classroom. Also the suggestion that ‘we people’ had been living in some sort of cave for the last thirty years was a bit objectionable too.
However, I knew where she was coming from. I am not a diehard fan of pens, pencils, clocks, phones, doors and windows; but at the same time this long-standing Situationalist approach to teaching beginners is not as harmful as some teachers believe. They formed the basis of drills used to ‘imprint’ structures in the 50’s - because structures were the key to language, so the thinking went. Of course, now we know that mastery of structures does not automatically lead to communicative autonomy, but that, in turn, does not mean that structures or sentence patterns have no place in language learning.
In the SpeakYourMind course we are very clear about recognising the limitations as well as the uses of starting in this way. There are advantages of teaching the words for the things that occur in your physical surroundings, learners can see them and touch them - it's very direct and immediate. In the initial set of objects and words that our beginner learners encounter they come across almost the complete range of phonemes, as well as beginning to learn about stress patterns - so important in English – so it’s not just ‘structures’.
Teachers and students are aware that starting in the classroom with classroom objects is purely a convenient way to get going – it kick-starts the language learning. As language quickly grows, the confines of the physical classroom dissolve, and more likely and plausible interaction can emerge. Even the very early lessons involving pens, watches, phones, switches, tables and so on can, in reality, become challenging and fun in the hands of a talented and informed teacher - it's not a question of some brutal taskmaster squeezing the life out of language and chipping away at the poor learners’ brains to engrave words and structures indelibly and inalterably.
But I think the most important point to dispel is the idea - common among many teachers - that when we are teaching language we are in some way reliving the learning experience that occurs in growing individuals as they learn a language.
Of course, no one would set about teaching their toddler in such a formal restrictive and disciplined way. Children ‘discover’ language in all its complexities and subtleties, and learn over the course of years and through hundreds of thousands of different types of experiences and encounters.
We cannot try to replicate this experience - and we certainly don't have the time to do so - in the classroom. When adult or teenage learners come to a classroom, they come with the benefit of many learning experiences with different degrees of formality and modality, and are well equipped to cope with learning strategies that do not correspond exactly to what might be described as ‘natural’ or ‘real’. But of course, a classroom is a classroom and not the ‘natural world’ or the ‘real world’ (but ‘real worlds’ have classrooms too).
To assume that an approach which is evidently contrived and artificial will somehow necessarily impair learners’ receptiveness, or ‘damage’ them in some way, is to do little justice to their intelligence.
Of course if a teaching programme continues to present a language in a lifeless and implausible way, learners will lose interest and motivation, and as experience has shown, will not provide learners with the skills required to become confident and effective language users.
Yes, we have heard of the communicative approach and we well appreciate and approve of its aims, and we recognise the advances and benefits that it has brought. Communication is at the heart of what we teach, although we would make a distinction between communication as the exclusive ‘means’ and as the ‘end’. Communication is a consequence of what happens in the classroom more than being the starting point of what happens at all costs.
This is what I meant when I said to disgusted of Tunbridge Wells that we can move beyond CLT, which so often seems to end up becoming trapped in a hall of mirrors. So I am genuinely sorry that pens and books figure in our first lessons, but we do not live in caves and we do not use the pens to club our students into submission.
Jun 8, 2011
May 25, 2011
Are you this kind of person?
Why I like my coach
"Back to my tennis........
I’ve started lessons with a new coach and I’m pretty pleased. I’ve been watching and noticing how he manages things and he’s got qualities that apply to most teaching situations.
First of all, he knows just what I’m capable of and he seems to keep me working just at the edge of my limits. He also sees when I’m beginning to get frustrated and when I’m simply beginning to tire. The pace suits me. I’m breaking sweat pretty much straight away – he’s hitting the ball hard enough and just far way enough to keep me stretched but without leaving me doubled up on the ground panting for breath – something he could easily do if he wanted to (he could also bore me stiff like a previous coach who didn’t seem to be interested enough in me to notice how good I could be and just did everything on ‘auto-instructor’ mode).
We start with a warm-up. He gets me to practice strokes that I can already handle pretty well but he ups the pace from session to session to make sure that it’s challenging - I certainly couldn’t have coped a couple of weeks ago with the pace we’re working at now. I’m improving my basics and feeling more confident and becoming more adventurous.
