Post-talk

By Scott Donald

This article is a follow up to ‘Pre-talk’ [https://medium.com/a-little-more-action-research/pre-talk-d9678e98110b#.nn8a44cku]

Phew! All that planning, and it’s over in an hour. Thankfully, though, the conference talk seemed to to go well enough.

I tend to measure how successful my talks were (or weren’t) by how much of the material I remembered to say. There’s nothing worse than looking at my notes afterwards and seeing a key sentence still sitting there, unuttered. Happily, this time, there were very few. And now that the blog exists, I have a place I can share those key points and underline a few things. But first…

A conclusion from the talk

The topic of vergüenza (the Spanish word for shame) came up when discussing typical problems with speaking. This happened both at the talk and at the practice run I did at my work (IH Clic Sevilla). I find this particularly interesting, as I came to Spain 3 years ago for the first time in my life armed with a photocopy I’d made of the Spanish and Catalan section of the Swan & Smith Learner English book. In it there are lots of interesting comparisons with English grammar, vocabulary and phonology, but nothing about Spanish learners being reluctant to speak up in class (which it does for other speakers, e.g. Japanese.) So I relied on cultural stereotypes, and I imagined a Spanish speaker: loud, fast and fluent. It seems I’m not the first person to draw these conclusions and then find a different reality in their English classrooms. It often seems that students in Spain are, in fact, more concerned with accuracy over fluency. I’d be interested to know if readers of this blog have had similar experiences. I think it’s a really interesting topic and something that would be a good area to explore further…

Things I forgot to say and a couple of points to underline

I opened my talk with some typical utterances for turn-taking that one might expect to here in a speaking exam,

Would you like to go first?

Or perhaps the slightly less natural,

In my humble opinion, I think you should start. I’m all ears!

My suggestion was that this type of functional language alone is not enough to help someone improve their speaking, or to pass a speaking exam (you can’t bluff your way through a 15 minute speaking exam with rehearsed chunks of language.) However, I’m not suggesting that teachers should avoid teaching them, as long as they sound natural. The point I wanted to reinforce in the talk was that students need to be getting good quality speaking activities in class first, before we can expect them to become competent speakers in English.

One way we looked at achieving a good quality of speaking activity in the class was by allowing students preparation time. This included getting students to prepare things before at home, and maximising speaking opportunities in class (something suggested by my colleague Ewan Swain in his talk on ‘Flipped Classrooms’.) This is something I explored in depth last year with a Pre-CAE class by setting up a Google Doc with the following introduction:

A typical challenge looked like this:

The results were very encouraging. Most students generally watched or listened to the content before class, and then they came primed for discussion and debate. The lessons were good fun (high student motivation) with lots of good quality interaction. Sometimes the suggestions for the challenges came from me, sometimes from the students. I particularly enjoyed the lesson which sprung from the How I Met Your Mother episode. I wasn’t mad about the show myself, but the students had chosen a decent Christmas episode which alluded to a character using some very vulgar language. In the lesson, we discussed the history and nuances behind English swear words and their role in the language, comparing them with Spanish swear words. The students were really engaged in the topic and eager to learn as much as they could. Pronunciation drilling was a particular highlight. Aside from How I Met Your Mother, our extracurricular lessons covered: Vogue magazine interviews; an old British tv show about our profession called Mind Your Language; Ted Talks; Radio 4 broadcasts; and topics such as discipline, stereotypes and English as a lingua franca.

This year, I’ve tried a more hands off approach with the same students. I simply set up a blog and encouraged them to contribute their ideas with very little input from me. Whether it’s the approach, or the fact they are busy doing past papers, the results have been pretty rubbish. My conclusion is that a bit of prodding and poking is necessary to achieve the desired results.

What’s next…

Well, unfortunately, I had to cut the pairwork section of my talk due to time restrictions. So look out for that in an upcoming post. I’m also considering something on the use of technology in the classroom. A few people have expressed interest in contributing to the blog, which is really encouraging. But there’s plenty of room for more, so please get in touch if you’re considering it. Regarding materials from my talk, they should be available on the ACEIA Malaga website shortly (unfortunately they are too big to share here.)

Finally, a quick thank you

Thanks to the people who helped me develop the talk with ideas and general support. Thanks to the researchers and teachers whose excellent material I was able to use in my talk. Thanks to Fiona Dunbar and the ACEIA Malaga team for organising another great conference. And a final thanks to the people who came to the talk and anyone reading this blog; without motivated teachers like you. interested in professional development, the world of language teaching would be a lot less interesting.