ENGLISH Issue 81

July
2012

Tprofessional
EACHING
The Leading Practical Magazine For English Language Teachers Worldwide

In praise of pronunciation
Jonathan Marks

We have lift off!

Irena Köstenbauer

Regular revision
Hugh Dellar

A mare’s NEST?
Andrew Sampson

• practical methodology

• fresh ideas & innovations

• classroom resources

• new technology

• teacher development

• tips & techniques

• photocopiable materials

• competitions & reviews

w w w . e t p r o f e s s i o n a l . c o m

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www.diako.ir
Contents MAIN FEATURE TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS

IN PRAISE OF PRONUNCIATION 4 WE HAVE LIFT OFF! 24

Jonathan Marks ponders the possibilities for Irena Köstenbauer’s rockets give extra thrust
teaching pronunciation to a CLIL physics lesson

FEATURES BUSINESS ENGLISH PROFESSIONAL

OUTCOMES-BASED LEARNING 8 CASE BY CASE 49

Peter Zoeftig champions a coaching approach Phil Wade gets on the case of case studies

CRITICAL INCIDENTS 12
Louis Rogers cultivates cross-cultural understanding
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
LEARNING LEXIS: ADJECTIVES 16 PHEW! WE’VE FINISHED! 53
Isobel Fletcher de Téllez describes what Dorothy Sommer and Annette Stemmerich have
adjectives do pointers for anyone thinking of taking an MA

FOLLOW THE LEADER 18

Michael Tasseron likes his learners to be leaders
TECHNOLOGY
ENCOURAGING ‘COMPLEXIFICATION’ 19 M-LEARNING 55
Paul Bress demands more and more from his students Nick Cherkas finds support from his students for
mobile learning
CORRECTING ORAL ERRORS 20
Meng Tian discusses correction techniques FIVE THINGS YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO 58
and strategies KNOW ABOUT: QR CODES
Nicky Hockly explains those little symbols we are
POETRY TO CREATE POETRY 26 beginning to see everywhere
Sruti Akula and R Arul Peppin Rabitha use sonnets
to teach language creatively WEBWATCHER 59
Russell Stannard recommends a recording tool
REGULAR REVISION 30
Hugh Dellar suggests self-study tips and classroom
activities to promote the revisiting of learnt language
REGULAR FEATURES
OVER THE WALL 34 IT WORKS IN PRACTICE 36
Alan Maley enters the world of aliens and
imagined futures
LANGUAGE LOG 40
John Potts
SPEAK! PLEASE, SPEAK! 38
Nicholas Northall persuades his students to talk
SCRAPBOOK 42
A SECOND SELF 4 46
Jill Hadfield enjoys the Learning Experience
REVIEWS 44

A MARE’S NEST? 51 COMPETITIONS 41, 60

Andrew Sampson finds out the kind of teachers
learners prefer
INTERNATIONAL SUBSCRIPTION FORM 32

Includes materials designed to photocopy

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 Editorial
I
n his main feature article on teaching phones in class, he demonstrates why the activities
pronunciation, Jonathan Marks ends by asking and techniques he uses have been so popular and
about the views of the learners themselves: what successful with his classes.
are their aims and ambitions, and what sort of English
In the penultimate article of her series on motivation,
pronunciation would they like to achieve? These are
Jill Hadfield identifies consulting the students and
good questions – one of the aims of a learner-centred
taking their opinions into account when making
classroom is to match the teaching with what the
decisions about lesson content and class activities
students actually want and need to learn. Other
as an important motivational factor.
contributors to this issue echo the notion that
consulting the students is a good idea. Finally, Peter Zoeftig’s coaching-inspired approach to
language teaching puts the students and their needs,
Andrew Sampson looks at the often-discussed issue of
desires, experiences and opinions right at the heart of
why many institutions prefer to employ native speakers
the learning process.
of English. Approaching the issue from the students’
viewpoint, he has conducted a survey to find out
whether the students actually prefer native-speaker or
non-native-speaker teachers – and why. The results
are quite revealing.

Nick Cherkas writes his article on mobile learning from Helena Gomm
Editor
his students’ perspective: paraphrasing their feedback
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
on being actively encouraged to use their mobile

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www.diako.ir
 M A I N F E AT U R E
In praise of
pronunciation
Jonathan Marks promotes a more practical pedagogy and poses some pertinent questions.
I
haven’t got access to the
demographic details of ETp’s
readership, but it is probably safe
to assume that most of you began
your careers in the current Age of
Enlightenment, which has followed the
Communicative Revolution, and that
your assumptions about teaching have
been shaped largely by the slogans
daubed on the banners of the revolution
and adopted enthusiastically by ELT
teacher training and publishing. You
may have heard elderly teachers in dusty
staffroom corners muttering about a
previous Dark Age: lessons in cold,
draughty, candlelit classrooms with
stone walls (and stone desks and pews,
probably) with the teacher expounding
obscure grammar rules which the
learners then had to apply, without
mistakes, to the translation of sentences
so remote from reality that they have
never actually been seen to be used by
any speaker of any imaginable language.
Reverberations
The tenets of communicative ideology
reverberate so loudly through schools,
universities and publishing houses that
it’s hard to imagine a time when they
weren’t taken for granted. For example:
1 Teachers should teach language with
‘high surrender value’ – a term actually
introduced as long ago as 1926 by Michael
West (quoted by Anthony Howatt), who
defined it as ‘the proportionate amount of
benefit which will be derived by any pupil
from an incompleted course of instruction’.
(Incidentally, Howatt’s book gives a
much more detailed and accurate
account of the history of ELT than the
opening paragraph of this article!) The
4 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
term was revived by the communicative
revolutionaries to express the idea that
even on a short course, learners should
learn language that they can immediately
put to use in the ‘real world’; for
example, they should learn ‘functions’,
such as how to make, accept and decline
invitations, rather than gradually
accumulating a stock of knowledge,
such as the fact that the plural of ox is
oxen, which they might or might not
eventually have the opportunity to use.
2 ‘Fluency’ is at least as important as
accuracy. ‘Fluency’ is in quotation marks
because although most people use fluently
to mean ‘very well’ – X speaks English
fluently means that X speaks English very
well – the authors of the Communicative
Manifesto adopted ‘fluency’ to mean ‘the
ability to achieve communicative success in
a language although you don’t speak it very
well’. Accuracy develops gradually; most
learners achieve it only partially, even
after long, arduous years of study and
practice. The principle of ‘high surrender
value’ suggests that, even at elementary
level, learners should be encouraged to
use whatever English they have acquired,
however fragmentary and inaccurate, to
attempt to fulfil their communicative
intentions. And with the rise of English
as a global lingua franca, more and more
learners, however low their current level,
need to start using English now, rather
than in the distant future.
Rigidity
A rather rigid distinction between
fluency and accuracy developed, ignoring
the fact that a degree of accuracy is a
pre-condition for fluency – in either the
general or the specialised sense of that
www.diako.ir
word – beyond achieving the most basic
of communicative purposes.
Accuracy is associated particularly
with grammar, but fluent – or perhaps
we had better say proficient – language
use also depends on other types of
accuracy, such as lexical accuracy and
appropriacy, which could be called
pragmatic accuracy, and ... what else?
Ah, yes, pronunciation! Research (see,
for example, that by Rod Ellis) and
casual observation both tell us that
Most learners
achieve accuracy only
partially, even after
long, arduous years of
study and practice
pronunciation is the area in which
accuracy, especially if understood as
native-like accuracy (as it generally has
been, until recently), is least likely to be
achieved. As Tom McArthur puts it:
‘Pronunciation. That part of a student
which is exactly the same at the end of a
language course as at the beginning.’
Pronunciation relies on
physiological habits which, after an
early age, are less adaptable than the
mental faculties required for language
learning in general. The task of
pronouncing a new language is a
challenging one because we need to use
our speech organs in unaccustomed
ways: to make new distinctions between
sounds which seem the same to us, to
produce sounds which are totally new to
us, to produce familiar sounds in
unfamiliar sequences, and so on.
Relegation
Pronunciation was relegated to a
subservient role in communicative
syllabuses, methodology and materials.
Key writings by communicative
trailblazers – eg the papers in Brumfit
and Johnson – make little mention of
pronunciation.
And here is what the teacher’s books
for two popular and influential
coursebooks say about pronunciation:
‘Obviously, the recorded models provided
on the accompanying cassette are
invaluable for developing accuracy in
stress and pronunciation.’
(Brian Abbs and Ingrid Freebairn)
‘The course does not contain any formal
teaching of pronunciation or intonation.
However, students are given plenty of
exposure to spoken English in the form of
listening comprehension passages, listening
models, recorded examples and the drills.
[...] It is assumed that teachers can deal
with any particular pronunciation and
intonation problems as they arise.’
(Adrian Doff and Christopher Jones)
Recognition
And yet pronunciation can be an
immediate barrier to communication.
No matter how much English you
know, it won’t get you very far if no one
can understand you; you need a certain
degree of accuracy with respect to some
recognised and/or recognisable system –
‘recognised’ meaning ‘established,
standard, widely-used’, and
‘recognisable’ meaning that listeners can
tune in and perceive what the system is,
even if the details are initially
unfamiliar. It seems paradoxical, then,
that pronunciation was given such short
shrift by the communicative approach.
Learners, on the other hand, often
rate pronunciation as important, and
something they would like to spend
more classroom time on, perhaps not
least because pronunciation is such an
important factor in confidence – or lack
of confidence! – in speaking a language.
Can teachers deal with
pronunciation problems ‘as they arise’?
Very often they feel that they lack the
phonetic knowledge and the classroom
techniques needed to intervene
effectively. More recent coursebooks do
generally pay more attention to
pronunciation, but teachers still often
feel ill-equipped to make effective use of
the pronunciation-focus activities
included. To make matters worse,
pronunciation often appears at the end
of a unit, in the bottom right-hand
corner of a page, which makes it all the
more likely to be ignored.
Reductions
Coursebooks – and, therefore, teachers
– also often overlook the connection
between pronunciation and listening.
Listening to a new language is
challenging for various reasons, but one
important reason is that we tend not to
notice distinctions of sounds, stress and
intonation which our L1 doesn’t use:
this is the receptive side – the listening
side – of pronunciation. Listening to
English is made especially problematic
by rampant vowel reduction, elision and
assimilation, which can render sequences
of familiar words unrecognisable. For
example, hadn’t got any is often
articulated as /æÑ?gI?ni/. This is likely
to bewilder a learner-listener who would
expect /hæd nIt gIt eni/.
Recommendations
Recommendations for listening work,
especially at lower levels, highlight the
importance of understanding ‘the most
important words’ and using context and
background knowledge to eke out this
patchy understanding. But if you can’t
recognise the words you hear, how can
you tell which ones are the most
important? And even if you do manage
to pick out a few words, it’s unlikely to
be enough, because the other words
aren’t totally unimportant.
Ideally, teachers should be able to:
● include a concern for pronunciation
wherever relevant in planning and
teaching any lesson, whether the main
focus is on vocabulary, grammar or
whatever;
● intervene during fluency-oriented
activities to help when a
mispronunciation is causing persistent
misunderstanding, or is establishing
itself among the members of a class;
● provide targeted guidance and
practice in aspects of pronunciation
that are causing systematic difficulty
for a class – including devising their
own exercises tailored to the needs of
their classes;
● provide practice in listening to a wide
variety of native and non-native
accents of English, with exercises to
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
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facilitate noticing of regional
differences and of the characteristics
of words and phrases in the stream of
speech (see John Field).
Reality
Returning to the question of a
‘recognised and/or recognisable system’,
how important is it for learners to aim
for native-like pronunciation? Setting
aside the complicating factor that there
are so many different native accents of
English to choose from, the
fundamental fact is that native-like
pronunciation is difficult to achieve, and
unimportant for the ever-increasing
majority of learners who need to use
English as a lingua franca (ELF). It can
even be a counter-productive aim: some
people feel that their accent is an
important part of their identity, which
they don’t want to surrender when they
speak English.
Bryan Jenner introduced the idea of
a set of priorities for pronunciation
teaching, a ‘common core’, as a realistic,
achievable goal for learners who don’t
need or wish to aspire to native-like
pronunciation, based on ‘what all native
speakers ... have in common’. Whereas
Jenner’s proposal assumes that learners
should be intelligible to native-speaker
listeners, the principle of a pronunciation
‘common core’ has been reconceptualised
by Jennifer Jenkins as a set of
pronunciation features needed to ensure
intelligibility among speakers of ELF in
interactions in which native speakers
don’t participate; this is the predominant
context for the use of English today.
Jenkins’ ‘Lingua Franca Core’ (LFC) is
based on research into communication
breakdowns in interactions between
speakers of widely different languages,
plus a consideration of which features
are teachable and which not.
The LFC includes most consonant
sounds, but not the notorious th sounds,
which Jenkins found to be unnecessary
for international intelligibility and which
are notoriously resistant to teaching.
Simplification of consonant clusters at
the beginning of words by elision is not
acceptable, but simplification by
inserting vowels is; she found, for
example, that a Japanese speaker’s
/pP÷rIdJkŸtI/ for product was more
intelligible than a Taiwanese speaker’s
/ ÷pIdJk/. Simplification of clusters
within and at the end of words, however,
is less threatening to intelligibility. Vowel 
5
 
In praise of Abbs, B and Freebairn, I Studying
Strategies Longman 1982

pronunciation What about your learners? What are

 length is more important than native-like
vowel quality. Nuclear stress is
important, but native-like intonation
patterns aren’t. For a more detailed
description of the LFC and the
practicalities of an ELF approach to
pronunciation, see Robin Walker.
Jenkins points out that the LFC is
not appropriate for all learners. Those
who are keen to aim towards native-like
pronunciation should be given the help
and support they need in their endeavour.
Such learners might include those who
wish to identify and integrate with an
English-language community, and those
learning in national education systems
where native pronunciation models are
enshrined in syllabuses and examinations.
their aims and ambitions? What sort of
English pronunciation would they like
to achieve? Are you giving them all the
support you can? Are you taking
opportunities to integrate a concern for
pronunciation into every lesson?
After all, every lesson includes
speaking and listening, so every lesson
is a pronunciation lesson. ETp
Jonathan Marks is a
freelance teacher
trainer, writer and
translator based in
Poland. He is the
author of English
Pronunciation in Use
Elementary (CUP)
and co-author (with
Tim Bowen) of The
Pronunciation Book
(DELTA Publishing).
jonathanmarks@wp.pl
Brumfit, C J and Johnson, K (Eds) The
Communicative Approach to Language
Teaching OUP 1979
Doff, A and Jones, C Meaning into Words
Intermediate CUP 1983
Ellis, R The Study of Second Language
Acquisition (2nd edition) OUP 2008
Field, J Listening in the Language
Classroom CUP 2008
Howatt, A P R A History of English
Language Teaching OUP 1984
Jenkins, J The Phonology of English as
an International Language OUP 2000
Jenner, B ‘Teaching pronunciation: the
common core’ Speak Out! 4 1989
McArthur, T Living Words: Language,
Lexicography, and the Knowledge
Revolution University of Exeter
Press1998
Walker, R Teaching the Pronunciation of
English as a Lingua Franca OUP 2010

Pronunciation in disguise
Many learners learn primarily through written texts and find it hard to relate what they hear to what they have learnt.
Here is an example of an activity to develop awareness of how written forms can disguise similarities of pronunciation.

What you need What you do

Copies of some sets of sentence pairs containing rhyming
phrases – like these:
1 You can either eat these fresh or freeze them.
2 It’s made of metal.
3 I saw him standing in a queue outside the cinema.
4 Which syllable’s the stressed one?
5 This dish is cracked.
6 What did you do to them?
7 I bet she wishes she’d stayed at home.
8 I was expecting a room with a view.
9 Did you get through to them?
10 As soon as the dog sees them it starts jumping up and down.
11 The vet’ll come and have a look at the cat this afternoon.
12 Choose the best one.
Copies of the answer key:
1 You can either eat these fresh or freeze them.
10 As soon as the dog sees them it starts jumping up and down.
2 It’s made of metal.
11 The vet’ll come and have a look at the cat this afternoon.
3 I saw him standing in a queue outside the cinema.
8 I was expecting a room with a view.
4 Which syllable’s the stressed one?
12 Choose the best one.
5 This dish is cracked.
7 I bet she wishes she’d stayed at home.
1 If necessary, revise the idea of rhyming words (eg blue and knew)
and the fact that rhyme isn’t always indicated by spelling.
2 Write on the board:
I’ll try to be back in time for dinner.
I’ve got quite a lot of shopping to do.
Ask your class to find phrases from each sentence which rhyme
with each other. You may need to help them by saying the
sentences aloud.
3 Underline the rhyming phrases:
I’ll try to be back in time for dinner.
I’ve got quite a lot of shopping to do.
These phrases rhyme because the o in the word to is reduced to
schwa.
4 Tell the class they are going to find rhyming phrases of this kind
in other sentences. In some cases there may be a single word
with a matching phrase, like brighter and quite a. Hand out the
sentences and give the learners time to match the sentences that
contain rhyming phrases.
5 Elicit and discuss suggestions in plenary.
6 Hand out the answer key. If the learners found any of the
matches difficult, ask why. It may have been because:
● spelling disguises identical sounds – sees ends in s and freeze
ends in ze, but both these endings are pronounced /z/;
● writing also disguises boundaries between words – dish is is
two words and wishes is a single word, but this difference is
not usually apparent when they are spoken.

6 What did you do to them? 7 The learners practise saying the sentence pairs so that the
9 Did you get through to them? phrases really do rhyme and have the same rhythm.

