Building our repertoire

This is the third of a series of posts where I share short extracts from the second edition of  The Language Teacher Toolkit, which is now published! For this section, from the final chapter called "Planning for communication", Gianfranco and I drew partly on some blog posts I had written a year or so ago. Like most of the chapters in the book, the chapter contains a mixture of research information and classroom practice. This section is focused more on the latter. We particularly had in mind teachers learning the craft in this section, and how they can develop a repertoire of go-to procedures to manage workload through rapid, but effective planning.

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Building a repertoire

For new teachers, planning can be daunting. They may be faced with a wide range of theories and advice about how to teach. In teacher education circles there is a debate around whether you should learn from a variety of methods, or be taught just one, to keep things simple, and from which you can build a more sophisticated approach with experience. We agree with Larsen-Freeman and Anderson (2011), Bauckham (2016) and Prabhu (1990) that there is no best method for every circumstance, but if you develop your own repertoire of procedures based on sound principles you will be off to a good start.

Having a set of familiar procedures, activities, plans and techniques saves time on preparation and keeps workload in check. Below are some procedures and teaching routines you could apply on a regular basis.

 

1.       Working with a sentence builder. Remember that three great advantages of sentence builders are (1) their comprehensibility (everything is translated); (2) their clarity and transparency, i.e. it is clear to students exactly what they need to practise and (3) their adaptability, i.e. the many ways you can exploit them. A sentence builder can be the first part of a longer sequence of lessons involving narrow listening and reading texts, comprehension questions, translation, grammar exercises and less controlled productive tasks like free composition. In general, the principle, as we saw in Chapter 12, is about moving from receptive work to productive through careful steps, allowing much recycling of high-frequency language patterns. Even if you do not follow a strict MARS EARS sequence of the time described in Chapter 12, there is still a wide range of ways a sentence builder can be exploited. (An example SBis shown in the book.)

 

2.       Working with a written text. At any level the techniques described in Chapters 3 and 4 can be deployed (note: these chapters are about managing classroom speaking and using the target language). Once you have a text at the right level (ideally, with at least 95% of the words already known to students), you can work through a routine of interactions and other activities. With this toolkit of procedures, the text essentially become the lesson plan. Once again, lessons are built up with the early focus on comprehension, building the level of demand gradually over a lesson or sequence of lessons. This takes practice and experience, of course, but over time a great deal of time is saved when planning.

 

Below is a short, concocted novice text in English, followed by a sequence of possible activities. The text is short enough to be displayed on a screen, as well as printed off. Imagine how this would work in the language you teach.

 

Her name is Marie-Hélène. She is 9 years old. She lives in Toulouse in the south of France. She lives in a house with her two parents and her brother Alain.

 

She has a cat called Raoul. He is black and he is very cute. She loves cats, snow and cartoons on TV. She also likes to play on the computer. In her room she has a bed, some books, a desk and a computer.

 

She doesn't like mice; she prefers hamsters. She hates spiders. She thinks they’re horrible!

 

a.   Teacher reads aloud the text.

b.   Choral repetition of part of the text. Use the ‘back-chaining’ technique. This means repeating a chunk, one syllable at a time, ‘back-to-front’, e.g. in the first sentence above: ène, Hélène, is Hélène, name is Hélène, her name is Hélène. Focus on awkward sounds and sound-spelling correspondences. (These could even be highlighted in the text, a technique known in the research literature as textual enhancement).

c.   Find the L2. How do you say…?

d.   True/false, e.g. She lives in a house. She has a dog.

e.  Correct false statements, e.g. She is 10 years old; she lives in New York. Normally teacher-led, but in pairs with some classes.

f.   Question-answer (using full range of question types and personalising the questions at times), e.g. Is she ten years old? Does she live in Toulouse or Paris? Where does she live? How old are you? Where do you live?

g.   Aural gap-fill with the text not visible, e.g. Her name is…. She is … She lives in… She lives with…

h.   Students write answers to questions previously practised orally.

i.   ‘Disappearing text’, i.e. on successive slides remove more and more of the text for students to complete orally, starting with just a few words missing, then going as far as the class can manage.

j.  A gapped version of the text to complete (with or without options). Gaps may be words, chunks or letters.

k.  Translation into L2 of chosen chunks from the text, either teacher-led or in pairs.

l.   Transcription of chunks from the text, e.g. delayed dictation.

m. Changing the perspective. Students convert the text into the first person, orally and/or in writing.

n.  Free writing. Students write their own narrative. With most classes this needs leaving very late, once you are sure the language has been recycled multiple times over more than one lesson. Students could record their writing on a phone.

 

 

3.   Working with an aural text. Whether your text is from an audio or video sources, or your own voice, a common sequence of activities can be used. The source text should, again, be highly comprehensible. Material which has too much unknown language will be off-putting to students and reduce their self-efficacy. It is often a good idea to use a transcript together with the spoken text. Below is a sequence that could bé followed.

 

a.    A pre-listening task such as working on some words and phrases students will hear in the text or some background information about the topic.

b.    Read aloud the text twice as students follow.

c.    True-false statements to judge, e.g. with mini-whiteboard responses.

d.    False sentences to correct.

e.    A gap-fill task, either with options provided or not.

f.    A ‘faulty transcript’ task, where you give students a transcript which differs in a few ways from the original. Students must find the discrepancies.

g.   A dictation task based on bits of the text, e.g. running dictation, paired dictation or delayed dictation.

h.   Translation.

i.    A ‘disappearing text’ task where you display part of the transcript, then, slide by slide, successively remove parts of the text for students to recall.

 

4. 4.  Working from a picture or picture sequence. (In Chapter 10 we described sequences for exploiting pictures.) As with the above examples, the resource (picture or picture sequences) becomes the lesson plan. And the same picture(s) can be re-used in multiple ways, saving you time and effort. The same sort of techniques used in the previous sequences can be applied, with the same aim of recycling the same language many times over through the four skills.