What do you consider when you’re planning a lesson? Would you ever not plan your warmer or your lead-in? Would you ever go into a lesson without planning your input stage? In this talk we urge teachers to plan in the forgotten stages, the ones that give students the time and space to assess and discuss how much they’ve learnt, and we offer a suggestion on how to balance a lesson so that there is an appropriate amount of time given to these stages.
If you’d like to learn more, you can find the slides below. If you’re interested in learning even more, check out the following blog posts or our delightful book, Overt Teaching.
This lesson is obviously quite timely given the month but it very much focuses on analysing different future forms and highlighting how they are often used together. While the context is making resolutions on social media, the lesson goes on to show how these forms can be used in a range of different contexts.
Level: Pre-intermediate – Upper Intermediate.
Time: 90 minutes.
Objective: by the end of the lesson, learners will be better able to discuss their hopes and plans for the future.
Vocabulary focus: collocations for activities / hobbies.
Grammar focus: be going to / will / might / be supposed to.
Mark and I write and speak a lot about Overt Teaching. If you’d like to know more about what that is, you can read our blog post here or check out our handy dandy book, available on all good book websites and probably in the dark corner of a bookshop where they keep the rest of the EFL methodology books.
The core of Overt Teaching is that we believe we should be involving our learners in the discussion of learning throughout our lessons. We should be discussing the objectives of our lesson and helping learners to relate it to their lives and goals; we should discuss why we do what we do with our students, what our aims for a task are; we should give students the tools they need to reflect on their own success and give their peers feedback. And why? Because a more aware and invested student will be more engaged and make more progress.
In general when we talk about this at conferences or just one to one, our points and ideas are met positively. We’ve met very few teachers who really believe that it is a bad course of action or who do not want learners engaged with the learning process. However, we do often encounter some push back and it tends to be in the form of:
This is great but my students couldn’t do this.
There tend to be a number of reasons why teachers believe that their students would not be able to discuss learning but below are some of the most common, and a summary of some of the discussions we’ve had.
This is fine with higher levels but my students are too low. They don’t have the language you need to reflect.
Of all the levels, learning is most tangible at the lower levels. It can sometimes be as simple as “at the beginning of the lesson, you couldn’t talk about the past, now you can”. Very often reflection is viewed as a complex abstract topic that must be delved into in great detail. However, at beginner, elementary or pre-int, reflection at the end of a lesson can be a simple discussion:
What vocabulary did you learn today?
What grammar did you learn today?
How will you use it outside class?
Success for a task can be laid out as using a specific piece of grammar or a number of items of lexis. Students can easily give peer feedback with short tick-boxes. The below can be easily used so students can choose their own lexis and their own level of success. It can be used as a peer-assessment or adapted for self-assessment.
This is fine with lower levels but my students are advanced and it is harder for them to see progress and reflect.
100% agree with the core of this statement. At higher levels it is more difficult for students to see their progress as it’s much less tangible. This, however, makes it even more crucial that learners are given the opportunity to reflect on and discuss what they’ve learnt. Without these discussions, students may come to the conclusion that they are not progressing because it is less tangible and visual.
At higher levels, students can converse easily on a range of topics. They can draw on their known, safe language and complete communicate tasks with relative ease. It is important therefore that we give them the opportunity before the task to make decisions about new language and skills they want to attempt, encouraging them to move outside their comfort zones. And then to reflect on how successful they were and what they want to try next time.
This is fine with adults but my students are too young to reflect and discuss their learning.
Most of my experience has been with older students, and while I have taught younger students, it is a number of years ago now. However, recently I got the chance to sit in on my 5-year-old son’s lesson. He was writing some words about a picture they had drawn. They were learning to write words to describe body parts. The teacher modelled it and then checked success criteria:
Where do we write? Chorus: under the picture.
How many words do we write on each line? Chorus: one.
Which words are we writing? Chorus: body word.
Students went off and wrote their words. Afterwards the teacher asked them to give their partners feedback using thumbs up or down while she moved around. She called out the success criteria again and students gave their partners thumb-based peer feedback.
Like anything, we grade the task. It’s all possible but needs to be scaffolded for the age or level. Here’s a nice idea for teaching writing using images of cupcakes the visualise layers of success.