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 IN THE CLASSROOM
Outcomes-based
learning
R
Peter Zoeftig ather than handing out
ready-made materials or
recommends authentic, using textbooks with my
clients, I use coaching
natural and focused techniques involving correction, pacing
and leading, which are focused on the
coaching methods to coachees’ own experiences and their
emerging insights into language. In this
increase acquisition of the article, I will draw comparisons between
coaching and more conventional
target language. teaching methods to show that by
moving away from teacher-produced
materials and towards student-centred
experience, with the additional benefit
of coaching techniques and some
insights provided by Neuro-linguistic
Programming (NLP), we can promote
change and rapid improvement.
Coaching
Coaching is distinct from teaching. It
should be collaborative, mainly non-
directive, non-judgemental and
challenging. It involves authentic use of
language, self-observation by the
coachee, and the right level of pitch,
purpose and performance. It has
direction, is explicit in its skills practice
and includes varying degrees of
preparation, intensity and resting. It
places crucial importance on the
surfacing of insights (of self and of
language), recognition of patterns and
the management of performance, as
well as being delivered at the right pitch
to stretch and challenge the coachee.
Where, in a conventional ELT lesson,
the teacher would be aiming at getting
the learners to a certain level by
preparing a grammar, communication
or vocabulary exercise with plenty of
instructions but limited or non-existent
use of pacing or listening to emerging
language, in a coaching lesson based on
8 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
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outcomes, the coach will be encouraging
visualisation, self-listening and repetitive
practice of situations and topics largely
chosen by the trainee. There will be
(self-)challenging language practice and
a clear focus on subjective and objective
improvements every step of the way.
Crucially, both coach and coachee will
learn how to read subjective shifts that
are occurring naturally, and develop
them incrementally.
Outcomes-based
coaching
Outcomes-based coaching and skills
acquisition, as defind here, is where the
coachees define their targets in alliance
with a coach, and are engaged positively
in the adventure of how to reach them.
The coachees learn where they need to
be, and what resources are needed to go
there. Whatever assistance is given by
the coach along the way is not laid
down by a textbook, theory or teacher
belief, but allows for the discovery of
aspects of the linguistic and cultural
paradigms of the target language, as
well as giving the coachees insights into
themselves: all key elements in reaching
the goal successfully. Instead of
traditional ELT teaching methods based
on syllabuses or textbook exercises, we
Coaching is distinct
from teaching: it should
be collaborative,
mainly non-directive,
non-judgemental
and challenging
use strategies and insights that are well-
established in coaching.
This ‘outcomes-based’ training model
represents a re-think of how we address
issues of learner-centred models of
acquisition, allied with a variety of
strategies informed by NLP, and it
references Dogme, the Natural Approach
and life coaching skills. Key points
include how outcomes can be measured in
terms of critical shifts of understanding
and behaviour in the learner, and the
coach’s reading of how the inner
dialogue develops in the coachee.
NLP and outcomes-
based learning
The strength and integrity of NLP
insights are that everybody’s reality exists
within their own world of language and
experience. Many teaching methods
present situations for the learners to
study that do not reflect their immediate
or own situation. The various versions
of experience provided by a textbook or
critical model may provide interesting
reading material, but as a means of
acquiring language skills, internalising
grammar rules or developing
performance they have very little to do
with the coachees’ own experience, and
will have little impact on changing their
ability to communicate more effectively
unless other key factors are in place.
These factors include the ability of
the coach to establish rapport with the
coachees and to match, pace and lead
them. These very specific skills cannot
be learnt quickly. However, while the
goal of avoiding the main pitfalls does
not necessarily require a deep
understanding of NLP or of coaching, it
is important to know what the methods
of NLP coaching are and are not.
NLP is not about forcing change or
offering promises of rapid success (though
this can, in fact, be achieved). It is about
respecting the integrity of the subjective
experience. Thus, here, an understanding
of coaching assists outcomes-based
learning by allowing the learners to
learn at their own rate, through sensitive
developments, staying with the coachees
as they determine these for themselves
through discovery, observation, the use
of their senses (using models given by
those around them, noting, writing and
speaking, visualising and re-visualising,
framing and re-framing) in their own good
time, led forward with a sense of respect,
challenge and curiosity by the coach.
Needs and desired
outcomes
Learning a new language implies a shift
of cultural perspectives and,
occasionally, taking a new look at one’s
identity, resulting in personal change and
growth. Coaching supplies answers that
teaching a language in the traditional
way often does not. Through doing
imaginative work of their own choosing
and related to their own experience,
experimenting with language in a
comfortable environment (challenged
when necessary, but not pressurised too
early to perform), the coachees are given
the means to work towards personal
goals in clear manageable steps.
The exact way in which the coach
can help is a sensitive core element of
the change process. The fundamental
insight here is that changing the
performance aspect so that it is ‘better’
according to grammar, vocabulary and
cultural norms requires giving space
An understanding
of coaching assists
outcomes-based
learning by allowing
the learners to learn
at their own rate
and time to the person undergoing this
experience. It is important to exclude
other elements that may tend to
confuse, complicate and even damage
the process we are trying to engender by
overloading the coachee at critical
moments. When a person is learning or
practising a new language skill, and is
being led forward through the technique
of reflective listening, emphasising self-
correction and being challenged in a
productive way, the language output
will start to surface naturally.
A natural approach to
language skills
acquisition
As Stephen Krashen has pointed out,
learners do not acquire very much from
what they learn. What is memorised can
certainly help when dealing with
situations such as a test, and one
exercise will help a learner to perform
better in another exercise. Learners may
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be able to repeat trained and practised
scenarios, but there is often little
transference from this to the acquisition
of real language skills in the real world.
When the pressure is on, they just forget
what they have ‘learnt’.
The central dichotomy (also
mentioned by Krashen) is the question
of whether we can accelerate acquisition
by bringing learners into a classroom.
By definition, however, the language
classroom focuses on language itself,
and is distinct from the real world.
Hence, teachers bring examples of
ready-made language into the room,
and ‘give’ these to learners. However
specific the objectives claim to be, what
often happens is that the learners end
up working on pre-prepared things that
the teacher has selected and this leads
to teacher- or school-determined
outcomes, not necessarily those desired
or needed by the learner.
To create a natural and authentic
environment for acquisition, the very
thing the classroom does not need is
imposition of content or method. It is
unnatural to assume that the learners
don’t know what they need or want in
terms of outcomes, whether in terms of
performance, grammar or critical
understanding. While this may be true
of some young learners, it is generally
not the case with highly experienced
and skilful professional adults, and so a
certain kind of presentation skill,
negotiation technique or critical business
analysis could be a natural area for
training. Coachees are often very familiar
with soft skills development. Working
on some kind of task and engaging
personally in a task are very different,
and this difference can be exploited
positively to increase acquisition.
Resources and
correction
Anything that is authentic and natural
is good for acquisition. Anything that is
unnatural – tasks that don’t directly
reflect needs, or saying ‘today we are
learning the past perfect because you
need it’ without questioning how to
handle it in a real professional situation
– will not help towards positive language
acquisition and, indeed, may lead to
negative feelings about the value of the
experience, creating affective filters.
While a supply of prepared texts, to
reinforce certain training objectives
(when requested by the coachees), may 
9

Outcomes-based
learning

be helpful (eg to use in the development
of specific skills), the main resource will
be model sentences and phrases that are
generated together with the coachee,
from the coachee’s own experience and
practised and returned to continually
through storytelling, roleplay and other
critical thinking approaches.
Grammar books, general and
specialised dictionaries and a range of
other resources should be everywhere
available in the training centre for
reference, but the centre should not be
especially ‘school-like’ and should,
rather, provide opportunities for real
interaction.
It is completely natural for coaches
to correct coachees in an environment
where there is trust in the skills of the
coach and this correction is handled
skilfully. The aim of correction, when
done in a ‘leading’ method, is to input as
much as possible in the way of example
and of opportunity for practising
outcomes, but it should not be value-
laden. By using sensitive peer-correction,
too, much may be achieved, depending
on the rapport that has been developed.
Coachees who are experienced, widely-
travelled, sometimes very important
people in their industries, must be
accepted in their entirety as autonomous
learners; such is the nature of our
relationship. Correction using coaching
methods, showing up mistakes and
looking at them together, drawing
attention to corrective practice and doing
this repeatedly, viewing a skills task or
communication task from a large
number of perspectives, using reading,
roleplay and discussion, is totally
congruent with the idea of training
towards better outcomes.
Methods
Let’s return to the question of coaching
methods and the structure of the
experience. Since, in an outcomes-based
approach, there must be absolute
respect for the coachee’s own processes,
in every way and at every moment,
flexibility is paramount. Pacing,
listening to and staying with the
coachee in the real and authentic
environment that they have elected to
experience is what creates outcomes.
10 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
A timetable of activities that is
flexible, tailored to the learners’ stated
needs and objectives, that actively
promotes the natural process of
acquisition and leads the coachees
effectively, avoiding book-based
theoretical or directive models is entirely
possible. It will involve having clearly
understood outcomes that evolve and
surface, allowing the coachees to talk
about their experiences, dreams and plans,
which can flower, change, grow and live
authentically in the coaching centre itself.
The key element is how the coach
engages with coachees – how we talk is
what we are. In the minds of others,
what we believe and how we act are
drawn together in how we talk and what
Every client is
unique, we want
to know how they
do what they do
and how they can
do it better
we talk about; these are then connected
to physical aspects such as body
language and our general appearance to
create their interpretation of who we are
and how we think.
What goes on in the coachees’
minds may be seen in terms of an inner
dialogue, involving their desired
outcomes and the way they adjust their
brain processes to lead towards these
outcomes – and the coachees’ own
awareness of their inner dialogue is
crucial. The coach must learn how to
hear, interpret and guide the coachees’
inner dialogue, by using correction and
self-correction rather than telling them
what to learn. I have seen very rapid
changes in the process, progress, level of
skills and quality of favoured outcomes
taking place, using rigorous ‘question
and answer’ leading techniques.
However, whilst a lot of coaching talk is
useful, it shouldn’t intrude on the natural
experience of acquisition, which may
also require regular silent periods. Above
all, we must learn to ask the right
questions and to listen more deeply.

In outcomes-based learning, the
coachees are encouraged to try to use
their own resources and to look
www.diako.ir
inwardly and outwardly for themselves,
not wait for the coach to provide
‘answers’. By accessing and reframing
the experience of the new language, the
coach paces the coachees and works
alongside them at their own rhythm.
Indeed, by trying to speed things up in
order to reach a prescribed point in a
scheme of work, a teacher may simply
be removing the learners’ opportunity
to learn by themselves.
As mentioned above, the work of the
coach (and of the institution where the
coaching is taking place) is to create a
fundamentally secure environment where
the coachees are able to benefit from this
challenge and where the learning process
does not fall back into being a prescribed
series of imposed learning objectives,
syllabuses, core texts and programmes.
The coachees’ own values and identity
must be paramount, and the coach must
act as a skilled catalyst, using an
approach that is completely clean of
presuppositions, but involves challenge
and leading techniques.
The more time and effort is given to
these practices, through skill and
sensitivity to the question of dealing
with surfacing language, and to leading
the coachees, the better the outcomes
will be.
I hope in this article I have shown
that coaching presents a pragmatic and
often simple approach to the acquisition
of language skills; that it carries with it
an attitude of fascination – every client
is unique, we want to know how they do
what they do and how they can do it
better; that good coaches have a deep
appreciation of how goals and skills
interact; and that good rapport and
trust are prerequisites of the coaching
experience.
In a future article, I will address
how the coach works with the inner
dialogue of a single coachee or group,
reflecting key elements of this
processing in order to lead to the
outcomes desired. ETp
Peter Zoeftig has over
25 years’ experience of
teaching and coaching,
having worked in France,
Belgium, Saudi Arabia
and the United Kingdom.
He has qualifications in
NLP and coaching and is
involved in both personal
and business executive
coaching, recently
providing training for
CERAN and Sherbourne
Priors OISE, Warwick, UK.
info@tostig.co.uk
www.diako.ir
 ESP Critical incidents Louis Rogers considers the business of cultural awareness.
I
n the past, many coursebooks leant
strongly towards the culture of the
target language. There was an
assumption that if you were learning
English, you would also be keen to know
about an Anglo culture. However, with
the growth of English as a lingua franca,
fewer and fewer materials are Anglo-
centric and far more are global in their
outlook. Arguably, today there are more
interactions in English taking place
between two non-native speakers than
between a native and non-native speaker.
Consequently, it is becoming vital that
people not only learn about the culture of
the speakers of a language but that they
also understand as wide a variety of
cultures as possible and are able to
function effectively in a diverse range of
environments. Clearly, enhancing this
understanding would be of benefit to all
learners, but it is particularly important in
a professional environment. Both
linguistic and cultural skills could impact
on an individual’s career progression or
the international success of a company.
Culture in language
teaching
Language teachers may not see
themselves as cultural trainers. Some may
even resent having to embrace such a
role, particularly when they are aware of
the fees cultural trainers can charge in
comparison to typical English teacher
rates of pay. However, many find
themselves in a position where the
students are reliant on the teacher’s
Arguably, today
more interactions in
English take place
between two non-native
speakers than between
a native and non-
native speaker
12 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
cultural knowledge or expect the teacher
to be able to raise their cultural awareness
as part of a language course. This is
perhaps not surprising when we consider
that most definitions of culture incorporate
some aspect of language, even when they
do not mention it explicitly. For example,
Larry Samovar, Richard Porter and Edwin
McDaniel define culture as ‘the rules for
living and functioning in society’. Whilst
language itself is not mentioned, few
would question the key role it plays
within this definition.
Cross-cultural training
methods
If English language teachers are to
become cultural trainers as well, what
different training methods are there and
which is the most effective? Kenneth
Cushner and Richard Brislin defined a
range of different training methods.
Firstly, cognitive training, which teaches
facts about a target country or culture
and information about what happens
psychologically to people living in
another culture. This approach,
particularly in learning about a target
culture, is probably the one that is most
pervasive in many business English
materials. However, there is little
evidence to show that this approach
actually helps people to function
effectively in another culture. It can also
quickly lead students down the path of
stereotyping some cultures. Other
methods, such as behaviour modification,
experiential training, cultural self-
awareness and attribution training are all
arguably more effective methods as,
rather than learning facts about a culture,
students play a much more active part –
either in a story or role. These
approaches also push students further
down a path of self-reflection and of
analysing their own culture and own
behaviour. Such approaches can be
particularly effective when a person has
had little experience of other cultures
and, especially, in situations where there
is one target culture in mind.
www.diako.ir
Attribution training
‘Cultural assimilators’ have a long history,
dating back to the University of Illinois in
1962. Initially, assimilators were developed
to help individuals or groups from one
culture improve their interactions with
those from another culture. Cultural
assimilators involve students reading
short case studies, known as critical
incidents, that involve potential
misunderstandings between two groups
or individuals. The principle underlying
such an approach, as outlined by
Whilst obviously
cross-cultural
interactions can be
positive, there are many
cases where they
present a challenge
for the individual
Cushner and Brislin, is that there is such
an array of situations and behaviours
people can encounter that it is not
possible to give individuals enough
information about all of the differences.
Instead, this method deals with the how,
when and why in order to understand
some of the general principles that underlie
the specific behaviours people encounter.
Whilst obviously cross-cultural
interactions can be positive, there are
many cases where they present a
challenge for the individual. These difficult
moments can be defined as critical
incidents: situations that people find
problematic, confusing or even amusing.
What makes them stand out and stay in
our minds is that they are different from
what we expected to happen in a situation
– largely because they are different from
the cultural norms we have learnt in our
own culture. Cushner and Brislin break
these misunderstandings down into 18
themes that can be categorised into three
main areas: Feelings (the emotions and
 Instructions for Worksheet 1
1 Give out Worksheet 1 and ask the students to choose 2 Ask the students to read the second critical incident
an option from each pair in Exercise 1. and choose one of the options from the three given. As
2 Put the students into pairs and ask them to discuss the a class, discuss which option they think is most likely:

reasons for their choice.
3 Ask the same pairs to discuss the questions in Exercise
3 and then have a whole-class feedback session.
Instructions for Worksheet 2
1 Give out Worksheet 2 and ask the students to read the
first critical incident. Monitor and check understanding,
answering any questions where needed. Then ask the
students to discuss the question that follows.
(This incident is largely about cultural differences in
attitudes towards time and directness of
communication. Sally might have been surprised at the
directness of the receptionist’s response. There could
also be issues related to time – some cultures are
much more monochromic and follow the clock rather
than the event.)
a) It is very unlikely this is the right option. He had
already formed a good relationship before coming.
b) There are very few formal terms of address and no
fixed rules in the UK, so this is unlikely to be the
case.
c) This is the most likely option. Small talk is a key part
of building a relationship at the start of a meeting
and can go on for as much as 20 minutes.
d) This might be the reason. Some British people find
talking about money, even in some business
situations, a bit difficult and often prefer financial
negotiations or discussions to take place in writing.
3 Discuss as a whole class some of the issues from the
two situations – attitudes to time, direct communication,
politeness and taboo topics.

reactions caused by a lack of familiarity),
Knowledge (such as the structure of work,
roles and hierarchy) and Categorisation
(the way to respond to particular
situations, such as greeting someone).
Critical incidents typically explore one or
more of these themes, and encourage
students to think about the behaviour of
the individuals in a story and to assess
why there was a difficulty or breakdown.
In both culture-general assimilators and
culture-specific assimilators, the critical
incidents can be accompanied by a
number of different options for the students
to choose from. These options present
different reasons for the misunderstanding
for the students to choose from. The
students can discuss which option best
explains why the difficulty or unexpected
situation occurred. Each of the options is
accompanied (on a separate sheet) by a
description of what is the best or most
Critical incidents
encourage students to
think about the behaviour
of the individuals in a
story and to assess why
there was a difficulty
or breakdown
likely option, which of the other options
might be possible and which are unlikely to
be the reason for the situation occurring.
There are over 100 examples of these in
the Cushner and Brislin book and many
more available on the net that are both
culture-specific and culture-general.
An alternative to providing a story with
options is to use a more open-ended
approach in which the critical incidents
presented still explore the same themes,
but don’t prescribe fixed options for
students to choose from. They are left
more open for the students to discuss and
explore the situation, and for the class to
analyse their knowledge of the situation
and the feelings they themselves might
encounter in the given situation.
There are two worksheets on page 14
accompanying this article. The instructions
for these are in the box above. The first
worksheet contains some brief statements
for discussion around some wider
cultural themes of self, time, power and
communication. The second is a culture-
general and culture-specific one
orientated towards the UK. It would be
quite easy to construct similar worksheets
yourself to cover some of the broad-
scoping issues such as time or power.
For further information on some of these
themes, the work of Geert Hofstede,
found in many business and management
books, can be a good starting point. In
order to write culture-specific activities,
you clearly need to know the target culture
well – from either living there or through
extensive research. If you are writing
critical incidents with options, then it is
best to pilot the incident with other people
from the target culture to check that you
have chosen the most likely options.
By using critical incidents in class,
you can not only encourage discussion
and fluency practice, but also help your
students to analyse both their own and
other people’s reactions and behaviour in
different situations. Hopefully, this will
give students the tools to move ET p
beyond
simplistic cultural stereotyping.
Cushner, K and Brislin, R Intercultural
Interactions: A Practical Guide Sage
Publications 1996
Hofstede, G, Hofstede, G J and Minkov,
M Cultures and Organizations: Software
of the Mind (3rd edition) McGraw Hill 2010
Samovar, L, Porter, R and McDaniel, E
Intercultural Communication: A Reader
Wadsworth Cengage Learning 2012
Louis Rogers is a Course
Tutor at the University of
Reading, UK. He is the
author of Reading Skills
and Writing Skills, in the
DELTA Academic
Objectives series, and
the Intermediate and
Upper-Intermediate
levels of the Business
Result Skills for Business
Studies workbooks,
published by OUP.
l.j.rogers@reading.ac.uk 

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 • 13

www.diako.ir
 Critical incidents

Worksheet 1 Worksheet 2

1 Read the questions and choose the 1 Read the incident below and discuss the question that
option from each pair that best follows.
describes you.
Sally was working in the offices of her company in another
1 Which statement do you think of first
country for a few months. A parcel arrived for her at the front
when you are presented with a
desk and she went to collect it. While she was there, she talked
problem?
to the receptionist and asked her a few questions. She was
a) I know what I need to do to solve
really impressed at how friendly and helpful she had been and
this situation.
felt that the receptionist was very professional. Later, Sally saw
b) I know who best to speak to for
help. the receptionist leaving the building and remembered one more
question she had. The receptionist told Sally that she was on
2 Which statement best describes your
her break and that her question would have to wait until later.
feelings at work?
Sally was surprised by the response and change in attitude.
a) I have a formal relationship with my
manager and there is clear distance Why do you think they saw the situation differently?
between us.
2 Read the incident below and discuss the question that
b) I have an informal relationship with
follows.
my manager and feel like an equal.
Hans recently had a challenging meeting in London. He had
3 Which statement is most like you?
been in contact with the company for some time via email and
a) I like to focus on one thing at a time
felt that he had built up a good relationship with his clients.
and don’t like interruptions.
However, when the meeting happened, things did not go as
b) I like multi-tasking and don’t mind
smoothly as he had hoped. It wasn’t entirely clear who was in
interruptions.
charge and no one seemed to use formal terms of address with
4 Which statement is most like you?
anyone. There was also a long time spent talking about his
a) If there is a problem, I’d prefer to be journey and the weather, and a lot of fussing over tea and
told directly.
coffee. After about ten minutes he tried to move them on to
b) I don’t like confrontation and so will discussions of the contract but was surprised about their
suggest there might be a problem.
negative reaction. He was also surprised at their unwillingness

2 Work with a partner and explain why and awkwardness in talking about money and that they

you chose each option. preferred an offer letter. The constant negative jokes about
themselves also made him lose some confidence in their
3 Discuss these questions with a
company.
partner.
Why do you think the situation did not go as well as he had
a) Do you think your culture focuses more
hoped?
on the importance of an individual or a
group? a) Hans is not very good at forming relationships with clients.

b) Do you think there is a strong hierarchy b) Hans did not know how to show respect to the most senior
in your culture? person in the room.

c) How do you feel when people are late? c) Hans was not aware that the small talk was actually a key
part of the meeting.
d) Do you think people in your culture are
direct or indirect? d) Hans spoke too directly about money.