He makes sure there’s variety. He’ll introduce a new exercise each session to work on a new stroke but he doesn’t spend too long on this. I get more wrong than right at the beginning and he doesn’t let me reach the stage where I lose heart. He stops when he reckons I’ve had enough, not because I’ve finished learning the new stroke – we’ve just completed the first step. We’ll go back to it again next time and the following time and sooner or later he’ll incorporate it into the repertoire of our warm-up.
I certainly get more upset about my mistakes than he does and he makes sure he gives me plenty of encouragement by praising shots that really deserve it and not commenting on every single bad shot, limiting himself to identifying the cause of a problem when I make the same kind of mistake several times. The thing is I know that he sees everything and that he sees everything in a broad context – where I started from and where we’d like to get to.
We’re “playing tennis”, which makes me feel great. But I know that really he’s “playing” – not “playing a match”. He’s working on improving me. That’s why I’m here."
It's probably true that all of us transfer our own preferences, tastes and styles (How can you not like pasta? Don't you realise it's fantastic?!) into our students and as teachers "do to others as we would like others to do to us" Teachers who like grammar teach lots of it.
Teachers who like poetry incorporte poetry into their lessons.
Teachers who don't like organisation like to improvise (wing it).
Teachers who like the sound of their own voices assume everyone else does too.
Teachers who feel uncomfortable about 'correcting people' don't like to 'correct mistakes'.
Teachers who are laid back don't expect too much effort from students.
Please add others at will:
"Back to my tennis........
I’ve started lessons with a new coach and I’m pretty pleased. I’ve been watching and noticing how he manages things and he’s got qualities that apply to most teaching situations.
First of all, he knows just what I’m capable of and he seems to keep me working just at the edge of my limits. He also sees when I’m beginning to get frustrated and when I’m simply beginning to tire. The pace suits me. I’m breaking sweat pretty much straight away – he’s hitting the ball hard enough and just far way enough to keep me stretched but without leaving me doubled up on the ground panting for breath – something he could easily do if he wanted to (he could also bore me stiff like a previous coach who didn’t seem to be interested enough in me to notice how good I could be and just did everything on ‘auto-instructor’ mode).
We start with a warm-up. He gets me to practice strokes that I can already handle pretty well but he ups the pace from session to session to make sure that it’s challenging - I certainly couldn’t have coped a couple of weeks ago with the pace we’re working at now. I’m improving my basics and feeling more confident and becoming more adventurous.
He makes sure there’s variety. He’ll introduce a new exercise each session to work on a new stroke but he doesn’t spend too long on this. I get more wrong than right at the beginning and he doesn’t let me reach the stage where I lose heart. He stops when he reckons I’ve had enough, not because I’ve finished learning the new stroke – we’ve just completed the first step. We’ll go back to it again next time and the following time and sooner or later he’ll incorporate it into the repertoire of our warm-up.
I certainly get more upset about my mistakes than he does and he makes sure he gives me plenty of encouragement by praising shots that really deserve it and not commenting on every single bad shot, limiting himself to identifying the cause of a problem when I make the same kind of mistake several times. The thing is I know that he sees everything and that he sees everything in a broad context – where I started from and where we’d like to get to.
We’re “playing tennis”, which makes me feel great. But I know that really he’s “playing” – not “playing a match”. He’s working on improving me. That’s why I’m here."
It's probably true that all of us transfer our own preferences, tastes and styles (How can you not like pasta? Don't you realise it's fantastic?!) into our students and as teachers "do to others as we would like others to do to us" Teachers who like grammar teach lots of it.
Teachers who like poetry incorporte poetry into their lessons.
Teachers who don't like organisation like to improvise (wing it).
Teachers who like the sound of their own voices assume everyone else does too.
Teachers who feel uncomfortable about 'correcting people' don't like to 'correct mistakes'.
Teachers who are laid back don't expect too much effort from students.
