This post was prompted by an exchange on LinkedIn. Rachel Higginson, experienced education consultant and founder of Finding my Voice, posted this under the title: When cold calling is too cold . Let me quote an extract: There has been a concerning and consistent theme in pupil voice sessions that I have conducted over the last year. Cold calling is having a negative impact on learning. Pupils express how they spend the entire lesson anxious about their impending turn and they also explain how this impacts their ability to concentrate on the lesson itself. Interestingly this is also related to what happens when they don't get it right. They talk about lack of acknowledgement and shame and embarrassment. She goes on to write: At Finding My Voice we call cold calling, 'Inclusive Questioning'. This is a deeply inclusive strategy which is intentionally warm... 1) Classroom Culture is based on shared and established Social Norms: 'We are imperfect', 'We think alou...
I'm returning here to a topic I have posted on before. This time I gave Chat GPT some notes to work on, it provided the bones of the blog and then I edited and supplemented it. We know that language input that students understand is at the heart of language acquisition. If students don’t understand the input, learning doesn’t happen — it's mere exposire, not language that learners can process. The challenge for language teachers is to model input clearly, repeatedly, and meaningfully. Below are five commonly used ways to model input , with concrete ideas on how to exploit each one , all classroom-tested and easy to adapt. AI makes creating these inputs faster than ever — but it’s how we use them that really matters. 1. Sentence builders Maximum clarity, zero ambiguity Originally known in audiolingual practice as substitition tables, sentence builders makes the target language completely transparent. Students know exactly what language they will use,...