14 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

www.diako.ir
www.diako.ir
 IN THE CLASSROOM

Learning lexis:
Adjectives
Isobel Fletcher de Téllez recommends ten ways for teaching adjectives.

I
t is sometimes difficult to know by fixed collocations, matching exercises are Patterns with past participles
looking at an isolated word useful for getting students used to the striped pyjamas
whether or not it is an adjective: association of certain adjectives and checked tablecloth
adjectives are morphologically very nouns. Many of the ideas below already spotted tie
varied. Whether or not it is acting as an have matching elements, or can be lined paper
adjective depends on the word’s usage, adapted to make matching exercises. Seasons
usually betrayed by its position in the Be sure to randomise the words in winter coat/boots
sentence. Adjectives describe nouns, the lists and boxes; for your spring blossom/flowers
acting as modifiers before the noun (best convenience, items are matched up here summer holidays
friend) and qualifiers after the noun with their answers. autumn leaves/colours
(secretary general), where they often
occur as a phrase (the girl with auburn 1 Nouns as adjectives 3 Order of adjectives
hair). They also act as complements Present these lists for the students to A build-up of several adjectives is possible
after linking verbs (She looked strange). complete with a single word from the box. before the noun, although not all
Nouns themselves can act as categories will occur in the same
adjectives (pipe line) often – typically in line room towel card
sentence. These will generally be in the
certain genres such as business language order: opinion, qualitative/quantitative,
1 pipe 3 tea
– in multiples (deputy human resources colour, classifying (for four, which is the
hair bath
manager). usual maximum). Give the students
air hand
Present and past participles can act these adjectives and several nouns and
washing beach
as adjectives (delaying tactics, smoked let them order them suitably.
salmon). It has been noted that as the 2 board 4 credit
English Romantic poet John Keats committee birthday 1 Opinion
matured, his adjectives changed from seminar business shocking, lovely, amazing, surprising
pre-noun adjectives to pre- and post- dining identification 2 Qualitative/quantitative
noun participles as adjectives. It is a little, three, a few, several hundred,
2 Collocations
certainly the mark of a more advanced an expensive
writer to use participles adjectivally, so Ask the students to collocate suitable
3 Colour
this might be something to introduce to adjectives with given nouns. These can be
white, dark, purple, pale pink
your more advanced students. grammatical or lexical, eg colours, sizes,
materials, etc. Explain to the students 4 Classifying
Like nouns, the lexical content of
adjectives is considerable, and so that there may be several acceptable wooden, two-headed, plastic, Spanish
adjectives will make up a large percentage combinations; these are not fixed 5 Nouns
of the lexical items that students need collocations, and adjectives can collocate house(s), insect(s), wine
to know and use. Similarly, because as freely as necessary. However, in
general terms, certain combinations are 4 Present participles as
they rarely stand alone, they have
significant collocational power, which more likely than others. adjectives
will substantially increase the students’ Onomatopoeic present participles In each case, ask the students to match
generation of language. crashing noise the words from the two columns.

 screeching
rattling
brakes
chains
a) The present participles of transitive
verbs can be used as adjectives to
Here are ten ways to practise adjectives flashing light describe the effect on a person or thing.
with your students. Because adjectives beeping tone They do not describe an intrinsic
occur with nouns, and sometimes in fairly thundering crash quality of the noun.

16 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

www.diako.ir
distressing news (news that have been forgotten, a novel that has been 1 2
distresses you ) written well. These adjectives can be pea, bottle, lime, sea, olive green
a surprising result (a result that qualified by well, badly, etc. chrome, butter, acid, primrose yellow
makes you surprised) an exhausted team powder, navy, royal, duck-egg,
a depressing film (a film that makes a changed man electric blue
you depressed) broken promises shocking, sugar, baby pink
a misleading explanation forgotten dreams pitch, coal black
a tempting offer a well-trodden trodden path charcoal, dove, pebble grey
a tiring journey a well-written novel berry, strawberry, ruby, blood red
drenching rain a badly-needed rest True adjectives dark, light, pale and deep
a humiliating defeat a sorely-missed friend apply to most colours.
b) There are present participle adjectives a well-deserved prize 9Similes
which have the meaning ‘for this
purpose’. 7 Past participles as qualifier These are fixed collocations that are now
phrases clichés. Ask the students to match the
a washing machine
similes in column 1 with the nouns in
a camping site Column 2 below shows some participles
column 2. New, but appropriate,
a polishing cloth + with which have the meaning ‘being
combinations would be considered
washing-up liquid full’. You could use the material in
refreshing in literature. The students may
a baking tray several ways. For example, write the
be able to offer a range of alternatives.
floor-cleaning equipment items in column 1 on the board and ask
sewing thread the students to list three things that 1 2
knitting wool could be inside or on top of them. While as red as blood
the students are writing, put up column as white as snow
5 Metaphorical present 2 in jumbled order. Ask them to use one as fierce as a dragon
participles of the adjective phrases to link the two as hard as nails
There are -ing adjectives that appear to lists. Column 3 gives you some examples. as quick as lightning
come from a verb, but in fact do not – or as wise as an owl
1 2 3
only metaphorically so. They are only as flat as a pancake
a handbag crammed all her
used predicatively (ie after a linking verb, as good as gold
with cosmetics, keys,
not before a noun). The confusion of the as old as the hills
handkerchiefs
real verb with one of these adjectives as cold as ice
a donkey laden boxes of as graceful as a swan
accounts for the following joke:
with oranges,
Courtier addressing the king: Your bananas, 10 Adjectives of the senses
majesty, the peasants are revolting. bottles of water Ask the students to assign the adjectives
King: Yes, they are rather, aren’t they?
a room packed aunties, little below to one of the words in the box
Match the adjectives with the topics with cousins, and then to give examples (perhaps in
they could be used to describe. grandmothers sentences) to show what sort of nouns
Afterwards, use the -ing form as a and friends of the adjectives could describe.
present continuous tense to show the friends
other meaning. For example: I am sound touch sight smell taste
a market crowded stalls selling
moving house next month. I am trying to
with pots and pans, piercing, tinkling, harmonious, screeching
do my homework.
vegetables, slimy, waxy, clammy, fluffy, abrasive,
revolting (very unpleasant) food bric-a-brac smooth, prickly, sticky, scalding
moving (emotionally stirring) music a call inundated complaints translucent, shiny, glowing, dim, murky,
fetching (making the wearer dress centre with from customers, pale
very attractive) companies,
pungent, musky, scented, reeking, fragrant
rambling (with no coherence) speech small businesses
sickly, sweet, bitter, acid, salty, bland
pressing (urgent) need a cupboard filled chillies in
with bottles, jars of
engaging (attractive and activity After many years in ELT,
mustard,
worthwhile) teaching and publishing,
bottles of sauce Isobel Fletcher de Téllez
trying (testing your patience) child has founded Viva Lexico
8 to pursue the
Compound colour adjectives possibilities of teaching
6 Past participles as adjectives (noun + colour) lexis and grammar with
software games.
Past participles are used as adjectives Write up the nouns in column 1 on the
with the sense ‘having been done’. They board and ask the students to guess
can be considered as contractions of a which colours they collocate with when
passive construction, eg dreams that used as adjectives. tellez@btinternet.com

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 IN THE CLASSROOM
Follow
the leader
By assigning leadership to the learners, Michael Tasseron creates
a situation where everyone wins.
I
believe that promoting learner
independence by assigning
individual leadership roles prior to
the start of a group activity has
advantages for both the students and
the teacher:
● If the students are able to complete
tasks successfully with minimal
teacher intervention, they are more
likely to remain focused.
● Student-to-student interaction time is
increased.
● Accountability is motivational: group
leaders are well aware that they are
responsible for facilitating successful
group activities.
● It helps in improving self-confidence.
● The students will inadvertently
practise certain communication skills,
such as negotiating meaning.
● The students’ listening skills are likely
to improve.
● With the focus moving from the
teacher to the students, the teacher is
able to step back and focus more on
providing relevant feedback to the
students.
Preparation
When assigning roles, make sure that
everyone gets an equal chance to lead;
so if one student is a group leader in a
particular activity, a different student
should be chosen to lead the group in the
next one. This is important, regardless
of how the students are grouped.
Make sure that the students are able
18 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
to negotiate meaning, using phrases
such as What do you mean? and Can you
repeat that?
Ensure that the students are aware
that the group leaders are responsible
for the entire group and for making sure
that everyone understands what is going
on and remains focused at all times.
Procedure
At the start of a group activity, I ask
the students to close their books, get
into groups and choose a group leader.
They can either volunteer, or they can
play ‘rock, paper, scissors’ to determine
who gets the role. In most cases,
students will volunteer or will ask or
elect one of their classmates to be the
leader – something they seem to enjoy.
The selection process also provides a
quick break from the lesson routine,
which gives the students a breather
before starting the activity.
In an activity involving answering
comprehension questions from the
coursebook, the group leaders are the
only people with the book open, and
they read the questions aloud without
showing them to the others in the
group. It is important that everyone else
closes their books and puts their pencils
and pens away. If anyone does not
understand the questions, they can
negotiate meaning by asking Can you
say that again? or What do you mean?
In other types of group activity, the
group leader reads the instructions to
the other members of the group. The
group leader thus has the responsibility
of ensuring that everyone is clear about
what they are expected to do.
www.diako.ir
Variations
With lower-level classes, the group leaders
may be allowed to show their groups
the questions or instructions if they are
having difficulty in understanding what
is required of them. However, I have
found this is not generally necessary
once the students become accustomed
to this type of activity.
In activities such as group feedback
or games, where the students are
required to write on the board, a team
writer can also be elected – though the
teacher can assign this role in the
interests of saving time.

I have found that the students enjoy this
type of activity, particularly the team
leader selection process, which always
generates a degree of excitement.
Students may at times elect a leader who
has not been contributing to the lesson
(for whatever reason) up to that point.
This is seldom done maliciously – it
simply conveys in a friendly manner that
everyone is required to participate equally.
I have also noticed that assigning
leadership roles in groupwork activities
helps to improve the listening abilities of
the students, and is a good confidence
booster to the team leaders, particularly
when their respective groups complete
the given task successfully.
An added benefit is that with the
team leader being the only person with
a book open, there are no distractions
(no papers, books, pens, pencils, etc to
fidget with), and the students remain
focused throughout the activity. ETp
Michael Tasseron is a
South African who has
been teaching English
since 2004. His first
teaching experience
was in China, after
which he moved to
Japan, where he spent
six years. He is now
teaching in Oman.
michael.tasseron@gmail.com
Writing for ETp
Would you like to write for ETp?
We are always interested in new writers
and fresh ideas. For guidelines and
advice, write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Encouraging
‘complexification’
Paul Bress prompts his students to produce more complex sentences.
Y
ou’ve probably all seen, taught or
taken part in a lesson in which
elementary students have to keep
on adding to a list of things they’ve
supposedly bought in a supermarket: ‘I
went to the supermarket and I bought a
litre of milk, a loaf of bread and a carton
of yoghurt’, etc. Although the strain on
the short-term memory may be off-
putting, students still appear to gain
some pleasure and satisfaction from
creating an ever-longer sentence with
the limited language they have at their
disposal. They’re probably used to saying
one short sentence and then clamming
up – but now they’re holding the floor
for a good half a minute!
In my experience, students generally
like to be asked to produce ever more
complex sentences. This may not
constitute an obviously communicative
act but, nonetheless, they may find
themselves becoming more empowered
as they manipulate language with
increasing ease.
‘Complexifying’ sentences
Imagine that two people are at a party
and are talking about a third person.
One says to the other: ‘That man drives
a Mercedes’. Here we have a very basic
subject (noun phrase)–verb–object (noun
phrase) sentence. Let’s first see how we
can expand the sentence by adding to
the two noun phrases:
That man drives a Mercedes.
That old man drives a Mercedes.
That really old man drives a Mercedes.
That really old man in the corner drives a
Mercedes.
That really old man who’s standing in the
corner drives a Mercedes.
That really old man who’s standing in the
corner drives a huge Mercedes.
That really old man who’s standing in the
corner drives an absolutely huge Mercedes.
That really old man who’s standing in the
corner drives that absolutely huge
Mercedes under the tree.
That really old man who’s standing in the
corner drives that absolutely huge
Mercedes that’s parked under the tree.
That really old man who’s standing in the
corner drives that absolutely huge
Mercedes that’s parked under the tree, but
he lives in a bedsit.
That really old man who’s standing in the
corner drives that absolutely huge
Mercedes that’s parked under the tree, but
he lives in a tiny bedsit. etc
Using prompts
Teachers can use large flashcards to
indicate how the students have to
‘complexify’ the sentence. Smaller
versions of these cards can be used in
small groups of students. Here are some
suggested prompts:
ADD AN ADJECTIVE TO
THE SUBJECT NOUN PHRASE.
ADD AN INTENSIFIER TO
THE SUBJECT NOUN PHRASE.
ADD A PREPOSITION PHRASE TO
THE SUBJECT NOUN PHRASE.
ADD A RELATIVE CLAUSE TO
THE SUBJECT NOUN PHRASE.
ADD AN ADJECTIVE TO
THE OBJECT NOUN PHRASE.
ADD AN INTENSIFIER TO
THE OBJECT NOUN PHRASE.
ADD A PREPOSITION PHRASE TO
THE OBJECT NOUN PHRASE.
ADD A RELATIVE CLAUSE TO
THE OBJECT NOUN PHRASE.
ADD BUT TO INTRODUCE
A NEW CLAUSE.
It can be just as demanding to ask the
students to modify the sentence in some
way. For example:
That really old man who’s standing in the
corner drives that absolutely huge Mercedes
that’s parked under the tree, but he lives in a
tiny bedsit.
PROMPT: ALTHOUGH
Here, the students have to rearrange the
sentence so that but is replaced with
although (Although that really old man
who’s standing in the corner drives that
absolutely huge Mercedes that’s parked
under the tree, he lives in a tiny bedsit).
Other prompts that can be used with
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
this sentence are: However, Nevertheless,
Despite, Despite the fact that, In spite of,
In spite of the fact that.
Avoiding problems
When we are facilitating language
manipulation like this, we really need to
be on the ball. For example, you can’t
use the intensifier prompt unless an
adjective is already in place, so you need
to get the order right. For this reason,
when the students are working in groups,
it’s best to conflate the intensifier prompt
and the adjective prompt into a single
‘adjective phrase’; prompt.
Note that, in my example, I’ve used
a monotransitive verb (drive). You need
to use one of these to have both a
subject noun phrase and an object noun
phrase. But if you use a ditransitive
verb (eg give) or an intransitive verb (eg
exist), you are automatically altering the
degree of complexification.
Some teachers may be tempted to get
their students to manipulate the tense
but, in the case of the example sentence
above, it ends up being nonsense and not
good language for the students to aspire
to. It’s probably better, therefore, to
practise a different version of the
exercises I’m suggesting here.

I could understand why some teachers
might think that the above suggestions
have an old-fashioned ring to them and,
furthermore, that perhaps the prompts
might be too difficult. My response
would be that it’s important to limit how
often you undertake such an exercise and
to teach the language of the prompts
with great care (I don’t think the noun
phrase is a particularly hard concept to
grasp – it can be done by using the idea
of slots). Once you’ve taken the trouble
to set up this complexification work,
you should find that any reasonably
motivated class will take to it like a duck
to water – or an old duck to freezing
cold water ... or a very old duck to
absolutely freezing cold water ... ETp
Paul Bress lives in
Whitstable, UK, where
he works as a part-time
teacher of English to
overseas students and
also writes novels. His
novels are: The Man
Who Didn’t Age, The
Dysfunctional Family,
For Adults Only and The
Check-out Operator, all
published by Fast-Print
and available in Kindle.
paulbress@talktalk.net
19
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Correcting
oral errors
Meng Tian focuses on effective feedback.
C
ommunicative language
teaching has convinced
teachers that in order to get
English language learners
communicating well in the target
language, interaction activities must be
incorporated into lessons so that they
can practise speaking with their peers
and with the teacher. However, whilst
communicating in one’s mother tongue
is natural, communicating in another
language is very demanding, especially
for low-level learners. The
communication process requires
accuracy and fluency in the target
language, while the planning and editing
time is very limited and some necessary
language components are likely still to be
unfamiliar or even unknown. Therefore,
it is inevitable that learners will make
errors during the learning process.
Although errors indicate that the
learners’ grasp of English is imperfect,
there are positive aspects to be
considered. On the one hand, the
learners are taking part in a challenging
interaction, trying to express themselves
in another language. They are
experimenting with what they have
learnt. If they are given appropriate
feedback, they will gradually come to
know the difference between correct and
incorrect language. On the other hand,
by noticing and correcting the students’
errors, teachers can get an idea of what
needs to be focused on in future lessons:
errors can reveal how much new
language has been absorbed and how
much further practice is needed.
20 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Factors
There are many issues which need careful
consideration, including the teacher’s
and learners’ roles in error correction,
what errors to correct and how to correct
them. In addition, the learners’ level
and attitudes need to be taken into
consideration. Error correction can,
therefore, be very complicated since all
these factors will influence its efficacy.
Decisions about how to react to the
learners’ performance should be based
on the following factors:
1 Error categories
Distinguishing between different types
of errors can help teachers decide which
errors can be self-corrected or peer-
corrected and which need to be teacher-
corrected. Some errors can be self-
corrected by the learners completely
unprompted or with the guidance of the
teacher or other learners. Some, however,
are produced regularly and systematically
and can be much more deeply ingrained.
The learners might not know what the
correct form should be – or may know
what the correct form should be, but are
not able to produce it for themselves.
2 Interaction aims
In terms of the aim of interaction, a
distinction is often made between non-
communicative and communicative
activities. As Jeremy Harmer explains,
the former are generally intended to
ensure accuracy, while the latter are
designed to improve language fluency.
In other words, non-communicative
www.diako.ir
activities, sometimes called ‘controlled
practice activities’ are designed to
encourage correct production of newly
presented language or to correct errors
later on, while the goal of
communicative activities is to get the
learners to use new language in more
natural communication. This distinction
helps teachers decide the extent to
which errors should be corrected. In
non-communicative activities, teachers
should focus on accuracy and try to
If the students
are given appropriate
feedback, they will
gradually come to
know the difference
between correct and
incorrect language
correct the learners’ errors immediately.
With communicative activities, it is
better for teachers to avoid over-
correction and focus the learners’
attention on the communication of
ideas rather than specific grammar
points or vocabulary usage.
But when should teachers correct
errors? The options include:
immediately; after a few minutes; at the
end of the activity; later in the lesson; at
the end of lesson; in the next lesson; later
in the course; never. If the objective is