This is fine but my students are from an educational background where they expect the teacher to give input the whole time. They’re not able to reflect.
There are so many things that we take for granted in an English language lesson that are not standard in every educational background. Depending on your age or culture, working with a partner may not be something you expect in class, but we do it because we know the value. For many students, being taught lexically might jar with their expectations but many teachers will persevere, confident that this is the best way for their students to learn.
Like anything, given the support and scaffolding, students will learn what is expected of them in class. Patience and understanding will often be necessary but if you feel that the discussion of learning is worthwhile and beneficial for them, then it’s worth spending the time helping your learners to develop those skills.
This is fine by my students want to focus on grammar and vocabulary input. There is not time for reflection and discussing learning.
As above really. If you value it, then it’s worth spending the time on it. The expectation of many students is that their lessons should be full of input so they can fill their notebook with notes which they may never look at again. What’s more important than every student knowing how much they’ve progressed in a lesson and knowing what they need to work on. Without discussing learning, this won’t happen. We’ve got to value these discussions and make the space in the lesson.
This is fine but I tried to do reflection tasks and my students couldn’t do it.
Giving peer feedback, reflecting on success or discussing your progress are not easy skills. However, they are skills that will help our learners in language learning but also in their lives beyond the classroom. They are valuable skills. The first time you try it with your students, they may struggle or balk as reflecting on input isn’t as easy as receiving and recording input for many. My advice would be:
Scaffold it carefully.
Do it little and often.
Don’t be put off if it’s tricky the first time. Persevere…it’s worth it.
This is fine but there are 50 students in my class so I can’t do this with them all.
The bigger your group, the more crucial it is that your learners are developing the skills they need to self-assess, peer-assess, reflect, and give feedback. With a large group, there is no way that a teacher can be expected to give meaningful feedback to everyone or assess their progress. The best we can do is develop the skills above and help our students to become more autonomous.
Let’s bring it all back home.
It’s not that we disagree with any of the above challenges. They are all challenges. However, if we believe in the value of these discussions and so we urge you to persevere and make it possible for your learners. They can all do it…they might just need your support.
I’m always interested in not just the language we use to communicate but the cultural ideas behind them. I remember the day that I learnt I had an understood sphere of acceptable personal space when I was communicating with others. I had just moved to Spain and was teaching 7-year-olds. Parent-Teacher meeting day came around and my Spanish was terrible. I had only been learning for 3 months. I worked hard and prepared my reports in Spanish with the help of my colleagues. I learnt them all off by heart and prayed that nobody asked any follow-up questions. One of my students, an amazing girl by the name of Lucia, was doing great in my classes but not so well in her English classes in her primary school. Understandably, but unfortunately for me, her mother had lots of questions.
She came in and caught me at the end of the meeting. I was standing in the corridor and she walked up stopping at a point that she felt comfortable and we began to have a conversation in my very broken Spanish about her daughter. My unconscious understanding of personal space kicked in and I took a step back. She then took a step forward and I took another back. By the end of the conversation when our odd dance had ended, I was 5 classrooms down the corridor with no idea how I’d gotten there.
From that point onward, I’ve been fascinated by all of the personal and cultural aspects of communication. It’s the little things that we assume is the same for everyone. But unless we discuss it, we often remain unaware that what is understood for one person or culture, can be offensive or shocking for another person. For that reason, I always had regular conversations with my students about how people communicate in their cultures. I never saw it as our job to teach this as such. More to facilitate that conversation so that our students can learn from each other and learn to communicative effectively with people from around the world.
This lesson focuses on greeting and encourages students to reflect on how they greet in their culture and to learn what others expect from a greeting. It’s designed for lower levels (elementary / Pre-intermediate) but as it’s an awareness raising lesson, it could be carried out with higher levels.
Intercultural Communication: Greeting
Level: Elementary / Pre-int (& above)
Time: 90 minutes
Objective: to raise awareness of how people greet in different cultures so that we can greet and have short conversations with people from around the world.
Let’s begin with the picture for this blog. I promise it’s not a beer-related blog. I was going to Italy on holiday for a week with my family recently so I decided to download a popular language-learning app to learn some key phrases in Italian. I was super motivated to learn the phrases I needed to get by for a few days…but unfortunately, that didn’t last long.