Please add others at will:
Apr 18, 2011
Six Months Jail Over for SpeakYourMind author
Six months’ prison over for SpeakYourMind author. Getting out was always easier than getting in. That’s one big difference between volunteer visitors and the inmates. Tomorrow I’ll be going in through the check-points and all the steel gates, down the long corridors and past the cages to my ‘classroom’ for the last time this ‘term’. It was an idea that had been burying away into my mind for a while and it was this time last year when I made the first approach to Verona Sociale – a voluntary organisation that also covers Progetto Carcere an organisation that oversees a range of activities inside Verona’s prison at Montorio. Things take time where officialdom is concerned but by the end of October the papers and authorisations were all in place. I was going to teach a group of inmates English. The wonderful thing is that it worked. I’ve been asked by the organisers to stop for ‘administrative’ reasons but I can honestly say that all of us are very sorry that this has reached its end. The group of participants – all male – have been great to teach: they’ve taken things seriously from the start and have always been courteous, positive, and good-humoured – far more than could be reasonably expected given the circumstances. Whether they enrolled on the course simply to break the monotony – inmates spend twenty-two hours a day in their cells – or to take the opportunity to learn a new skill soon became irrelevant: no-one turned up just to pass the time of day and the rewards I got as a teacher have been huge. As in any teaching situation, your first job is to establish a sense of ‘group’ and of a shared objective – everyone is on the same side working towards a common aim. This could have been much harder to achieve than actually turned out – this wasn’t a group of friends or colleagues and what they all had in common was not a consequence of choice. Most were beginners – three or four zero-beginners and another five or six who had a smattering of English. Two had a bit more English behind them – one a Libyan with a brother in the US, and another Italian in his late thirties. Later in the course a young Pole joined – he has a girlfriend in the States and his English is pretty fluent. In just under forty lessons (two one-hour lessons a week) we have managed to complete the first course-book; something that classes in far more favourable conditions don’t always manage. We have quite an interesting nationality mix – apart from the Libyan and the Pole, there were two young men from Morocco (one of whom dropped out over Christmas – one of three ‘desertions’ during the course, including one who was released) - and a young German who spoke no Italian and was seriously disorientated but who was taken under everyone’s wing (including many of the guards) in an admirable and moving way. The young Moroccan in particular has been a brilliant student and he is rightly pleased with himself. He’s told me that now he can add some English to his French and Italian he plans to get a job in tourism when he returns to the outside world. I suppose everyone who does any kind of voluntary work hopes that this kind of result can happen – the chance to make a single real difference to someone’s life. Two others told me last lesson that they are hoping to be released soon and asked if they could carry on at our school later – it would be a shame to get so far and then have to stop. Of course – students need a certain type of resilience and humour – more than is normally called for in English classrooms. “What time do you get up / have breakfast etc?” inspire no curiosity (the fact they eat rice five times a week for lunch doesn’t make questions about meals and food all that interesting either.) “Where do you go after lessons?” “What do you do in the evenings / weekends?” – all the standard kinds of elementary questions are sadly pointless, as are most questions related to their jobs or even homes (some have had theirs confiscated by Court). Despite all this - and the fact that we are in a classroom with no pictures or the things you’d normally have (and with windows ten feet up the walls) the classroom dynamics are just the same as they could be in any classroom anywhere. “Marco” is Marco and “Ali” is Ali – but from outside all these people are, to too many of us, often just “Prisoners”.
Mar 15, 2011
what is a book?
This was actually written as a reply to an enquiry we received from a teacher in Turkey who has become interested in SpeakYourMind and has been in contact with us for a while now. Having seen sample copies of Student Books he wrote back to ask us about the book itself, in terms of its design, layout and - ultimately its role.
"By the way, the books have no colour or pictures ........... Don't mis understand I think the lexical-interactive approach is great. But I would need some supporting arguments ............. explaining the system to potential buyers and their teaching staff."
WHAT IS A BOOK?
Why do we need books? Does the book teach us, or does it simply record what the ‘teacher’ teaches us? Is a book the content or the container?
With the main aim of SpeakYourMind being to teach English as spoken language, the Student Book is, in reality, an option – students could learn (and I know those who have) only with their lessons at school and without ever opening their book. SpeakYourMind is designed to be effective in this way, but – naturally enough – most students want to learn to read and write as part of the course, so the book becomes a requirement rather than an option. The book is also a valuable support for those students who want to help themselves by revising in their own time – this may apply to a majority of students but evidence shows that there are learners who have neither the time nor the inclination.