Giving the
learners the chance to
self-correct is helpful
in establishing an
atmosphere conducive
to learning
accuracy, then immediate correction is
more likely to be useful; if the aim is
fluency, then immediate correction is
less appropriate and any correction will
probably come after the activity has
finished or later. Interrupting to correct
the learners can kill an activity.
Roles
Recognising different teacher and learner
roles in error correction can foster positive
attitudes towards correction, involve the
learners in the learning process and reduce
their dependence on the teacher.
Giving the learners the chance to
self-correct is helpful in establishing an
atmosphere conducive to learning. The
learners will learn how to monitor
themselves and become more accurate
and autonomous. Sometimes they will
need some assistance from the teacher
to identify where the errors are and what
kind of errors they are before they can
self-correct.
Peer-correction is useful, too, but
must be handled carefully. Pairs or group
members should change frequently to
avoid giving the better learners a sense
of self-satisfaction and the lower-level
learners a feeling of inferiority.
If errors are too difficult for self-
correction or peer-correction, the teacher
should stop and explain the right form to
the whole class. The learners should then
practise the correct version. Teachers
should also identify any common errors
that their learners make and use these
to plan subsequent lessons.
Stages
Correction is usually made up of four
distinct stages. Whether to follow the
stages strictly or not will depend on the
level of the learners.
Firstly, the teacher should show that
something is not accurate by a gesture
or (not-too-discouraging) word.
Secondly, the teacher should let the
learner know where the error is. They
can do this by isolating the part of the
utterance that is wrong. So, if a learner
says ‘My sister come yesterday’ but
means ‘My sister came yesterday’, then
just telling him to try again might be of
no use.
Thirdly, the learner needs to know
what kind of error it is (eg grammatical
or phonological). In the example above,
the learner needs to know that the
mistake is in the verb come. If he still
can’t correct the error after the teacher
tells him that the word come is
incorrect, the teacher will need to give a
further hint or supply the correct word.
Lastly, to make everything clear, the
teacher should repeat the correct version,
even when the learners can correct
themselves. This helps the learners to
consolidate what they have learnt.
Recording errors
In controlled practice activities,
correction is usually done during the
activity. However, in freer speaking
activities, for example roleplays or
discussions, it is better not to interrupt.
As it is not easy to recall learners’ errors
after the activity has finished, many
teachers watch and listen while speaking
activities are taking place but at the
same time take notes of any common
errors in grammar, pronunciation, etc.
They also note down things that go well
and times when learners couldn’t make
themselves understood. After the
activity has finished, they ask the
learners how they think it went, before
giving their own feedback.
If there is recording equipment,
teachers can video activities and use
parts of the recording with the learners
to examine any errors. This can be time-
consuming, but it is usually appreciated
by the learners.
Techniques for
correction
Jeremy Harmer describes a number of
efficient ways to give correction:
Repeating
The teacher asks the learner to repeat
what they said by saying ‘Again?’ or
‘Pardon?’ using intonation or facial
expression to indicate that some part of
what they said is wrong.
Echoing
The teacher repeats what the learner has
said, stressing the part that is incorrect.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
Statement and question
The teacher simply points out that there
was an error and asks a question like
‘How can we make that sentence right?’ or
‘What’s wrong with that sentence?’ to
involve learners in the correction process.
Expression
When the teacher knows the learners
well, a simple facial expression, such as
a frown, coupled with a gesture, can
show something is not correct.
Metalanguage
Teachers can use linguistic terms
(countable nouns, word order, etc) to let
the learners know what errors they have
made and get them to think about how
to correct them.
Reformulation
In two cases, the teacher may need to
rework the learner’s utterance. One case
is when there are several errors needing
correction, and it may be beyond the
learner’s ability to self-correct. The
other is when the teacher feels it is
necessary to help the learner produce a
more natural and appropriate utterance.
As Andrew Cohen points out, it isn’t
enough for teachers just to focus on
correcting the wrong use of basic
vocabulary, grammatical forms and
pronunciation. Such evaluation is only
partial as it focuses on ‘low-level’
accuracy, but ignores ‘higher-level’
factors, such as appropriate word choice
and native-like organisation.
Oral errors are usually picked up on
when only one learner is speaking, so
correction often has to be done on an
individual basis. However, teachers
should avoid slowing down the pace of
the lesson and letting the other learners
get bored. To reduce the likelihood of
this, they should involve the whole class
as much as possible in the correction
process and spend less time correcting
something that is only a problem for
one learner and more time on problems
common to the whole class.
Issues
Teachers can become worried and
impatient when learners cannot use new
language perfectly. So it is essential for
them to have a clear understanding of
the nature of errors. Errors are the
learners’ way of testing their hypothesis
about the nature of the language they
are learning and, as a result, should be
viewed with openness and acceptance, 
21

Correcting

oral errors
especially during the early stages of
language learning. As Stephen Krashen
points out, errors are inevitable and will
be plentiful as learners learn and
experiment in using new language. In
short, errors are an important part of
learning and the feedback teachers give
plays a vital role in this process.
The learners’ response to correction
should be taken into consideration, too.
Error correction touches not only the
cognitive skills, but also the affective
aspects of language learning, which
include feelings and attitudes. Teachers
must, therefore, be careful to avoid
causing negative reactions when they
correct. Learners who lack confidence
in their language ability may become
discouraged, especially when correction
is given without explanation and they
don’t know what to do with the
feedback given by the teacher.
Moreover, comments like ‘I don’t
understand what you are saying’ can
damage the learners’ self-esteem.
Some learners may have a passive
attitude toward correction and will
expect the teacher to identify and
correct errors for them.
Implementation
The effectiveness of any error correction
depends on its implementation. Both
teachers and learners have to try to
replace negative reactions with a
positive outlook. Teachers can help by
explaining to the learners the purpose of
correction and the techniques they will
use. This explanation can include the
fact that the amount and timing of the
correction will depend on whether the
emphasis of an activity is on accuracy
or fluency, to what extent they intend to
correct errors, how they are going to
provide feedback and how the learners
can help each other in error correction.
This will help to create positive attitudes
towards error correction and a
supportive atmosphere in class.
Positive feedback, acknowledging
the learners’ progress, should always be
given alongside any correction. This will
contribute to the learners’ motivation
and their willingness to improve.
Negative comments such as ‘That’s
22 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
wrong! Why didn’t you do enough
practice?’ will discourage the learners. It
is better to use comments like ‘That isn’t
clear; perhaps you would like to revise it.
What do you think?’ and praise, such as
‘Good job’ or ‘You’re making progress’
will boost their confidence and morale.
It is not hard to find areas of
improvement in learners’ work. For
example, successful communication,
accurate use of grammar points recently
learnt, use of new vocabulary, good
pronunciation, and so on. The use of
positive comments will neutralise any
negative emotions created by correction.
Some learners
may have a passive
attitude toward
correction and will
expect the teacher
to identify and correct
errors for them
Strategies
Teachers should be equipped with
enough knowledge of the grammar,
vocabulary, and so on of the target
language to enable them to provide good
lessons without misleading the learners
and causing ‘teacher-induced’ errors.
While preparing lesson plans, teachers
should familiarise themselves with all
aspects of an item of language they are
focusing on. The more they know about
the language they are going to teach, the
less likely they are to make mistakes.
At the same time, teachers should
identify the typical grammatical, lexical
and pronunciation problems associated
with the nationality of the learners. This
will help them predict the sort of errors
the learners may make and enable them
to cope with them more easily.
Language transfer has long been seen to
be a source of learning difficulties and
errors. Contrastive analysis of
languages indicates that dissimilarities
between the native and the target
language may cause confusion leading
to errors (negative L1 transfer) instead
of facilitating the process of second
language learning (positive L1 transfer).
Thus, when teaching particular
structures which cause L1 interference
and when doing correction, it can be
www.diako.ir
useful for teachers to remind the
learners of any linguistic differences
between English and their native
language. Michael Swan and Bernard
Smith have produced a useful analysis
and categorisation of common errors
made by learners of English from
different countries.
Encouraging the learners to keep an
error correction notebook (with notes
of any errors made and their
corrections) can be a helpful strategy.
This will help the learners to monitor
their errors and provides a useful
revision tool and a way of encouraging
them to be more independent.
If necessary, teachers should give
remedial sessions highlighting any
recurring errors in order to develop the
learners’ awareness of common errors.
This is a face-saving technique, as
individual learners will not be in the
spotlight and those who recognise their
own errors in those that are highlighted
will be consoled by the knowledge that
they are not alone in making them. Just
make sure that no names are mentioned
when highlighting the errors!

We must all bear in mind that the aim
of correction is to bring about self-
awareness and improvement, and when
giving correction teachers should not
forget to give positive feedback on the
learners’ work. If this is not done as a
matter of routine, it can be hard to
maintain a positive and cooperative
working atmosphere. ETp
Cohen, A D Language Learning Heinle &
Heinle 1990
Harmer, J The Practice of English
Language Teaching Pearson 2007
Krashen, S D Principles and Practice in
Second Language Acquisition Prentice
Hall 1987
Swan, M and Smith, B Learner English
CUP 2001
Meng Tian has 12 years
of tertiary English
teaching experience at
Shanxi Normal
University, P R China,
and Assumption
University, Thailand. She
is currently taking a PhD
in ELT at Assumption
University. Her research
interests include
discourse analysis,
fluency and accuracy,
group dynamics and
creative writing.
mengtian08@yahoo.com
www.diako.ir
 TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS 

We have lift off!

Irena Köstenbauer launches a lesson on Newton’s laws of motion.

I
would like to share with you a great
activity, which will make a CLIL
physics lesson on Newton’s laws of
motion not only interesting but also
a lot of fun. The activity also includes an
arts and crafts element. You will need at
least two teaching hours for this. The
physics lesson can be combined with
the arts and crafts activity, and then
you will need one hour outside the
classroom to do the rocket launch
itself. (If you don’t teach physics, you
can simply make the rockets in an arts
and crafts lesson and just have fun
watching them fly high up in the sky.)
Before you plan the activity you
should first buy a Rokit kit. These can
be obtained from www.rokit.com, and
they can be used over and over again.
If you have more than 20 students in
your class, it is advisable to buy two
kits in order to avoid long waiting times
for launching the rockets. 1 Introduction to Newton velocity (speed, very quick movement),
You will need plastic drinks bottles During the assignment period, the force (power, physical energy), external
(1.5 to 2 litres capacity; one for each students are given an activity sheet to (outer, outside), accelerate (speed up),
student), paper of different colours, complete with information about the body (object), constant (permanent,
coloured string, glue, scissors and sticky famous physicist Isaac Newton (date stable), at rest (not moving), thrust
tape, your Rokit kit, a bicycle pump, a and place of birth, books he wrote, (forward movement).
stopwatch and a score sheet. things he discovered, areas of Next, introduce Newton’s laws of
investigation). They do the research on motion:
The thrust of the internet and then make a large First law: An object that is at rest (is
the activity poster with information and pictures. not moving) will stay at rest if no
Newton’s three laws of motion unbalanced force acts upon it.
describe the relationship between the 2 Introduction of the laws Second law: An object that is in motion
forces acting on a body and its of motion (moving) will not change its speed if no
resultant motion. By making and Pre-teach any new vocabulary. Explain unbalanced force acts upon it.
launching rockets, your students will the meanings using synonyms in English Third law: For every action there is
gain a practical understanding of these or, if necessary, provide a translation in an equal and opposite reaction.
laws of physics, and hands-on the students’ L1. Allow time for
experience of the forces that make repetition of the words. 3 Practical demonstration
squid and motorboats speed through The following words and phrases Make and fly rockets as described
the water and space rockets fly. Here should be introduced beforehand below to show how Newton’s laws
are some suggestions for how to use (synonyms are given in brackets): work. (For other practical ideas go to
the rockets in a CLIL physics lesson. motion (movement), in motion (moving), www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/newtlaws.)

24 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

www.diako.ir
 TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS
4 Follow-up activities
To review the new vocabulary, you could
prepare worksheets with scrambled
words, wordsearches, puzzles and
matching activities. You will find ideas at
www.puzzlemaker.com.
To review the content and vocabulary
and add an element of writing in a fun
context, you could devise a jumbled
sentences worksheet. Prepare eight to
ten ‘jumbled sentences’ using the new
vocabulary and including information
about Isaac Newton and the laws of
motion. Put them in separate envelopes,
each with a number. Put all the envelopes
on a table in the middle of the room.
Divide the class into small groups
and explain that each group has to take
an envelope and form a complete
sentence with the words inside. Once
they have finished and had their
sentence checked by you, they write it
in their books, take the envelope back
to the table and get another one.
Making the
rockets
1 Teach the students about
how a rocket works,
explaining what ‘thrust’ is
and what the forces are
that make a rocket fly.
Draw a diagram on the
board, showing the various
components of the rocket
kit. Write all the important
vocabulary on the board
with arrows to the relevant
parts of the diagram.
2 Tell them that they are
going to make their own
rockets using plastic drinks
bottles. Explain that when
the rockets are complete,
you will be holding a
competition – and that the
rocket with the longest ‘hang-time’ will
be the winner.
3 Make sure that they understand that
the top of the bottle will be the bottom
of the rocket. Start constructing the
rockets. Demonstrate how to make a
nose cone and wings. Allow the students
to come up with their own designs, but

Launching the
rockets
The competition works best
when the weather is calm – any
wind will drastically reduce the
rockets’ flight times.
Make sure that there is a
ready water source for the
students to fill their rockets. It
takes only around a quarter to
half a bottle of water to achieve
a successful launch. Make sure
that the students don’t overfill
them – a full bottle will damage
the Rokit kit.
Be aware that there will be a
large amount of water and mud
sprayed in the air at each launch,
so advise the students that they
might want to stand back.
1 Assemble the Rokit kit and
attach it to the first rocket. Be
sure that the pump is securely
fastened to the valve and that the
kit is snugly screwed onto the bottle.
The student who owns the first
rocket should begin pumping the
rocket. As soon as the rocket launches,
start the stopwatch and allow it to run
until the rocket touches down. Record
the time on your score sheet and call
the next student forward.
2 Once you have gone through all of
the rockets, announce a second round
of the competition and then combine
the times of both flights. At the end,
announce the winner.

We launch these crazy rockets every year
at our English summer camps and the
students have a lot of fun making them.
I hope you will enjoy the activity. ETp
Irena Köstenbauer is
the principal of English
For Kids, a Vienna-based
give them pointers on how aerodynamics language school
specialising in full
will affect the flight of the rocket. immersion courses for
children. She has
4 When the rockets are ready, ask the developed several CLIL
materials and written a
students to name their rockets and series of books for
award a prize for the most beautiful primary schools. She has
also trained teachers in
one. Record the rocket names on a Poland, Austria and
Argentina.
sheet of paper. This will be your official
magik@e4kids.co.at
score sheet.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 • 25
www.diako.ir
 L I T E R AT U R E
Poetry to
create poetry
W
Sruti Akula and riting poetry is usually
considered to be a higher
R Arul Peppin order art and ordinary
people are wary of even
Rabitha experiment with making an attempt at it. The
experiment described in this article was
sonnets to teach language. done in order to see how writing poetry
(here a sonnet) could be made
interesting with the use of materials and
adequate guidance. On the one hand,
activities like this improve the learners’
language skills as they play around with
words and, on the other, they develop
creativity and confidence. (Note: We
were working with trainee teachers in
this experiment but the results will be
equally relevant to practising teachers.)
The rationale
Dick Allwright and Judith Hanks
identify the following features of a
learner-centred approach, and this
experiment addresses them all in the
following manner:
Learners are unique individuals who
learn and develop best in their own
idiosyncratic ways.
In our experiment, the learners’
idiosyncratic ways of learning were
respected. No one was forced to follow
any hard and fast rules, and they were
given freedom to participate in their
own way. For example, some learners
came up with their responses
immediately, but some took their own
time. The teachers gave everyone
enough time to work at their own pace.
Learners are social beings who learn
and develop best in a mutually
supportive environment.
In this experiment, a lot of learning
26 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
www.diako.ir
took place because of both peer
interaction and student–teacher
interaction. This was noted especially
during peer interaction, when the
learners came up with a lot of
alternative words in order to follow the
rhyme scheme of the sonnet; this
created greater sensitivity among them
with regard to the use of vocabulary.
Learners are capable of taking
learning seriously.
Although a couple of learners were, in
the beginning, not as serious as the
others, as a result of seeing everyone
participating in an enthusiastic manner,
they too started working seriously
towards the goal (providing lines for the
completion of the sonnet).
Learners are capable of independent
decision making.
When one of the learners was advised
by the teacher to change his idea so that
the lines he had given would relate
better to the other lines of the sonnet,
he justified his own idea and stuck to
his initial decision.
Learners are capable of developing as
practitioners of learning.
The learners’ achievements in this
activity boosted their confidence, and
we believe the effect will be long-lasting
and will enable them to participate
actively in future language classrooms
without having to be forced by the
teacher all the time. This will
consequently pave the way for the
learners to become their own
practitioners of learning when given the
required facilitation and – at the same
time – when their idiosyncratic ways of
learning are respected.
The experiment
Time taken: 45 minutes
Aim: To gain the experience of creating
poetry
Objectives:
● To help the learners enjoy writing a
sonnet or part of it by themselves or
by working in groups.
● To guide the learners to an
understanding of the features of a
sonnet with the help of sample
sonnets (one written in Shakespearean
and one in Petrarchan style).
● To encourage the learners to play
with language.
Materials:
Two sonnets of different types were
used. Their features are as follows:
Shakespearean sonnet:
(Fearfully, Wonderfully and Skillfully
Made by Zeph Agayo)
● It is divided into four parts: three
quatrains, each with a rhyme scheme
of its own, followed by a couplet.
● The first quatrain introduces an idea;
the second quatrain complicates the
idea; the third quatrain complicates it
still further and the epigrammatic
couplet resolves it.
● The rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.
Petrarchan sonnet:
(London, 1802 by William Wordsworth)
● It is divided into two parts, an octave
followed by a sestet.
● The octave bears the burden, a problem,
a reflection, a query, a historical
statement, a cry of indignation or
desire, a vision of the ideal.
● The sestet eases the load or resolves
the problem or doubt, answers the
query, solaces the yearnings, realises
the vision.
● The rhyme scheme is abbaabba cddece.
In typical Petrarchan sonnets, the
octave contains two rhyming sounds
(a, b) and follows the rhyme scheme
abba abba. The sestet can have various
rhyme schemes: cdedce, cdcded,
cddcdc, cdecde, cdeced or cdcedc.
Approach: Learner-centred approach
The class: The class consisted of 16
learners and was taught by a group of
three teacher trainees doing a one-year
postgraduate diploma in teaching
English (PGDTE) at EFLU Hyderabad,
India.
It was an experiment done as a part
of peer teaching for the paper ‘Literature
for language teaching’ to find out
whether a teacher can successfully involve
all the students in a creative activity like
writing a sonnet, and how far such an
activity can help in language learning.
The experience
One of the teachers began the class by
encouraging the learners to identify the
distinctive features of a sonnet. These
features were elicited from the learners
by making them read the sonnets
analytically and compare and contrast
them. The features they identified, such
as the number of lines, the rhyme
schemes and the difference between the
Shakespearean and Petrarchan styles,
were written on the board. Then the
teacher gave a brief introduction to
Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets.
The second teacher then asked the
class to go through the sonnets to
identify the problems raised in them
and the solutions they offered. It was
made clear that not all sonnets follow a
problem–solution pattern; some deal
with ideals, general themes, indignant
cries or desires, concluding or giving
vent to the built-up pressure in the final
couplet. The teacher read the sonnets
aloud to the class and then made one of
the students read them in order to drive
home the fact that sonnets are pleasant
to listen to and to highlight the
importance of the rhyme scheme.
Then the third teacher took charge
of the class and asked the learners to try
their hand at writing a sonnet. When the
learners struggled for ideas, the teacher
suggested that they could do a whole-class
collaborative poem by replacing the
word hands in Fearfully, Wonderfully and
Skillfully Made with mind, and making
other necessary changes accordingly.
Some students immediately came up with
lines of their own; others who struggled
with things like grammar and collocations
received help from the teacher in
expressing their ideas more clearly.
Once the learners had got the hang
of organising their ideas following the
rhyme scheme of the sonnet, the teacher
stopped the class and asked them to
finish the third quatrain by themselves at
home and then went on to the couplet.
At this stage everyone was eager to bring
the sonnet to a conclusion with their own
individual ideas. Almost every student
came up with their own couplet and
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
The learners’ sonnet
Though my mind is not as sharp
as the witch’s tongue,
It can bring down feuds and
cold wars.
Though my mind is not as magical
as a magic ring,
In my classes it shows me stars.
It can make wonders out
of my thought,
It can be dangerous as an
atom bomb.
Nobody knows when it will blast,
Then everyone will have a tomb.
…………………………………………………
…………………………………………………
The alternative endings
All that can be borne by it
And yet to keep me fit.
But at the end of the day when
it works
I feel proud of its efforts.
And all that should come to an end
With everyone’s helping hand.
And all that my mind can think
I want all of you to think.
Even though it diverts me towards
distraction
I have to be alert to reach
perfection.
But my mind should be restful
In order to be peaceful.
Though sometimes it tortures me
Yet I don’t want to flee.
Yet I am ready to bear all the
danger
Because I want to give my son
a bright future.
everyone was bubbling with enthusiasm
and ideas. It was like opening the flood
gates, as every student started competing
with the others to see their concluding
couplet written on the board. As a
teacher should not discourage the
students’ efforts, the teacher decided to
accept all their couplets to keep up their
spirits. A few couplets that needed a little
restructuring were revised by the students
themselves with the help of their teachers. 
27