We began by learning the Italian for “a man”, “a woman”, “a child”. Now, this is technically what my family is but I’m not sure it was necessarily what I needed at that time. Not to worry though, my motivation was still high so I persevered. Next I learnt to say “a man eats”, “a woman drinks”, “a child speaks”. Again, I definitely expected these three things to occur regularly throughout the week but I just didn’t see myself needing to describe the individual habits of my family to Italian passers-by. My motivation dropped and I abandoned the app.
Instead, I stopped and thought about what my goal was for the holiday. I had very simple needs…you might be able to guess what some of them were from the picture. I wanted to be able to:
Order beer, wine and juice.
Order food.
Ask where the toilets were (very important when travelling with a 6-year-old).
Ask for the bill.
Say “please” and “thank you”.
Armed with my goal, I was suitably re-motivated but this time I took my learning into my own hands and with the help of Google Translate and a few Google searches, I had the phrases I wanted. In the end, it was all for naught as I was in an all-inclusive resort and if I tried to speak in Italian to anyone, they just ran away and returned with an English-speaking colleague.
My lack of Italian aside, this experience got me thinking about the impact learner goals have on motivation and engagement. For the most part, when someone is learning a language, they have a goal. Mine was quite narrow but for many they will be broader. Perhaps it will be to study at a university, to travel to a country, to improve job prospects, to migrate, or to converse comfortably with friends or family members. Whatever the goal, this is what drives them. It drives them to pay for a course or a private tutor; sometimes it even drives them to travel at great expense to a country where they can fully immerse themselves in that language. If we can help our learners to see how each lesson chips away at their goal, we can get real engagement.
How can we harness the power of these goals?
I work for EC English, where students are encouraged to set goals before they begin their course. Recently a student set their goal. It was a simple, real-life goal. They wanted to be able to understand football match commentary. The student was coming to our school for a month. Here’s the issue, much like my Italian experience, this student is very quickly going to realise that not all of their lessons are related to football. And, unless they have the good fortune to join a class during the unit on sports and games, it’s quite likely that football will not be mentioned at all in that month. This student’s motivation might not last the first week, let alone the month.
Unless…
Step 1: help the student to break their goal down into meaningful steps to achieve it.
To be able to understand football commentary, one doesn’t just need to know football-related vocabulary. On top of that, if this learner is interested in football, they probably know a hell of a lot more sports language than I do (my friends still get frustrated when I ask if their chosen team has won their sports game). So what else might they need? Perhaps:
Decoding weak forms & fast speech.
Understanding intonation and shades of meaning.
Present tenses (simple, continuous, perfect).
Will / going to for prediction.
Certain stock phrases (e.g. “at the end of the day”, “they gave it everything”).
None of which are crazy or out of the ordinary in a general English class.
Step 2: give the student space to reflect
Very often we encourage students to reflect on what they’ve learnt in a lesson or in a week of lessons. We ask them what vocabulary, grammar or skills they’ve acquired. But perhaps we’re missing a step. Perhaps the question is not just “what have you learnt?” but “what have you learnt that will help you to achieve your goal?”.
By keeping our learners’ eyes on their goal and constantly highlighting how what they’re learning in class chips away at that goal, we can harness their motivation and turn it into lesson engagement.
What’s next?
Consider book-ending your lessons, or your week of lessons (or an appropriate number of lessons depending on your context) with this two-step discussion. The first is helping them to refine their goals and the final is asking them what impact your lessons have had on those goals. The resulting conversation can help inform your future lessons as well as ensure engagement from all your students.
And, as the picture shows, I can order beer in Italy…even if I didn’t get a chance to do it in Italian. Next time…
Over the past few months, I’ve been speaking to a lot of teachers about the emergence of AI and its impact on our industry. Reactions have ranged from fear to acceptance to excitement. It’s a really interesting time to be a teacher. I have to say, I understand the fear. For the majority, it’s not about machines rising against us or homicidal interactive whiteboards. For many it’s a fear of the unknown, we just got used to teaching online and now there’s another new piece of software we need to get to grips with, another tool that our students will be more familiar with than us. And that is very understandable.