Homework and / or self-study is a bit of a grey area when it comes to TEFL for adults. There are many teachers who feel that homework and self-study are a necessary part of a course and that students are reasonably expected to do their fair share of study in their own time. Those that don’t (such goes the argument) are not serious about learning and will, naturally and deservedly, not achieve satisfactory results. Worse still, they will jeopardise the success of the course, make life difficult for the teacher and make lessons wasteful for their more conscientious classmates. Our stance on this is that self-study is a recommended option – students can learn without, but they will make things easier for themselves by finding ten or fifteen minutes as regularly as they can to look through their lessons in the student book. And with this type of use in mind, the SpeakYourMind Student books are very much designed for simplicity. They follow the teaching programme step-by-step, which means students know exactly where they are, and they can quickly find today’s or yesterday’s lesson content.
Speaking-centred learning
During lessons students speak, and when they are not speaking they are listening and following the teacher-student conversation, ready to take part at any moment. The lesson ‘follows the book’ (the content the teacher works with and moves within) but it is ‘book-free’ in that books are closed and the conversation and the language it evokes is very much the centre of attention. The ‘book’ does not need to create interest – the energy and the interest is in the air, and students’ eyes (and ears) are focussed on the speakers and not resting on a page of an open book. Likewise, the CDs that accompany the Student Books are designed for self-study and not for classroom use (although there may be cases, such as in full-time language courses, where this could be integrated into lesson-plans). The CDs, like the books, are best used when students do not have access to a teacher.
Conventional book-based lessons are suited to teaching situations where there are large mixed-level classes – a situation that is widely accepted as being ‘a fact of life’ but which we identify as being the biggest single obstacle to successful learning and teaching. Working with level-matched classes with level-specific material greatly benefits students and teachers alike, but it shifts a lot of the hard work onto the course administrators rather than the teachers in the classroom – probably the main reason most conventional language schools continue to apply a very loose interpretation of ‘graded’ classes.
Content: plain and simple
As mentioned in reference to home-study, the book is designed for simplicity – it provides students with quick and easy access to relevant content. I can see why teachers who are used to working with orthodox materials published by the multi-nationals will find the SpeakYourMind student books very plain by comparison.
The student books do, nonetheless, contain all that students need in order to follow the course: explanations and examples of new vocabulary, along with dialogues which place new language in a range of recognisable situations (social, family, travel, professional). These dialogues are ‘multi-functional’ – they can be used for the oral introduction of new words in class by the teacher, they can be used for self-study reading, they can be used for pronunciation and intonation activities in class, as well as for the basis of short ‘role-play’ activities in lessons. The student books also contain clear and comprehensive grammar sections as they appear, step-by-step – students do not need a separate grammar book. Likewise, exercises and other activities are all part of the same volume – students don’t need to have separate ‘course-books’ and ‘work-books’.
All student books contain an index of all new words, as well as lists of irregular verbs, British and American English charts, and in the first three course books, a basic grammar guide. In other words, the whole SpeakYourMind course is designed to be compact and self-contained – both in terms of the lessons themselves and the material that accompanies them.
Returning to the visual aspect of the Student Books, they are black-and-white, text-only. This is in clear contrast to the array of colours, photos, and fonts that fill the pages of the standard course-books, but I don’t think that this in itself need be seen as a weakness. Firstly, I don’t think that learners need all the, what is by now, predictable visual ‘stimulus’ that can end up cluttering pages and seems, very often, designed for teenagers by people who are not teenagers. This is bound to be largely a question of personal taste and preference, but some of the EFL books that I like most are free of decorative visuals – they give the impression they are matter-of-fact about the job in hand, and the simple layout means that all relevant information is easily identifiable (I’m talking about the LTP professional English series and exam preparation series – now published by Heinle). It was in the mid-eighties that the current ‘magazine’ style of TEFL publications took off, largely to satisfy the needs of learners to see ‘realistic’ material that they would otherwise not have easy access to. The internet has made this need largely redundant (as it has brought the relevance and usefulness of many other aspects of conventional TEFL into question – but this is another topic).
I’m not going to defend our own published material at all costs, and I really don’t want to make ‘simplicity’ too much of a virtue. Now that the new-generation SpeakYourMind series is finally complete and the content is all in place, looking at improvements in layout and design is already a project for future editions.
On the whole, students seem to approve of the size of the SpeakYourMind student books – they fit easily into most bags. The main font is Times Roman – hardly trendy but nonetheless a font still widely used in newspapers, news magazines and books. As such, it is probably the most useful font for learners, specifically for those whose alphabets are different, to become accustomed to.
In the end, as schools and teachers we set out to be providers of learning, and with SpeakYourMind ‘the lessons’, not ‘the book’ as a product, is central to this.
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