Poetry to
create poetry

The findings
This experiment enriched our
knowledge about various aspects of
language teaching – materials, methods,
the teacher’s role as a facilitator, the
learners’ role in an innovative classroom
and their creative ability. We were also
pleased at the success of the class, as
when we started out we hadn’t expected
all the learners to participate equally
well. The following are some of the
findings of our experiment:
● The sonnets chosen were helpful in
eliciting the features of a sonnet.
Their selection was based on the
proficiency level of the class, and this
enabled the learners to respond to
them without too much intervention
from the teacher.
● Facilitating was done by giving
suggestions, such as to replace hands
with mind, thereby keeping the
learners on the right track.
● The teachers got first-hand experience
of using poetry to teach language.
● The production of a completely new
sonnet with so many alternative
couplets proves that, given a friendly
ambience and the necessary incentive,
literature can be a fine tool in
teaching language.
● The learners relished playing around
with words and this paved the way to
a good deal of peer interaction. The
result was a pool of rhyming words,
out of which appropriate words were
picked to finish the sonnet. This
enabled the students to encounter
many new lexical items and made
them sensitive to vocabulary usage.
● The students were encouraged to
think and write creatively.
● There is a popular belief that poems
can most easily be written in blank
verse. This experiment proved that
following a fixed rhyme scheme can
be a lot of fun and is not a herculean
task.
● Flexibility is a key factor in any
innovative classroom.
28 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
The implications
Based on our findings, we expect that
the teacher trainees will reflect critically
on some of their perceptions regarding
the role of the teacher and the learners
and the nature of teacher input. We also
expect that the teacher trainees will use
the experience to modify their
classroom practices and will have
clearer perceptions about what will and
won’t work in a lesson. In the process,
they will themselves become more
independent and will be able to help the
learners become more autonomous. We
predict the following additional benefits
of the experience:
● The trainees will be careful in the
selection of appropriate materials for
classes such as this.
● The fact that incidental vocabulary
learning is possible in a lesson like
this is something that the trainees will
keep in mind while planning their
future lessons.
● The trainees will be ready to carry out
similar experiments by organising
their ideas and they won’t assume
that experimenting in a language class
is a waste of time.
● After experiencing success with this
material, the trainees will be confident
about using literature, especially
poetry, as a tool for language teaching.
● The learners will be motivated to
participate in innovative classes. This
experiment proves that something like
this is possible with this particular
class; learners in general may feel more
confident that they, too, are capable
of creating a poem or a sonnet.
● The trainees will be alert to the fact
that the learners have a lot of
www.diako.ir
language skills, and sharpening those
skills is possible with the help of
appropriate materials and proper
facilitation, guidance and scaffolding.
● As they have discovered that
following a rhyme scheme is fun, the
trainees will not hesitate to
experiment with poems that follow a
rhyme scheme in a creative class; they
will not automatically assume that
blank verse is easier.
● The trainees will be more willing to
modify their lesson plans according
to the direction that the class takes
because flexibility in this experiment
has helped in achieving more than the
desired end. ETp
Allwright, D and Hanks, J The Developing
Language Learner Palgrave Macmillan
2009
We wish to convey our grateful thanks to
Professor Premakumari Dheram without
whose encouragement and support, this
article would not have been possible.
Sruti Akula has taught
English for two years
and is taking an MPhil in
ELE at EFL University,
Hyderabad, India. She is
interested in language
teaching methodology,
materials production,
language testing and the
role of L1 as a
scaffolding device.
ssshruthisyamala@gmail.com
R Arul Peppin Rabitha
has an MPhil in English
Literature and is
currently taking an
MPhil in ELE at EFL
University, Hyderabad.
Her areas of interest are
developing reading
skills, language through
literature, language
testing and pragmatics.
arrabitha@indiatimes.com
TALKBACK!
Do you have something to say about
an article in the current issue of ETp?
This is your magazine and we would
really like to hear from you.
Write to us or email:
ENGLISH TEACHING professional
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Email: helena.gomm@pavpub.com
www.diako.ir
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Regular
revision
Hugh Dellar revises with his students in class
as well as getting them to revise regularly at home.
I
t is vitally important to revise
regularly (preferably daily) in class.
However, it is also important to
get your students to revise in their
own time. You can encourage this by
giving them a series of helpful tips:
there is a photocopiable example on
page 31, which you can use or adapt
and add your own ideas. Give it to the
students as a handout and invite them
to keep the page for future reference.
In addition to these self-study tips,
here are some easy and varied revision
activities you can do in class.
1 Rote learning
Ask the students to make a list of words
and expressions they want to learn over
the following week. They could do this
at the end of the lesson or at home.
Collect their lists, check them and make
any corrections, then get each student to
write their list out afresh on a clean
piece of paper. Give them a week to
learn their chosen words and
expressions. You could also use their
lists for some of the activities below.
2 5
Choose three expressions
Ask the students to choose three
expressions from their notes. They then
mingle and discuss one of the following:
● why they like the expressions they
have chosen;
● why they think they are useful;
● what they mean;
● when they have used them or think
they might use them in future.
3 Act or draw
Make a list of words and expressions
and hand them out. Ask the students to
30 • Issue 82 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
work in pairs. Student A acts or draws
one of the words or expressions and
Student B guesses what it is. They then
swap roles. With higher levels, only give
one list to each pair so that only the
student doing the acting or drawing can
see it. With lower levels, let the student
who is guessing see the list of words.
4 Team games
Divide the class into two teams. Ask
one person from each team to sit at the
front of the class with their back to the
board. Write a word or expression on
the board. Each team has to explain the
word or expression to their team
member at the front of the class. The
first person to guess gets a point for
their team.
A quicker (but perhaps less fun way)
is for the teacher simply to explain a
word or expression and each team has
to shout out or write down the answer.
Another variation is to have a word
on the board and the students can only
shout out collocates rather than
explanations.
Translation
Get the students to translate the
expressions they learnt in the previous
lesson and compare with a partner. (In
multilingual classes, they should compare
with someone who speaks the same
language.) At a later date, the students
could use their lists of translations to test
each other – one points to the translation
and the other says the English.
6 What do you remember?
Read out a text the students have
studied. Stop mid-sentence (or mid-
www.diako.ir
collocation or mid-expression) and let
the students shout out the rest of the
sentence, collocation or expression.
7 Remembering new language
Get the students to discuss what they
remember from a text, in pairs or as a
whole class. Reformulate what they say,
reminding them of the new language
they saw in the text.
8 Collocation grid
Get the students to complete a
collocation/expression grid, based on a
text they have studied. Keep this safe and,
at a later date, get the students to use the
grid to help them reconstruct the text.
9 Repeat activities
Ask the students to look back at an
activity they have already done. Let
them ask questions about anything
they’ve forgotten. Then tell them to
close their books and repeat the task.
You might also then do a further
practice/extension, with the students
personalising the task or the language.
10 Organising/grouping
language
Make a list of language items you have
taught, and ask the students to organise
the words or expressions into groups.
You can:
● provide the groups yourself:
sometimes they may be slightly bizarre
– rooms in the house or countries;
● say how many groups you want but
not give the titles;
● allow the students a free rein in
deciding how to group the items.
In all cases, the students can discuss
their groupings in pairs or small groups.

Hopefully, you will find these activities
easy to put into practice in the classroom
– and as a result your students will find
the language you have taught them
easier to remember! ETp
Hugh Dellar is a teacher
and teacher trainer at the
University of Westminster,
London, UK. He has been
teaching for almost 20
years, mostly in the UK
but also in Indonesia.
He is the co-author of
two General English
series, Innovations and
Outcomes, both
published by National
Geographic Learning.
hughdellar@mac.com
 Ten tips for self-study
It is important to revise regularly (preferably daily), looking again at the parts of the book
you have studied in class as well as your notebooks.
Here are some good tips to get the most from your learning experiences by revising language at home.
1 It can be a good idea to have two notebooks. One
for use in class and one for revision. When you get
home, have a look at the notes you took in class
and organise them in your revision notebook.
● You can organise language according to topic
(for example, food, weather, describing people,
talking about sport, etc).
● You can also organise lists of collocations and
expressions with common verbs (eg get, make,
do, etc so that you list things like How long does
it take you to get here in the mornings? I didn’t
get to bed until three, etc under get ). Make sure
you always have an example sentence showing
how the collocations are used. A good English
learners’ dictionary such as the Macmillan
dictionary or the Collins Cobuild Leaner’s
Dictionary can help.
2 Pick five to ten expressions and translate them
into your language. Don’t use a dictionary when
you do this. You can do it on your own or with a
partner who speaks the same language. If you find
the translation difficult, check the meaning of the
expression with your teacher in your next class.
● A few days later, look at the translated
sentences and translate them back to English.
Compare your translations to the original
sentences in English. Think carefully about any
differences.
● Repeat this a few days later and see if you have
translated the whole expression correctly this
time.
3 If you work with a study partner, you can test each
other by saying collocations or sentences in your
own language. Your partner then says the English
collocation or sentence. (Only do this with
collocations or complete sentences, not with
single words.)
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
4 Do any gap-fill exercise from the book again and
see if you remember the missing words. To make
this a bit more challenging you can re-do a gap-fill
without looking at the words given.
5 If you work with a study partner, you can test each
other by reading out gap-fill sentences from the
book or from your notes, but leaving out the words
in the gaps – or saying Mmm instead of the words.
Your partner then says the words in the gaps.
6 Re-do any exercise from the book, especially ones
you found difficult.
7 With a study partner, re-read a conversation from
the audioscripts in the back of the book. Close the
book and try to have the same conversation again.
When you get stuck, have a quick look at the
audioscript, close the book and carry on with the
conversation.
8 Together with a study partner, make a list of the
words and expressions you want to remember.
Then take turns to act or draw the words for your
partner to guess.
9 Choose up to five expressions that you like and
think are useful. Think of a situation when you
might use them. Then try to use them in the week
ahead. Don’t worry about making mistakes. You
learn from mistakes.
10 Re-read a text from the coursebook. Underline
between eight and 12 key words. Then, using only
these key words, try to retell the story. When you
get stuck, give yourself a minute to check the text,
close the book again and carry on. You can do this
on your own or with a study partner.
Good luck!
31
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www.diako.ir
 Over
the
wall ... Alan Maley
is gripped by a genre that
goes beyond tales of little
green men.
his is the second time I have
T ventured into ‘genre’ literature
(for the first one, see ETp Issue
79 on travel literature). This time
I will be dealing with science fiction,
which for its motivational pull alone is
significant for language learners.
In fact, it is sometimes difficult to
decide where the frontier lies between
sci-fi and fantasy, or fantasy and myth, or
sci-fi and ‘serious’ fiction. Is Anthony
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange sci-fi?
And George Orwell’s 1984? And Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World? And how
about Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland?
Luckily, we do not need to split hairs in
this way in order to enjoy all these titles –
and many more besides.
Whenever science fiction is
mentioned, it is the names of the 20th-
century greats which tend to spring to
mind, such as Arthur C Clark, Isaac
Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut or Frank Herbert.
Or perhaps the 19th- and early 20th-
century masters: Mary Shelley
iStockphoto.com / © Steven Robertson
(Frankenstein), R L Stevenson (Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde), Jules Verne (Journey to
the Centre of the Earth), H G Wells (The
War of the Worlds). But, of course, it is
arguable that sci-fi has an even longer
pedigree.
Surely Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels qualifies (especially Books 3 and 4)
34 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
– and perhaps even Beowulf? In Book 3,
A Journey to Laputa, Gulliver encounters
a strange society which lives on a flying
island and devotes itself to bizarre
scientific experiments with no practical
value, such as trying to extract sunbeams
from cucumbers. Enemies on earth below
are showered with rocks in an early
version of aerial bombardment. In Book
4, Gulliver is cast ashore on an island
ruled by highly intelligent and cultured
speaking horses – the Houyhnhnms –
who have to control the unruly tribe of
Yahoos – uncouth versions of
humankind. Although Gulliver’s Travels
was conceived as political satire, it does
have much in common with the imagined
worlds of sci-fi.
There is also a tendency to associate
sci-fi with space invaders, little green
men, ET phone home and the rest. But
the essence of sci-fi consists in asking
the question ‘What if …?’ and following
through the consequences to enter an
imagined world. What if everyone was
very small except for one giant (Book 1
of Gulliver’s Travels)? What if extra-
terrestrials took over a village and
impregnated all the women with their
children (The Midwich Cuckoos)? What if
a race developed which could alternate
between male and female characteristics
(The Left Hand of Darkness)?
www.diako.ir
The Midwich Cuckoos
John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos
opens with strange happenings at the
village of Midwich. Anyone trying to enter
the village is knocked down by an invisible
wall. After a few hours, things go back to
normal. But as the months pass, it
becomes obvious that all the women in the
village of child-bearing age are pregnant.
They all give birth at the same time. Their
children all look normal except that they
have strange-looking eyes and silvery skin.
As they grow up, they appear to possess
strange powers of telepathy and the
capacity to cause harm to ordinary humans
through mind control. It later becomes clear
that they have come to take over the world.
Reports come in of similar incidents
elsewhere in the world but all of these other
‘colonies’ have been wiped out. Only the
Midwich cuckoos remain. How will the
villagers get rid of them? Read on to find
out – or watch the film if you can find it.
Wyndham’s stories are compelling, both for
the basic dilemmas his plots set up and for
the way he makes them seem credible.
The Day of the Triffids – which asks the
question ‘What would happen to humans
if a species of plant developed which had
intelligence, could move around and had
a lethal poison?’ – is another of his highly
readable and original novels.
The Man in the High
Castle
Philip K Dick seems to be enjoying a
return to favour with re-issues of his
novels and films based on them, such as
Blade Runner and Total Recall. In The
Man in the High Castle, the question is
‘What if the Nazi and Japanese Axis had
won the Second World War?’ Most of the
story is set in the west coast area of what
was the USA. It is under the control of
the Japanese. The east coast area is run
by the Germans. In between, there is a
kind of no-man’s-land which is so
underdeveloped no one wants it, so it
enjoys some kind of autonomy. In this
area lives the man in the high castle, a
shadowy figure who has written a
subversive novel that everyone seems to
have read although it is banned in the
West and the East. In his novel, an
alternative reality is described, in which
Using sci-fi with
students is a tricky
business, of course,
but many of them
are already into it.
the Allies won the war. The plot is highly
complex, with sub-plots involving internal
rivalries in the German camp, and
between the Japanese and the Germans.
Relationships between conquerors and
vanquished are interestingly explored,
and the flavour of life under an occupying
power also comes across strongly. The
main female protagonist, Juliana, decides
to visit the man in the high castle. There,
by using the I Ching (which has featured
elsewhere in the story), she discovers
that Hawthorne Abendsen, the author,
wrote his novel using the I Ching, and
that the story it tells is true – the Allies
did in fact win the war …This
disconcerting discovery of parallel
universes is not explained further, leaving
the reader to go on thinking about the
story long after putting the book down.
Fahrenheit 154
Fahrenheit 154 by Ray Bradbury is one of
the iconic sci-fi titles. It is short (172
pages) and shares the dystopian vision of
Orwell and Huxley. It takes place in a
world where books are banned – all
books. The fire brigade’s job is not to put
out fires but to burn the books and the
houses they are found in. The story
follows the gradual rebellion of a fireman,
Montag, who starts to hoard the books
he is supposed to have burnt. He realises
the futility and vacuousness of a society
where people spend most of their time
watching the mindless programmes
projected on the walls in their homes. He
makes contact with the resistance and,
after a harrowing encounter with his
cynical chief, Captain Beatty, which ends
in Montag torching him, he escapes to
join it. In this group, members have each
‘become’ a book by learning it by heart.
They are the repository of a civilisation of
literacy which may return one day. A
nuclear conflict has broken out at the
end, and we are led to hope that a new
world can emerge from the rubble.
Before closing, I must mention two
personal favourites, and one rather
different kind of sci-fi.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
This book, by Walter M Miller, is set in
the Utah desert centuries after a global
nuclear catastrophe. The three parts are
set at three points in post-nuclear time –
each of which ends in a new disastrous
nuclear conflict. The Monastery of St
Leibowitz provides the link between
these eras, and acts as the repository of
human science after each holocaust. The
opening scene is one of the most
compelling in sci-fi.
Ridley Walker
Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker is also set
in a post-nuclear world which has reverted
to a kind of brutal, mediaeval state: full of
superstition, half-remembered fragments
of the earlier civilisation, and mindless
violence. It takes place in Kent, near
Cambry (Canterbury) and is written in an
invented post-nuclear dialect of English.
Absolutely brilliant. For once, the epithet
‘masterpiece’ is not an exaggeration.
Pattern Recognition
Finally, William Gibson’s Pattern
Recognition is a borderline sci-fi story,
set in the present and concerned with the
use of mental manipulation and
electronic communication in the service
of advertising. It is written in a zippy style,
with multiple twists and turns, so you need
your wits about you. This is a real page-
turner in a more contemporary idiom.