In answer to that fear, I would say just try it out. Start small and take it from there. You don’t need to be the expert. It’s all about the first step. In this post, we’ll look at making that first step as easy as possible.
What problem can AI help to solve?
An easy first step is finding something you do regularly and explore how AI can help you achieve that more effectively. As a teacher, I remember spending hours scouring the internet looking for the perfect texts to use in my lessons, the perfect dialogue, story, article, etc. I’d come across one and it would be almost perfect but not quite. If you’ve ever had this issue, Artificial Intelligence is going to become your best friend.
For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to use Chat GPT. It’s free, easy to sign up to and easy to use.
What is the objective of your lesson? What kind of text would help you to achieve that objective? Is it a short story, an article, an anecdote, a poem, a dialogue, a text conversation? Whatever it is, Chat GPT will help you to write it.
Step 3: Get your prompt right
The key to getting the text you want is feeding Chat GPT the information it needs. For example, if you say “write me a story about a night out”, you might get a story that’s 1000s of words long or you might get a very short one. It might be a love story, a horror story, or a combination of both. You’re at the whim of Chat GPT. It’s all about the prompt. To ensure success, include:
Request:
Genre:
Length:
Student profile:
Level:
Key grammar points to include:
Key vocabulary to include:
Step 4: Edit your text
The beauty of Chat GPT is that if you don’t like your text, you can just click “Regenerate” and you’ll immediately get another version. You can also ask Chat GPT to refine your text by feeding it further prompts. For example, you could say: “please make this story shorter” or “please make the vocabulary a little simpler” or even “please rewrite this story in the first person”.
In my experience, you’ll probably still need to edit the story slightly to make it perfect for your specific group of students, but Chat GPT will do most of the heavy lifting for you and will do it in seconds.
Let’s look at an example:
I want to teach a lesson on telling stories using a range of narrative tenses. My topic is nights out. I asked Chat GPT to create a text for me. Using the prompt structure above, I fed it the information it would need.
Chat GPT created the story below, which is a pretty good start but I felt there was some vocabulary that wasn’t really appropriate for this level.
I asked Chat GPT to replace the vocabulary with simpler vocabulary and got the following. This was pretty good but I wanted my students to tell their stories from the first person to better mirror how they tell stories in their real lives.
I asked Chat GPT to rewrite it from the 1st person point of view and thankfully it obliged.
I’ve now got a pretty decent text, at the level I want, in the format I want and the beauty of this is that it took about 2 minutes from start to finish.
A Final Thought:
AI isn’t perfect in any shape or form but it can save you a lot of time when it comes to lesson planning and materials creation, even if it’s just to give you some inspiration. So, before you go scouring the internet for the perfect text, why not take that first step and give AI a go. It’s not as scary as it might seem.
I absolutely love talking about food in class. I love how different cultures describe food, I love how literal some can be and how persuasive and descriptive others are. I love how totally convinced someone can be that the food from their country/culture is superior to another’s. I love the debates that ensue and all the language that emerges as a result. I love how curious everyone is off each other’s food customs. Food can be the gateway to lessons on question formation, circumlocution, descriptive language, instruction giving, debating and in the case of this lesson, writing skills.
This lesson focuses on describing food tastes and while the context is a food blog, the language (describing food and tastes) and the writing skill (organising a paragraph) are easily relatable to a range of speaking and writing contexts.
Details:
Level: Pre-Intermediate / Intermediate
Objective: by the end of the lesson, learners will be able to describe food tastes & write a paragraph that is easy for a reader to follow (e.g. in a blog post about food).
I wrote this lesson for a very simple reason. My friend sent me a photo of how his father-in-law drinks his coffee every morning and I just couldn’t get over it.
Every morning…every morning he drinks over a pint of incredibly milky coffee. I had so many questions and I kept thinking, I bet students would have lots of questions too. This is the lesson that followed.
Level: Elementary
Time: 90mins
Objective: Telling a story (e.g. about something you saw/did)
To make this lesson, I had to make a fake Instagram post and I came across my new favourite website. Great for making materials.
I remember my first teaching position. It was 2009. I walked in the door, was handed a coursebook, a register and some CDs and told to head across the road where my classroom was. There I found an old building with several classrooms and no teachers room. Over the next six months, I learnt to teach from the only support I had, which was my coursebook.