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
Using sci-fi with students is a tricky
business, of course, but many of them
are already into it. Short stories may be
better than full novels, and there are
some suggested websites below. Tying
sci-fi into film versions is also an obvious
option. But whether you decide to use
sci-fi in your teaching or simply to read it
for your own pleasure, it offers not only
little green men but some intellectually
stimulating and challenging new worlds
to explore. Sci-fi can be a machine for
thinking about possible futures. ETp
Novels
Bradbury, R Fahrenheit 451 HarperCollins
1954
Burgess, A A Clockwork Orange Penguin
1962/1973
Dick, P K The Man in the High Castle
Penguin 1965
Gibson, W Pattern Recognition Berkley
Books 2003
Hoban, R Ridley Walker Picador 1980
Huxley, A Brave New World Harper
Perennial Modern Classics 1932/2005
Le Guin, U The Left Hand of Darkness
Ace Books 1969
Miller, W M A Canticle for Leibowitz
Bantam Books 1997
Orwell, G 1984 Penguin 1948/2008
Wyndham, J The Midwich Cuckoos
Penguin 1953/1967
Wyndham, J The Day of the Triffids
Penguin 1951
Short story collections:
Aldiss, B No Time Like Tomorrow Signet
Books 1959
Asimov, I A Different Flesh Congdon and
Weed 1988
Kuttner, H Ahead of Time Ballantine
Books 1953
Moorcock, M The Time Dweller
Mayflower Science Fantasy 1969
For a general list of short story
collections:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Science_
fiction_short_story_collections
For free downloads:
www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/
sci-fiindex.html
Alan Maley has worked in
the area of ELT for over
40 years in Yugoslavia,
Ghana, Italy, France,
China, India, the UK,
Singapore and Thailand.
Since 2003 he has been
a freelance writer and
consultant. He has
published over 30 books
and numerous articles,
and was, until recently,
Series Editor of the
Oxford Resource Books
for Teachers.
yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
35
  IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
 Partners in poetry
Poetry translation, although challenging, is
a wonderfully engaging way for learners to
increase their awareness of the subtleties of
English and get to grips with figurative
language. In a multilingual class, it also
provides a means for the learners to share
and celebrate their respective cultures.
I have tried this technique several times with
groups of migrant workers who attend a
centre for community adult learning, and on
each occasion I have been delighted with
their enthusiasm for the task, the discussions
on language which have emerged during the
process and the beautiful end results.
Here are my ideas on how to instigate a
poetry translation session, an activity which
works well with intermediate levels and
above:
● You may wish to lead up to the idea
by reading the class a couple of poems.
I visited The Poetry Channel
(www.thepoetrychannel.org.uk), a fantastic
resource where you can watch and listen to
poets performing their own work. My class
thoroughly enjoyed John Hegley’s Rowena,
a hilarious tale of broken glasses and
unrequited love.
● Source some poems in the L1s of your
learners, or give them the option of
finding their own favourites online.
Alternatively, you could set the task of
choosing an L1 poem for homework in the
preceding class.
● Ask the learners to read the poem through
and write an initial translation, focusing
only on meaning. Circulate, asking
questions. Often, the poet’s own life is the
key to a deeper understanding of the work,
36 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
More tested lessons, suggestions, tips and techniques which have all
worked for ETp readers. Try them out for yourself – and then send us
your own contribution. Don’t forget to include your postal address.
All the contributors to It Works in Practice in this issue of ETp will
receive copies of Communicate levels 1 and 2 by Kate Pickering,
published by Macmillan. Macmillan have kindly agreed to be sponsors
of It Works in Practice for this year.
 Giving back
and the learners should be encouraged to written work
carry out some small-scale research on Instead of just handing
this in class. back written work when
● Divide the class into pairs. Each learner you have marked it, why
now has a ‘poetry partner’ who will be not make it into an
available to read work to and bounce ideas activity? For example:
off. Obviously, you need to put a little
● Read out a sentence from
thought into who gets paired up with
the written work at
whom! I find it helpful to put the learners
random and ask the owner
in mixed nationality pairs for the most
to claim it.
part, although I once paired a slightly
lower-ability learner with someone who ● Read out a sentence at
shared his L1. random and ask the class
to guess whose work it is.
● After the initial translations have been
written, you should have a short ● Read out any impressive
discussion with each learner, asking or unusual words from a
helpful questions to inform the next piece of writing and ask
stages. Look at the original poem, and the owner to claim it and
ask: Does it rhyme? What’s the rhyme explain the words to the
scheme? What shape does the poem take rest of the class.
on the page? Does the poet play on words?
● Read out words at random
These are all questions the learners need
from one piece of writing
to consider as they reformulate their
and ask the owner to
initial translations into a version that
claim it.
more closely resembles that of the
original. ● Summarise the text and
ask the owner to claim it.
● For the rest of the lesson, the learners
alternate between reading their work ● Describe the writing, eg
aloud to their ‘poetry partners’ and ‘a short piece with big
consulting with you, until everyone is clear letters, not joined
satisfied that their translation is true to together, written in dark
the spirit of the original. blue ink’, and ask the
● The project should conclude with a owner to claim it.
reading, or, if possible, you can collect the You can probably think of
poems and copy them so that each learner more ways of having fun
has a class set of translated poems. giving back written work.
Genevieve White Simon Mumford
Lerwick, UK Izmir, Turkey
www.diako.ir
 Every plural counts!
I would like to share a game which I used with second-year ● Teams wouldn’t be given four possible answers to choose
university students to teach regular and irregular plural from.
nouns. It is adapted from the popular TV quiz game Who ● No ‘lifelines’ would be given.
Wants to be a Millionaire? I found the ‘money’ element
provided extrinsic motivation for the students. ● Teams couldn’t choose to walk away and keep the money
whenever they wanted: it was win it all by getting all 14
First, I divided the board into columns (see below). The first plurals correct or lose it all by getting one wrong.
column was for singular nouns, which I wrote up one by one
during the course of the game; the last column was for the To minimise the level of noise and chaos, I chose a
sums of money which could be won for each correctly- representative from each team, whose task was to consult
guessed plural noun (including the correct spelling). The the other team members about the correct plural, decide on
columns in between were for the competing teams to write the correct spelling and write it on the board – all within a
the plural form alongside each noun. The currency I used was time limit of 20 seconds.
the Syrian Lira (50 SL = US$1); of course, you would use I didn’t make any corrections or comments while the
your own currency. students were playing the game so as to keep the
Next, I explained the game to the students. There were 100 momentum going. After it was over, however, I asked them
of them, sitting in rows in an auditorium. I told them each to open their grammar books and check their own columns.
row was a team, and their task was to help each other to win This gave them the chance to find their own mistakes and
the ‘jackpot’, which would be divided equally among them. I consult the textbook for spelling rules and guidance.
pointed out that the game was based on Who Wants to be a Afterwards, I gave further explanations of the rules of
Millionaire? but that I had my own rules: regular and irregular plural forms.
I found that this activity captured the attention of all the
Team 1 Team 2 Team 3 students and kept them fully engaged. I also believe that
stimulus 30,000 SL when the students have to find something out by reasoning
nucleus 15,000 SL and hypothesising, they tend to learn and remember it
crisis 12,500 SL better.
phenomenon 10,000 SL A final point: I used real money for this activity and I held it
louse 8,000 SL in my hands, playing with it in a tempting way while the
sheep 5,000 SL students were competing. I adapted the rules and made the
echo 3,000 SL
list of words deliberately hard in order not to lose my salary!
But unluckily, one team did manage to win and I had to
kilo 2,000 SL
hand over the money. However, I told them in a very light-
thief 1,000 SL
hearted tone that the impact of losing my money would
belief 800 SL make the questions in their forthcoming exam unbelievably
foot 500 SL difficult, and immediately they roared with laughter and
story 300 SL were more than willing to give it back. So I went home with
valley 200 SL my money back in my pocket, safe and sound!
man 50 SL Mohammed Arroub
Homs, Syria

 IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
Do you have an idea which you would like to contribute to
our It Works in Practice section? It might be anything from
an activity which you use in class to a teaching technique
that has worked for you. Send us your contribution, by
post or by email to helena.gomm@pavpub.com.
All the contributors to It Works in Practice get a prize! We
especially welcome joint entries from teachers working at
the same institution. Why not get together with your
colleagues to provide a whole It Works in Practice section
of your ideas? We will publish a photo of you all.

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 • 37

www.diako.ir
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Speak!
Please,
speak!
Nicholas Northall addresses why less vocal learners
don’t speak – and how to encourage them.
A
central aim of most ELT
lessons is to get the learners to
communicate orally. Indeed,
Tricia Hedge states that the
challenge of the language classroom is
not only to create opportunities for all
the learners to speak, but also to prepare
them for speaking spontaneously. In
many instances, this can be easily
achieved through the right use of
materials and exercises. However, how
many of us are faced with learners (if
not the whole class) who are incredibly
reluctant to speak? Getting these learners
to communicate orally can be difficult –
and a failure to do so can leave both
learners and teachers feeling annoyed
and frustrated. I will outline several
reasons why some learners might be
reluctant to communicate in class,
suggest some ways of creating a
classroom environment where they want
to speak in English, and finally present
some speaking exercises for motivating
less vociferous class members.
Reasons for reluctance
Although it is quite easy to recognise
which learners might be hesitant to
speak, it is an altogether different
matter to suggest reasons for this lack of
communication.
38 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Scott Thornbury suggests three
factors which could prevent learners
from communicating.
1 Cognitive factor
Learners might be reluctant to speak
because the topic being discussed is
unknown. Or, even if the topic is not
unknown, they might have little or no
opinion about it. One way to overcome
these problems could be to discuss only
familiar topics (such as the learners’
country or hobbies). However, this
would soon get boring. A more
adventurous way would be to use input
(such as websites and texts) to give the
learners a variety of different opinions
and vocabulary about a previously
unknown topic. They could then use
this input to facilitate forming and
expressing their own point of view. The
point needs to be made, though, that
discussion topics need to be relevant to
the learners, and should give all learners
the opportunity to contribute.
2 Affective factor
The affective factor comes into play
when the learners suffer from low self-
esteem and are anxious about speaking.
On the other hand, they might simply
harbour negative attitudes towards
learning English. In both cases,
www.diako.ir
motivation for learning suffers. Affective
factors could come from the learners
themselves, or they could be due to
poor rapport between the learners and
the teacher or amongst the learners
themselves. Olwyn Alexander, Sue
Argent and Jenifer Spencer suggest that,
while individuals need time to develop
confidence, they need to be persuaded
to contribute early when the ideas being
discussed are still basic. Indeed, if they
don’t contribute early, then they will
probably never contribute.
3 Performance factor
The final factor Thornbury identifies
concerns the learners’ language: they
may not have enough language to
formulate an answer or utterance. In
fact, they might not even understand
the question being asked. Therefore, it is
essential to ensure that the task is
appropriate to the learners’ ability.
I feel there is also a fourth factor – a
socio-cultural factor – where the learners
don’t understand the culture or social
conditions of the situation. For
example, in some cultures it is not ‘the
done thing’ to speak when not directly
addressed, or it might be that small-talk
and chit chat are unfamiliar concepts in
the learners’ culture. It might take time
to overcome this fourth factor – if,
indeed, we believe that we actually can
and should. Below are some suggestions
which might go some way towards
creating an atmosphere where the
learners want to speak.
The English-friendly
classroom
The first step is to create, as Jim
Scrivener describes, ‘a classroom where
learners were free to use their own tongue
whenever they wanted, but in fact mostly
chose to use English’. Of course, this
sounds ideal in theory, but how can we
achieve it in practice? Scrivener suggests
many ways of doing this:
● The classroom should have English
posters on the wall. (I would add that
having English newspapers and
magazines available also creates the
feeling of an area where English is
used.)
● There should be a lot of listening and
working on fluency activities. This
could be done as pairwork or
groupwork.
● The teacher should not criticise the
learners for using their own language.
(I would add that a ‘swear box’ could
be used instead to collect money every
time a learner uses their own language.
Obviously, with lower-level learners
the teacher would expect to hear the
learners’ mother tongue more often
than, say, with an advanced group. It
is also essential that the teacher does
not inadvertently criticise the
learners’ culture, language or identity
as this could have dire consequences.)
● Establish rules with the learners about
when they should speak English and
when they should/can speak their
own language. A possible way to do
this would be to have sections of the
classroom where only English is used.
● If you speak the same L1 as your
learners, ensure that you only ‘hear’
English.
A final ingredient for creating a
speaking-friendly classroom is
establishing a good rapport between
both the teacher and the learners and
amongst the learners themselves so that
the class has a positive atmosphere.
Rapport is an essential ingredient in a
successful classroom. But how can we
create and build rapport? Here are some
suggestions that Jeremy Harmer makes:
● Learn the learners’ names and
something about them. It might also
be worth noting that the teacher
should ask the learners what they
want to be called.
● Listen to the learners’ opinions and
concerns, and don’t interrupt.
● Respect the learners by praising but
not patronising them. Treat them like
adults. Correct them, but don’t
overcorrect.
● Treat all the learners in the same
manner; ie don’t have favourites.
● Demonstrate that you know your
subject, ie that you are professional.
I would also suggest that you should
smile, use humour (if appropriate) and
be yourself. Arrive at the classroom
early (perhaps a few minutes before the
lesson is due to begin) and use this
opportunity to chat about normal
everyday things with less vocal students.
Chatting in the classroom is a good idea
as it gives the learners the chance to
share their lives. Finally, remember it
can take time to build up a relationship.
More speaking for the
less vocal
Here are some activities to motivate less
vocal learners and to address some of
their reasons for not speaking.
Hot seat
The learners work in small groups (three
to five) and each write one question for
all the other members of the group.
(These are kept secret from the others
and should not be too personal!) One
person in each group is chosen to sit in
the hot seat. The others take turns to ask
this person their questions. After each
question has been answered, a different
learner sits in the hot seat, ready to be
asked a new set of questions.
Follow-up questions
During group- or pairwork, if one
learner is reluctant to speak, the
questioner can follow up each ‘answer’
with a short one-word question, eg
Who? What? Where? Why? When? How?
For example:
Learner 1: What did you do at the
weekend?
Learner 2: Shopping.
Learner 1: Where?
Learner 2: In the shopping centre, in
town.
Learner 1: Why?
Learner 2: I needed a dress for my
friend’s wedding.
With practice, the learners should be
able to give fuller answers. For example,
after the initial question above: I went
shopping in the shopping centre in town
because I needed a dress for my friend’s
wedding.
Short presentations
(This is like the IELTS speaking task 2.)
The learners are given a topic and
several linked questions. They work in
pairs and have one or two minutes to
prepare a two- to three-minute
presentation. They then take it in turns
to give their mini-presentations. These
could be about their hobbies or another
personal topic, such as their home town,
their family, etc.
Information gap
Information-gap activities can be such
things as discussing different or similar
drawings, communicating information
to complete a table or a text with
missing information, etc. The learners
work in pairs and each has slightly
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
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different information from their partner.
They have to ask questions or describe
what they know in order to complete
the information they have been given.
To make the activity last longer, they
could be told that the pair who finish
last are the winners.
Roleplays
Roleplays can be based on such things
as booking accommodation, making an
appointment to see a lecturer, asking for
an extension for an essay or anything
relevant to life in the country the
students are studying in.
Jigsaw reading/listening tasks
Half the class reads or listens to one
text, while the other half reads or listens
to a different text (these could reflect
two differing viewpoints, two sides to an
argument, two witness accounts, etc).
They then work with someone from the
other group to establish the full picture.
It is a good idea to start with
familiar topics such as hobbies,
favourite sports, families, etc.

In order to communicate, learners need
to have good rapport both amongst
themselves and with their teacher. They
need to study in a non-threatening
environment and they need to feel
confident enough to want to communicate.
They also need the opportunity to speak.
What materials and tasks do you use
to develop your learners’ discussion
skills? ETp
Alexander, O, Argent, S and Spencer, J
EAP Essentials Garnet 2008
Harmer, J The Practice of English
Language Teaching Pearson 2007
Hedge, T Teaching and Learning in the
Language Classroom OUP 2000
Scrivener, J Learning Teaching Macmillan
2005
Thornbury, S How to Teach Speaking
Pearson 2005
Nicholas Northall works
at the English Language
Teaching Centre at the
University of Sheffield,
UK, where he teaches
EAP and contributes to
the centre’s teacher
training programme. He
has worked in ELT for
over ten years.
northalln@hotmail.com
39
 LANGUAGE LOG

Singular or plural?
John Potts charts the intricacies and idiosyncrasies,
the contradictions and complications that make the English language
so fascinating for teachers and teaching. In this issue, he considers why a speaker
of English can get in a muddle over their choice of singular or plural forms.

ne feature of English that baffles some learners

O
is the seemingly cavalier way it treats singulars
and plurals. For example, most native speakers
would find the following sentence, taken from an
online essay on an American English website and dated
February 2009, perfectly acceptable:
‘I believe that everybody is doing their best with the
resources they have at a given moment in time.’
In contrast, many learners will be puzzled by the switch
from everybody is to their best followed by they have, all
within a few words in the same sentence. Later in the same
online essay, we find:
‘When the store clerk is rude, I remind myself that they are
doing their best with the resources they have. I then ask
myself if I have any resources to offer them. Inevitably I do.
I’ll offer them the small token of a smile or a kind word and
that often shifts their resources enough to make their best
at their next moment in time something much better.’
Quite clearly, the writer is using the plural pronouns they,
their and them to refer to a store clerk, so why the plural
forms? One explanation is that we don’t know whether the
store clerk is male or female since English very rarely
indicates gender in nouns, and so the singular forms would
be extremely clumsy:
‘When the store clerk is rude, I remind myself that he or she
is doing his or her best with the resources he or she has. I
then ask myself if I have any resources to offer him or her.
Inevitably I do. I’ll offer him or her the small token of a smile
or a kind word and that often shifts his or her resources
enough to make his or her best at his or her next moment
in time something much better.’
To prevent this, we use the plural form as a kind of ‘all
purpose’ or genderless alternative. A much simpler
solution, in this example, would be to make the original
subject plural:
‘When store clerks are rude, I remind myself that they are
doing their best with the resources they have. I then ask
myself if I have any resources to offer them ...’
Here’s another example, this time a caption to a
photograph accompanying a news story in The Guardian
newspaper:
‘A passenger rests at Terminal 4 of Heathrow airport while
waiting for news of their flight.’
Interestingly, the passenger in the photograph is a woman,
but nevertheless the caption writer did not choose to write
her flight.
However, the problem of singular and plural also occurs
with nouns where gender isn’t the issue. Look at these
nouns – what do they have in common?
team company group family Liverpool (football club)
Apple The Faces (rock group)
All refer to a ‘unit’ that actually comprises several or
numerous people, and native speakers will sometimes
regard such nouns as singular, and sometimes as plural.
For example, we can argue that family has two related
meanings: one as a ‘social unit’ and one as ‘a collection of
individuals related to each other’. So we could plausibly
say that the family is still important in modern society and
the family are all getting together for Christmas. In the first,
we treat the concept as one single unit and in the second
as numerous aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.
This is logical but, as we’ve seen, native speakers may
simply hop between singular and plural – seemingly as the
mood takes them. Not infrequently, they’ll do this in the
same sentence. Here are some examples taken from the
internet:
● ‘Liverpool look like a team that thinks the title race is still
open.’ BBC Radio 5 Live, 22 March 2009
● ‘According to Wu, Apple is waiting for flash memory
prices to decline but are otherwise ready to launch.’
MacRumors, US tech website, March 2007
● ‘This group of musicians are enjoying themselves: Mick
Hucknall, Kenney Jones and Ronnie Wood.’
The Telegraph, 5 August 2010

40 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

www.diako.ir
 LANGUAGE LOG Singular or plural?

For each, there are two possible versions if we want to be
consistent:
● ‘Liverpool looks/look like a team that thinks/think the title
race is still open.’
● ‘According to Wu, Apple is/are waiting for flash memory
prices to decline but is/are otherwise ready to launch.’
● ‘This group of musicians is/are enjoying itself/themselves:
Mick Hucknall, Kenney Jones and Ronnie Wood.’
The third example is interesting, as it includes a reflexive
pronoun. Notice the difference between these sentences:
The class was clearly enjoying itself. (class = one unit)
The class were clearly enjoying themselves. (class = several
students)
The class wrote the magazine all by themselves. (individual
class members each wrote something)
Someone in the class made a podcast all by themself. (only
one person (male? female?) made a podcast). This use of
themself as a singular, gender-free, reflexive pronoun is
relatively new, and not accepted by some speakers. My
spell-checker won’t accept it, for example!
We can see what has happened here: the initial singular
subject (a plague) was made more complex by adding of +
plural nouns (bags, fridges), followed in this case by a list
of other items. The writer ignores or forgets the initial
singular at the start of the sentence and chooses a plural
verb form to match the plural nouns (and the list) found
before it.
And finally, look back to my sentence above introducing
this point:
Another factor in the singular/plural conundrum is complex
subjects.
Sometimes, when native speakers see the plural that
follows the verb (here, the complement of is, namely
complex subjects) they are misled into making the verb
agree with it:
Another factor in the singular/plural conundrum are
complex subjects.
All in all, then, there is plenty to unravel with something as
apparently straightforward as singular and plural. It’s
enough to make a learner (or a teacher) tear their hair out!

John Potts is a teacher and teacher trainer

based in Zürich, Switzerland. He has written
Another factor in the singular/plural conundrum is complex and co-written several adult coursebooks, and
is a CELTA assessor. He is also a presenter for
subjects. Here is an example from BBC News: Cambridge ESOL Examinations.

‘A plague of black bin bags, abandoned fridges, garden

waste, building rubble and dangerous asbestos are
johnpotts@swissonline.ch
clogging Britain’s streets.’ BBC News, 2 March 2005

COMPETITION RESULTS
8 12 17 15 25 2 4 23 25 12 24 10 22 Congratulations to all Anne Aubrun, Dampicourt, Belgium
M A R K E T Q U E A S Y I
22 25 19 23 12 3 9 17 16 those readers who Sarah Busslinger, Untersiggenthal, Switzerland
I E H U A W O R D successfully completed Guillaume Gombert, Paris, France
16 25 26 22 16 25 12 17 13 25
D E C I D E A R L E our Prize Crossword 51. David Greenslade, Cefn Cribwr, UK
16
D
9
O
8
M
22
I
5
N
14
G
13
L
25
E
15
K
22
I
5
N
The winners, who will Jihanne Khouzaimi, Paris, France
13 23 17 26 19 2 9 10 18 2 each receive a copy of Jenny Lam, New York, USA
L U R C H T O Y V T
25 5 16 25 22 7 25 2 22
the Macmillan English Cora Leder, Wettingen, Switzerland
E N D E I B E T I Dictionary for Advanced Bruno Martin, Paris, France
12 12 23 24 2 25 17 22 2 10 2
A A U S T E R I T Y T Learners, are: Joshua Minder, Ennetbaden, Switzerland
9 6 6 12 13 10 12 2 11 12 10 Iftikhar Sharif, Sialkot, Pakistan
O F F A L Y A T P A Y
6 17 6 17 6 22 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
F R F R F I G J T W Q N F B M O Y P A L
1 25 24 2 22 26 9 5 22 26 26 9 2 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
J E S T I C O N I C C O T G K D R V H X Z I U S E C
26 5 17 2 9 12 9
C N R T O A O 25 26 9 5 9 8 22 26 24 22 24 25 20 2 17 25
24 2 12 5 16 12 17 16 10 9 13 20 E C O N O M I C S I S E X T R E
S T A N D A R D Y O L X 8 25 13 10 23 24 25 6 23 13 12 24 12 6
25 9 5 25 13 9 22 M E L Y U S E F U L A S A F
E O N E L O I 9 17 8 9 6 25 8 11 13 9 10 8 25 5 2
25 16 14 25 26 12 5 5 12 17 26 O R M O F E M P L O Y M E N T
E D G E C A N N A R C 6 9 17 25 26 9 5 9 8 22 24 2 24
19 21 25 12 13 9 23 24 5 F O R E C O N O M I S T S
H Z E A L O U S N John Kenneth Galbraith

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 • 41

www.diako.ir
SCRAPBOOK Gems, titbits, puzzles, foibles, quirks, bits & pieces,
quotations, snippets, odds & ends,
what you will

Plus ça change 00 military

security guards and 7,5
ich is abbreviated yed), never mind
The French saying wh personnel will be em plo
nsl ates loosely as Olympic site
to plus ça change tra the cost of dev elo pin g the
gs cha nge , the more they
‘the more thin itself.
’t take a great
stay the same’. It doesn
the Olympic Games Plus ça change ...
deal of research into
n! athlete called
to reach that conclusio At the 99th Games, an
In recent times, it has
become s in the ‘long race’
Sotades was victoriou
im tha t gre at advantages dal for Crete, his
customary to cla and took the me
l follow in the nex t Games he
ount Olympus, a 2,900-metre for the host country wil Bu t at the

M
birthpl ace .
It has also become Ep hes ian, having
peak on mainland Greece, is wake of the Games. declared himself an
nt to the Ga mes as to do so by the Ephesian
where the gods lived, the norm to poi being bribed
sel fless ideals. tou s act , he was
according to Greek legend, repres ent ing nob le and people. For this duplici
al ticket s.
and so it was considered a worthy place In the 1936 Games, tot banished by the Cre tan
Re ichsmark, growing trend,
to hold sporting contests. The origins of revenues we re 7.5 mil lion In what is becoming a
a pro fit of over one itch ing citizenships in
the Olympic Games were attributed to the apparently generating many athletes are sw
Ho we ver , the offi cial pet e at the Ga me s. There are
gods, and competing legends persisted million marks. order to com
out lay s by the city nt citi zen ship, and
as to who actually was responsible for budget did n’t inc lud e countries willing to gra
marks) or by the lete s in exc han ge for
their genesis. The first Olympic Games of Berlin (16.5 million more, to these ath
al gov ern ment (which is ent atio n and the hon our that
German nat ion their repres
for which we still have written records nt US$30 million). Olympic success.
estimated to have spe comes with potential
were held in 776 BC, though it is generally
In the 2012 Ga me s, almost £1 billion
believed that they had been going on for urity alone (20,000 Plus ça change ...
is being spent on sec
many years before that.

The ancient Olympics, held in honour of

the god Zeus, were as much a religious
festival as an athletic event. The sculptor
Pheidias created a 13-metre gold and
ivory statue of Zeus, which became one
of the seven wonders of the ancient
world.
Artistic expression was also a major part
of the ancient Games. Sculptors, poets
and other artisans would come to display
their works in what became an artistic
competition. Baron Pierre de Coubertin,
one of the founders of the modern
Olympic Games, wanted to imitate the
ancient Olympics in every way, so his
vision for the Games also included an
artistic competition, and one took place
at the Athens Games in 1896. However,
artistic competition doesn’t seem to have
featured large in events of late, and arts
certainly seem to take a fringe seat
compared with sporting events.
Olympic firsts
The first time women competed
at the
Olympic Games was in 1900 in Paris
in
the croquet event. No women com
peted
in 1896, as Pierre de Coubertin felt
that
their inclusion would be ‘impracti
cal,
uninteresting, unaesthetic and inco
rrect’.
The first female individual Olympic
champion was England’s Charlotte
Cooper, who won the tennis sing
les in
1900. However, she was not the
first
female Olympic gold medallist, as
Swiss
sailor Hélène de Pourtalès had earli
er
won gold as part of a boat crew.
The first black athlete to compete
at
the Olympics was Constantin Hen
riquez
de Zubiera. He represented Fran
ce in
1900, winning gold as part of the
rugby
team and silver in the tug-of-war.
The first black African to win a gold
medal was Ethiopian marathon runn
er
Abebe Bikila, in Rome in 1960. He
ran
barefoot all the way.
The first time a swimming pool was
used for swimming events was at
the
London Olympics in 1908. The only
swimming event in the 1896 Athe
ns
Olympics was the 100-metres frees
tyle,
held in the sea off Piraeus. In 1900
at
the Paris Olympics, swimming even
ts
were held in the River Seine. Time
s
were fast as the swimmers swam
with
the current.
The first athlete to be disqualified
for drug use was Swedish pentathle
te
Hans-Grunner Liljenwall. He teste
d
positive for excessive alcohol in
Mexico
City in 1968.
The first athlete to win gold med
als
in five consecutive Olympics was
British
rower Steven Redgrave in 2000.

42 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

www.diako.ir
 Olympic statistics Olympic trivia
The original naked che
f?
Oldest and youngest The first Olympic champion in reco
Oscar Swahn was 72 years and 279 days old when he rded history was Coroebus (a cook
from Elis). He won the only even
t: the ‘stade’, which was a sprint
took silver in the deer shooting event in 1920. In 1912 the length of the stadium (about race
192 metres). At the ancient Gam
he was the oldest ever gold medallist. athletes competed naked. es all
Lorna Johnstone of the UK became the oldest ever
Not so popular
female Olympian in 1972 at the age of 70. She
More athletes than spectators atten
competed in the dressage on her horse El Farruco. ded the 1900 Paris Olympic Gam
es.
Dimitrios Loundras of Greece was 10 years 218 A sure bet
days old when his team finished third in the parallel bars In 1920, Norway won seven yach
ting events – in five of them, the
in 1896. Norwegian competitor was the only
entrant!
In 1936, 12-year-old Inge Sorensen from Denmark
Worth the wait?
won a bronze medal in the 200-metre breaststroke,
In 1924, Bill Havens was chosen
making her the youngest medallist in an individual event. to represent the USA in the rowi
as his wife was pregnant, he opte ng, but
d to stay with her rather than com
Longest events Twenty-eight years later, that child pete.
, Frank Havens, took gold in the
The winner of the 320-kilometre cycle race in Stockholm 10,000 metres canoeing!
in 1912, Okey Lewis of South Africa, finished the course Close shave
in 10 hours, 42 minutes and 39 seconds. In 1956, American bantamweigh
Also at the 1912 Olympics, one of the Graeco- t weightlifter, Charles Vinci, foun
himself 200 grams overweight only d
Roman wrestling semi-finals lasted 11 hours and 40 15 minutes before the weigh-in.
Savage measures to reduce his
minutes. The competitors were Martin Klein, an Estonian weight included cutting off all his
He just made it – and won the gold hair.
representing Tsarist Russia, and Alfred Asikainen of medal!
Finland, who was eventually defeated. Unfortunately, Underpants of fire
Klein was too exhausted to wrestle in the final and had There have been protests against
the Olympic flame relay due to its
to settle for second place. Nazi origins. At the 1956 Melbourn
e Games, Barry Larkin, a local
veterinary student, registered his
protest by carrying a fake flame,
Fastest medal winner consisting of a pair of underpants
set on fire in a plum pudding can,
In 1924, Paavo Nurmi of Finland won five gold medals, attached to a chair leg. He succ
essfully tricked the onlookers and
including the 1,500 metres and 5,000 metres in the managed to hand over the fake
flame to the Mayor of Sydney befo
space of just one hour. escaping unnoticed into the crow re
d.

© iStockphoto.com / jokerproproduction
Most individual gold medals Olympians on film
Ray Ewry of the USA won eight individual gold medals, Johnny Weismuller, who won two
swimming gold medals (in 1924
including three in the standing long jump and the 1928) was best known for playing and in
Tarzan in a series of films of the
standing high jump. He won his final medals in 1908 and name. The part of Tarzan has also same
been played by other Olympians:
his record stood until 2008 when American swimmer Buster Crabbe (swimming bronze
1928), Hermann Brix (shot put silve
Michael Phelps won his ninth individual gold. 1928) and Glen Morris (decathlo r
n gold 1936).
Harold Toshiyuki Sakata, silver med
Most amazing finish allist in 1948 in weightlifting, later
appeared as Oddjob, the villain in
In the 195-kilometre cycling road race in Rome in 1960, the James Bond film Goldfinger.
a great pack of riders approached the finish together.
Mario Zanin of Italy won the gold medal, while Sture
Pettersson at the back of the pack took 51st place –
just 0.16 seconds behind the winner.
Anyone for
the swimming
Just not cricket
1908 was the first year in which the Olympics were held

obstacle race?
in London – and the last at which the host country was
allowed to supply all the officials. This practice was
changed to avoid accusations of bias after it was
claimed that officials were using megaphones to urge on (Sadly, discontinued)
their home team, and had deliberately broken the tape used to be
to force a re-run of the 400 metres after a British runner Which of the following
bu t are no longer so?
had been beaten. Olympic sports, Answers 1 cricket (las
t
l
6 live pigeon shooting played in 1900); 3 rea
There was also controversy in the 1908 tug-of-war war
1 cricket tennis (1908); 5 tug-of-
contest in which the British team, composed of hefty 7 chess (1920); 6 live pigeon
policemen from Liverpool, competed in enormous boots 2 shove-halfpenny shooting (its first and
only
0);
– their boots were so heavy, in fact, that it was only with 8 polo appearance was in 190
t
3 real tennis 8 polo (1936); 9 croque
great effort that they could lift their feet from the ground. (1900); 10 motor boating
9 croquet
The rules stipulated ordinary shoes, and the American 4 bar billiards (1908). 2, 4 and 7 hav
e
rts.
team protested, but to no avail. 10 motor boating never been Olympic spo
5 tug-of-war