Let me stop for a second to say that coursebooks are wonderful. I love them. But in an industry in which many teachers at best have a four-week course under their belt and at worst begin teaching with no relevant qualifications to speak of at all, coursebooks play a huge role in shaping and influencing the type of teachers we become. This is not a role that should be taken lightly.
What did I learn in those first 6 months?
I learnt a lot. I learnt that grammar was the key to learning a language. Every unit was built around the grammar. The point of the lesson was to teach the grammar. I learnt that being a good teacher meant learning all the grammar and presenting it in an interesting way.
I learnt that teaching listening meant carrying out a comprehension checking activity. From unit after unit of comprehension checking activities I learnt that practice was supposed to make perfect. I learnt that a good teacher constantly tested their students’ listening comprehension.
I learnt that teaching meant covering information. It meant completing the reading and listening activities. Doing the vocabulary exercises. Teaching the grammar. Practising it in gap-fill exercises and speaking tasks.
How do I feel about those lessons I learnt?
Well, over the past decade I’ve spent my time teaching, researching, attending conferences and chatting to colleagues and I’ve learnt that maybe not everything above had a positive impact on my students’ progression. I’ve had to gradually unlearn a lot of those potentially damaging lessons.
I’ve learnt that presenting the grammar in an interesting way doesn’t necessarily mean my students are any better equipped to use it when it counts.
I’ve learnt that being a good teacher doesn’t just mean mastering all the grammar points.
I’ve learnt that practice does not necessarily lead to perfection when it comes to listening.
I’ve learnt that a successful lesson doesn’t mean covering information, it means helping your students reach a goal. A successful lesson is one in which your students know what that goal is and can both see and discuss their progress.
I’ve learnt that giving my students input means nothing without them having the opportunity to reflect on what they’ve learnt and how they can use it in their lives beyond the classroom.
I’ve learnt that teaching isn’t about me, it’s about them.
Haven’t coursebooks changed too?
Coursebooks play a valuable role in our industry. As mentioned above, they can choose to drive standards and challenge outdated norms of teaching. In my time in the industry, I’ve seen huge changes.
The lexical approach was not new when the Outcomes series was released but because this approach was now visible on the page, gradually teachers who used these books were learning a new way of dealing with language and grammar in the classroom.
With the release of the Voices series, countless teachers around the world are now incorporating inter-cultural communication into their lessons because it is there on the page.
It is amazing to see new coursebooks coming out and paying attention to the changing world of language learning. As we see fewer coursebooks with pictures of London buses and tube stations in every unit, gradually English language learning becomes less England-centric and focuses more on global English.
But is there space for anything else on the page?
Our industry has come so far and it’s incredible seeing how materials have changed and grown over the years. However, I believe there is still space on the page for discussion. Not just the discussion of content but the discussion of learning.
Many teachers may be having these discussions with their students, but that can be a lot to ask of newly qualified teachers. By giving the below space on the page, we highlight their importance and give both teachers and students the tools they need to discuss learning and impact.
Real-life objectives.
Clear aims.
The discussion of the aims and objectives.
The creation and discussion of success criteria.
Reflection tasks.
For more information on each of these areas, check out our blog on Overt Teaching or our book on Overt Teaching. If you’re interested in materials that put the discussion of learning on the page, try this low-level lesson on using the past simple to tell stories. This worksheet includes aims and objectives, discussion of these aims, success criteria and reflection on progress on the page.
These days whether at work or in our personal lives, so much communication happens via social media messaging or texting apps. I can’t imagine my life without the ability to set up segmented groups of friends to organise events, work on projects or chat about inane interests.
We are big fans of using text messages for lessons for this reason but also because it is this beautiful hybrid of written and spoken English. More so than that, it is written spoken-English, which means you can easily teach or practise many speaking skills and conversation layouts in this more controlled medium of messaging.
Bringing text messaging into the classroom has many advantages. You can practise conversations at a slightly slower pace; it gives you more to feed back on as at the end of a text conversation, you can see everything that has been written, a luxury we aren’t afforded when monitoring a speaking activity; but above all, it mirrors real-life communication.
In this lesson we look at a common conversation of someone inviting a group of friends to a birthday event.
textploitation 