Scrapbook compiled by Ian Waring Green

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 • 43

www.diako.ir
Reviews
Rhymes and Rhythm:
A poem-based course for
English pronunciation
by Michael Vaughan-Rees
Garnet Education 2010
978-1859-64528-4
For those of us familiar with the original
edition of this book, published by
Macmillan in 1994 but out of print for
several years now, this will be a welcome
reincarnation. Teaching pronunciation is
never easy and all too often feels like a
chore, both to the teacher and the
learner. The author has chosen to present
pronunciation here largely through the
medium of poetry, which he claims
makes the material easy to repeat and
which follows the natural rhythms of
spoken English. It is also, it goes without
saying, likely to be more entertaining
than prose.
The focus of the book is on the
supra-segmental features of English
and, more particularly, on stress and
rhythm. In Part I, the author deals with
syllables, stress and rhythm. There are
not many poems in this part. In Part II, he
focuses on stress in words and phrases.
Though it is unlikely anyone would be
able to learn the many rules for stress
placement set out here, it is nonetheless
useful to have them laid out so clearly
and so well exemplified. Part III offers an
introduction to fast natural speech,
including work on the key areas of elision
and assimilation. There are more poems
and raps here, all of them catchy and
entertaining. In Part IV, Playing with
Words, he offers a variety of poems,
including limericks, and work on familiar
sayings, similes and sounds in English.
How does this book differ from the
original? Not very much. There has been
a re-organisation of the overall structure.
Whereas the original had six parts, this
has only four. Most of the original Part 5 –
Sounds and Movement – has been cut,
and Part 6 – Similes, Sayings and Sounds
– has been largely absorbed into the new
Part IV. Some relatively minor cuts have
been made to examples, poems and
rubrics. The original had 181 pages: this
edition has 112. The layout and visual
presentation has been made clearer, with
better, bolder headings. But all the tasks
and the bulk of the content are identical.
44 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
In some ways, this is a little disappointing,
though to re-write material just for the
sake of novelty may have seemed
unnecessary, if it was effective – on the ‘If
it ain’t bust, don’t fix it’ principle.
One welcome new feature is the
provision of a CD-ROM and an Audio
DVD at the back of the book. The Audio
DVD contains recordings of the exercises
and poems, which are clearly signposted
in the body of the text. They are
attractively recorded, with warm and
friendly voices, and enjoyable
instrumental backings in some cases.
Not everyone will appreciate the
occasional attempts to present a non-
standard accent in some of the
recordings, though I did not find this
unduly distracting. The CD-ROM contains
the visuals and teacher’s notes.
This raises the issue of whether the
book is primarily intended for classroom
use or independent study. The provision
of teacher’s notes would indicate the
former, but the General Introduction
appears to be addressed directly to the
learner. Doubtless it could be used in
both classroom and individual mode.
Two other issues need to be
mentioned. The first is that what is being
presented here is for the most part a
www.diako.ir
standard British model of
pronunciation. Personally, I
see nothing wrong with this;
after all, what alternatives were
there? Objections might,
however, be raised by
proponents of ELF or scholars
of Critical Linguistics. I should
mention that the author is at
pains to state that ‘you do not
have to sound like us’ but, if the
material is being presented as a
model, what else are students
supposed to sound like?
The other issue concerns the
poems themselves, most of
which have been specially
composed to exemplify and
practise particular features of the
language. Not everyone will
necessarily appreciate the rather
quirky brand of English humour. It
might have been preferable to
include more ‘serious’ literary
material and some authentic
recordings of other text types
(news reading, ads, etc), though I
appreciate that this raises thorny
copyright issues.
This apart, the new version of the
book would be a highly useful addition to
teachers’ resource rooms, and to well-
motivated independent learners.
Alan Maley
Fordwich, UK
Communicating Across
Cultures (DVD)
by Bob Dignen
CUP 2012
978-0521182027
ELT DVDs have been around for a while,
but Bob Dignen’s new Communicating
Across Cultures DVD has definitely set a
standard for others to follow. It
accompanies the very successful
coursebook of the same name (reviewed
in ETp Issue 80) but is also a stand-alone
resource.
The DVD has six sections, all based
around a project being run by a recently-
formed international team with four
members from different countries and
cultures. It begins with relationship-
building, then moves on to decision-
Reviews
making, communicating, influencing,
feedback and, finally, teamwork. Each
section contains explanations and video
clips of team meetings, followed by
detailed analysis. More background is
supplied via interviews with individual
team members, where they reflect on the
meetings. This is the main USP of this
DVD: it is not just for listening
comprehension, it is aimed at teaching
students valuable intercultural
communication skills.
Communicating Across Cultures is
aimed at the B1/B2 levels of the
Common European Framework, but it
would definitely also be attractive to
higher-level students. Even though I have
been a teacher of business English for
many years, I found myself fascinated by
the project and the way in which the
author dissects the proceedings and
teaches you to look beyond your first
impressions and take international
cultures, working cultures and even
personalities into consideration before
making judgements on people. His
passion for the subject really stands out
and hooks you from the very beginning.
For anyone interested in international
culture, especially in a business context
or working in teams, this is a very good
purchase and would
certainly add an interactive
and engaging element to
any class. At 65 minutes in
length and accompanied by
a full online photocopiable
teacher’s resource pack, it
would also work as a great
resource for an entire short
course.
Phil Wade
La Réunion, France
50 Steps to Improving
Your Academic Writing
by Chris Sowton
Garnet Education 2012
978-1-85964-655-7
Starting study at an English-
medium university can be a
frightening prospect for students both students and teachers. It can be
for whom English is a second language. used in the classroom, in small study
50 Steps to Improving Your Academic groups or as an independent self-study
Writing takes away one area of concern resource. Students of all levels, from pre-
by providing students with a step-by- sessional to those studying for a PhD,
step guide to academic writing, ensuring will benefit from it, as will the teachers
they are able to write well-constructed preparing students for academic study,
academic essays. The book addresses who can utilise the practical exercises in
the challenges facing every the classroom.
international student beginning a Overall, this is a comprehensive and
programme of academic study, incredibly useful book that I can highly
and it is packed full of recommend to teachers and students
information that will be invaluable alike. The material is accessible and will
to students striving to achieve ensure that this is not just another book
better results. bought at the start of term and never
One of the reasons this book looked at. Students will want to refer to
works so well is that the ‘50- the text time and time again and will view
step’ approach enables it as an invaluable aid to their academic
students to focus on those career.
areas of academic writing they Myrtle Harber
struggle with the most. The Swindon, UK
‘steps’ take them right from the
basics of academic writing,
dealing with questions such as Reviewing for ETp
How is academic writing Would you like to review books
different from other forms of or other teaching materials for ETp?
writing? to more advanced We are always looking for people
topics, such as plagiarism, the who are interested in writing reviews
use of I in an academic essay, for us. Please email
the use of unfamiliar words, helena.gomm@pavpub.com
vocabulary and collocations, for advice and a copy of our guidelines
grammar usage and final for reviewers. You will need to give your
checks and submission. postal address and say what areas of
The real beauty of this teaching you are most interested in.
book is the flexibility it offers
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 • 45
www.diako.ir
 IN THE CLASSROOM
A second
self 4
Jill Hadfield encourages enjoyment
of the Learning Experience.
I
n this article, we will look at the
‘third pillar’ of Zoltan Dörnyei’s
L2 Motivational Self System
theory: the Learning Experience.
This is quite different in nature from the
other two pillars – the Ideal L2 Self and
the Ought-to L2 Self – as it is
concerned not with the internal drive of
the learners, but with external factors
such as teacher presence, rapport with
other students, experience of success or
teaching approach and materials. It is
also different in nature as it consists of
elements that are necessarily part and
parcel of the everyday teaching and
learning experience, whereas the other
two components are unfamiliar
theoretical constructs which need
explanation and a careful teasing out on
the part of the materials designer in
order to see how they could be realised
in classroom practice. This article,
therefore, will not follow the ‘careful
question’ pattern of the last two;
nevertheless, I will explore the idea
more closely to answer these two
questions: What is involved in enjoying
the Learning Experience? and What are
the implications for classroom practice?
Enjoying the Learning
Experience
Any language learning experience
consists of a complex relationship
between the teacher, the class, the
subject being taught and the students’
sense of self. Enjoyment of the
Learning Experience thus consists of
four interrelated areas:
46 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
● enjoyment of the teacher’s presence
and student–teacher rapport;
● enjoyment of the subject matter and
teaching approach;
● enjoyment of the learning group and
class climate;
● enjoyment of success and self-esteem.
The absence of any one of these will
have a demotivating effect.
In the next section I will give a
summary of the main implications for
classroom practice and some practical
suggestions for activities to use as
starting points.
Implications for
classroom practice
1 Teacher presence and
rapport
In several studies of factors affecting
motivation (such as those by Dörnyei
and Csizér and by Chambers), teacher
behaviour was rated the most powerful
factor. So, what can teachers do to
motivate through their behaviour and
classroom presence? Firstly, obviously,
they should have a pleasant and
supportive manner. Dynamic teaching is
also important: lessons should move at
a lively pace and teachers should bring
an energising and enlivening quality to
them. Another important factor is a
sense of fun: classes are more likely to
be motivating and enjoyable if teachers
and students can share jokes. This does
not mean that the teacher has to be a
performer: in the best classes, the jokes
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come from the students as well as the
teacher. Finally, the quality that many
researchers believe to be key is
enthusiasm. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
argues that the most influential teachers
are those who love their subject and
whose enthusiasm for it is infectious. If
you can communicate passion and
enthusiasm to your students, you will be
a powerfully motivating teacher.
As well as having a lively and
enthusiastic teaching presence, it is
important to develop a good relationship
with the students. This means caring
about the students’ learning and progress
– and showing them that you care. It is
also important to have high (but realistic)
expectations of what the students can
achieve and to communicate these
expectations to them. The ‘Pygmalion’
effect, described by Robert Rosenthal and
Leonore Jacobson, shows that students
tend to live up to teacher expectations
of them, underperforming when these
expectations are low and performing
well when they are high. As well as
communicating your expectations of
and belief in the students, you need to
demonstrate your concern for their
progress, both as a class and individually,
by giving help, feedback and advice. This
can be in the form of comments on
homework as well as in face-to-face
conversation, for example in individual
tutorial times. You can also demonstrate
commitment to individual academic
needs and wants by conducting needs
analyses on the students’ wishes and
preferences and responding to these in
your teaching, even if this limited by
syllabus constraints.
As well as showing concern for the
students’ academic progress, it is also
important to make each student feel
that you accept and value them as an
individual, to be tolerant of differences,
to listen to and respond to students’
opinions and feelings and to take an
interest in their personal lives, interests,
hopes and ambitions.
Starting point:
Building rapport
1 On the first day of the course, ask the
students to produce a piece of writing
about themselves. You can give out a
questionnaire about their background,
family and interests or, better, write an
introduction about your own
background and interests, inviting
them to reply with similar information.
 You could also do this as a blog or
podcast and get them to post replies
or send you their own podcasts.
2 Collect in and read or listen to their
replies.
3 Collate their personal information into
a table that you can keep for
reference to use in a variety of ways:
Informally
● as a way of starting conversations
with individual students about their
interests;
● for finding texts you can bring in for
individuals that might interest them.
More formally
● to find texts and activities related to
the students’ interests that can
supplement the textbook;
● to continue the correspondence
with weekly letters;
● to schedule tutorials with individual
students a couple of times during
the term – these need only be short,
but students always appreciate
individual attention.
The information can also be used as
the starting point for a project: a wall
display, web page, wiki or podcast.
(See http://springston.podomatic.com
for an example.) Ideas for topics might
include: You and your family; Your
upbringing and education; The place
where you live; Friends and social life;
Work and study; Hobbies, interests
and passions; Hopes, ambitions and
dreams; The world we live in.
2 Subject matter and
teaching approach
Ensure that the topics you choose are
interesting and relevant to your
students’ lives. This may entail adapting
and tailoring the textbook more closely
to their needs or bringing in additional
material that will appeal to them.
You can make lessons interesting
and lively by carefully structuring them
to give a student focus and by using a
variety of activities and interactions.
Use a range of activities that appeal to
different learning styles. Vary
interaction patterns, paying attention to
the rhythm and balance of the lesson.
Schedule in regular ‘routine breakers’,
such as interclass quizzes, drama
performances, guest speakers, etc.
However interesting and varied your
materials, you will still have to engage
the students fully and arouse their
curiosity. Again, an enthusiastic teacher
will create enthusiasm amongst the
students, but it is important to think
about more specific ways in which you
can provoke their interest and
engagement. Students will engage better
with a task if they are clear about what
they have to do and understand what the
goal is and why it is relevant to them.
Beginning tasks with an appropriate
lead-in will fulfil these objectives.
You can individualise teaching in two
ways: firstly, by providing tailored help
to individual students, for example by
personalising homework, giving remedial
grammar work to target their needs or
having a ‘library’ of short puzzles, games
and reading texts for early finishers;
secondly, by providing materials and
tasks that have a personal focus and
encourage the students to talk about their
own lives, interests, opinions and values.
Make the language and culture
come alive by, for example, inviting
guest speakers into your classroom,
having regular culture lessons, showing
foreign language films, celebrating
festivals, etc. These activities can also
act as ‘routine breakers’ (see above).
Learners will find the learning
process more enjoyable and motivating
if they are consulted and their views
taken into account in decisions about
curriculum content and class activities.
It is also key to promote autonomous
learning by providing opportunities for
self-study, project work, etc and giving
guidance on strategies for improving
self-study abilities.
Starting point:
Your students’ opinions
1 Give out copies of the questionnaire
(see below) at the beginning of a course.
2 Ask the students to fill it out
individually, then put them in pairs to
discuss their answers: their similarities
and differences.
3 Get them to draw up a list of top
priorities: things they agree on.
4 Put the pairs in fours and ask them to
summarise their discussions,
establishing a list of top priorities they
have in common.
5 Ask each group to report back to the
class and have a class discussion about
consideration of individual differences
and preferences, and the need to
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
accommodate all of these. Make the
students aware of the need to
compromise, but also demonstrate that
you will try as far as possible to take
their needs and wants into account.
6 Collate the replies and lists in a table.
Write statements of what you will do
to take the students’ wishes into
account, eg ‘A lot of you find
vocabulary a top priority. I will give you
lots of practice of the vocabulary in
the textbook and also give you some
self-study vocabulary activities from
another book.’ Take minorities into
account too, eg ‘Not many of you
found reading a priority – but two
people said it was important for them.
So I won’t do extra reading in class
time, but we have a library of graded
readers and I will start a loan system
so you can take them home. You can
read as many as you like. (By the way,
reading graded readers is an excellent
way of increasing your vocabulary!)’
Copy these for the students or display
them on a noticeboard.
Questionnaire
Number the sentences in order:
1 = very important for me;
7 = not very important for me.
1 I need to know more vocabulary.
2 Grammar is very important for me.
I need lots of grammar practice.
3 I need to improve my written English.
4 I need to do as much speaking as
possible.
5 I find listening difficult and want to
practise it.
6 I need a lot of pronunciation practice.
7 I want to do a lot of reading.
Please write the topics that interest
you:
I would like reading and listening texts
about …………………………………
I am interested in writing and talking
about …………………………………
3 Class climate and group
dynamics
Make your classroom an attractive,
relaxing space, with seating
arrangements that ensure the students
can see each other’s faces not their
backs! Put up posters and wall displays.
Students will feel valued if they have 
47
 A second

self 4
input into what is displayed and can see
their own work there. Create an ‘interest
corner’, where you and the students can
bring in books, articles and photos for
everyone to look at and read.
The climate can be improved by the
environment but is mostly dependent on
the dynamics of the class. Research
shows that cohesive groups, besides being
pleasanter, work more efficiently and
productively, so it is worth taking care
to create a positive and cohesive class.
Establish class norms early on by
discussing with the students a set of
rules or a contract for class behaviour.
Make the students aware of what group
membership involves, and do some
work on negotiation and compromise
skills. Vary groupings, ensuring that the
students don’t always work with the
same partner or develop cliques: keep
relationships fluid.
Include personalisation and
empathy activities so the students get to
know one another and find out what
they have in common.
Round off pair- and groupwork
activities with whole-class feedback to
re-establish the sense of being a class.
Build a successful ‘class legend’ by
using activities that celebrate the class
as a whole. Include activities that lead
to tangible collaborative achievements
such as videos, poems and newspapers.
Encourage class ‘patriotism’ with
interclass competitions and sports.
Accentuate the positive, and include
activities that encourage the students to
express positive feelings towards the
language, the culture, each other and
the class.
Starting point:
Encouraging empathy
1 Put the students in pairs, sitting back-
to-back, and give them copies of the
questionnaire below.
2 Ask them to complete it, not for
themselves but as if they were their
partner.
3 When they have finished, get them to
compare their answers.
48 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
4 Get feedback from the pairs by asking
them to report back on one surprising
thing (eg an accurate guess, or
something they didn’t expect).
Questionnaire
I would describe myself as ...
My favourite family member is ...
When I was little, my favourite toy/game
was ...
I liked/didn’t like school because ...
My ideal job would be ...
In my free time I like ...
Things that annoy me are ...
My favourite book/film is ...
My dream is to ...
The world would be a better place if ...
4 Self-worth and the
experience of success
Learners will be more motivated if they
are aware of clearly-defined goals, of
ways of breaking down long-term goals
and identifying precise tasks and of
strategies for attaining them – and if
they can see their progress towards
these goals.
It is important to build confidence
and self-esteem among your learners by
giving them experience of success. One
step towards this is providing the
climate of acceptance discussed above,
and by creating opportunities for the
students to express positive and
affirming feelings about each other.
You can provide regular experience
of success, in the first instance, by
ensuring that goals are realistically
achievable, tasks are challenging but
within the learners’ capabilities, and by
giving adequate preparation and
scaffolding to help them achieve the goal.
Remember to give encouragement
and recognise and record progress and
success, attributing value to effort rather
than ability.
Include tasks that have a clear
outcome or goal or which culminate in
a product such as a performance, video
or poem. Tasks that involve some
creativity and which produce a tangible
product that can be displayed, read or
watched will give students a creative
‘buzz’ and a sense of self-esteem and
pride.
www.diako.ir
Starting point:
Group product
1 Find a magazine profile of a celebrity,
which gives details of their personality,
clothes, likes, dislikes, family
background, etc. Get the students to
read it and make a list of the
questions they think the interviewer
asked. Check their questions and
make any necessary corrections.
2 Put the students in pairs to interview
each other, using their questions.
3 Get the students to write up their
interview as if their partner was a
celebrity. Draw attention to some of
the language in the interview they
read. For example:
X is best known for her ...;
X shot to fame when he ...;
X is immaculately dressed in ... .
4 Take photos of each student in
celebrity-like poses. Collect the
interviews and correct them.
5 Get the students to type up their
corrected interviews with a photo of
their ‘celebrity’.
6 Collate them as a magazine (and give
it a suitable title).
Chambers, G N Motivating Language
Learners Multilingual Matters 1999
Csíkszentmihályi, M Finding Flow: The
Psychology of Engagement with Everyday
Life Basic Books 1997
Dörnyei, Z Motivational Strategies in the
Language Classroom CUP 2001
Dörnyei, Z and Csizér, K ‘Ten
commandments for motivating language
learners: results of an empirical study’
Language Teaching Research 2 (3) 1998
Hadfield, J and Dörnyei, Z Motivation
Pearson 2012
Rosenthal, R and Jacobson, L Pygmalion
in the Classroom Irvington 1992
Jill Hadfield has worked
as a teacher and teacher
trainer in Britain, France,
China, Tibet, Madagascar
and New Zealand. She
edits ELTmag
(www.eltmag.com), and
her books include the
Communication Games
series (Pearson), Oxford
Basics, Classroom
Dynamics and An
Introduction to Teaching
English (all OUP).
jillhadfield@mac.com
B USINESS E NGLISH professional
Case by case
Phil Wade studies the creative use of case studies.
A
uthentic case studies can be
enjoyable for students and
teachers as they provide an
opportunity to delve into and
discuss real issues. They teach students
about the behaviour of companies,
business skills and culture and can thus
provoke interesting discussions. Case
studies are usually based on a theme or a
description of some part of a business,
while many detail a big change or
improvement in a company. Their
popularity has meant that many business
English coursebooks now come with
end-of-unit mini case studies modelled
on authentic (real) situations – and,
according to several of my university
and pre-MA students, these are often the
most educational aspect of a business
English course. Generally, my students
prefer authentic case studies to ELT-
style cases, which are frequently designed
to practise certain language points.
Authentic cases are more relevant to the
students as they may well have some
prior knowledge of the company or the
business area involved. Students with
business knowledge or experience can
bring that to the forefront, while
newcomers to business can represent the
average consumer and bring a fresh
‘person on the street’ perspective.
Using case studies
creatively
Used with classes, case studies can
encourage debate and provide a context
for natural language usage with the
addition of some welcome language
support. Nevertheless, authentic case
studies can be long and time-consuming
so, rather than devoting countless hours
of lesson time to reading them, it is a
good idea to ask your students to read
them at home and then come to class with
notes on the main issues raised and any
new language they’ve found. The lesson
can then be focused on speaking and
writing, with the case study as the topic.
Each case study is different, and it is
good to tailor your approach to the
content or ‘plot’ of the case. The students
don’t always need to read the whole case:
giving them only part of the story, thus
creating an information gap, can form the
basis of a productive lesson. For instance,
a basic problem–solution case would lend
itself perfectly to giving the students the
problem section to read at home and
think of possible solutions to present in
the next lesson. At the end of the next
class, after the students have put
forward their ideas, you could hand out
the ‘official’ solution and they could
compare. If there are several solutions to
a problem, then each could be given to a
different team who must develop it and
‘sell’ their solution to the other teams.
Exploiting case studies
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of
case studies is that they provide material
for learning about business and trying out
business ideas. Several standard business
theories work very well with them.
For example, a SWOT (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats)
analysis, where the students evaluate a
product or company and look at how it
can develop or progress in the future,
can be carried out on the company or
product described in a case study.
Doing a PESTLE (Political,
Economic, Social, Technological, Legal,
Environmental) analysis is also
interesting as this looks at all the
external factors which influence a
company and its products.
Marketing and advertising are also
areas which are popular and very
approachable. They often revolve
around the five Ps (Price, Product,
Place, People, Promotion). Some great
task-based work could be done on
tackling a marketing brief.
With large companies which have
diverse products, carrying out a product
portfolio analysis in order to see which
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
make the most money could also link to
work on the PLC (Product Life Cycle)
of a product or products. Discussing
how to extend this cycle and analysing
eternally popular products is relevant to
most companies, as too is investigating
a product’s USP (Unique Selling
Proposition).
On a grander scale, an activity
involving creating a business plan for a
new company is certainly worth its
weight in gold as the students have to
look at every area of the business, from
finance to human resources management.
Case studies, particularly the lengthy
ones, often come complete with graphs
or charts which can form a basis for
discussion. For example, a chart
representing company profits over ten
years could then lend itself to work on
hypothesising, explaining, deducing,
comparing, contrasting and predicting.
Authentic cases
are more relevant to
the students as they
may have some prior
knowledge of the
company or the
business area involved
All these basic business areas come
up in most business English coursebooks
in some form, but students rarely see
them in action in real situations, or get to
work on them in extended activities. By
analysing a case study, you can see which
area is covered and then extend it; with a
basic ‘company description’ case, you are
more or less free to apply any of them.
For this reason, when you are planning
your course, whether you devote one
lesson a week to an authentic case or you
run a weekly case-oriented option class,
it’s good to schedule in varied topics
and approaches so that every week is
not just ‘read, discuss, present’.
Providing speaking
opportunities
The main activity in a case-centred class
ought to be speaking, and you should
identify some part of the case which
provides a gateway into this. For instance,
a case based on the effective downsizing 
49
 B USINESS E NGLISH professional
Case by case
 of a company would lend itself well to
roleplaying a formal meeting with the
company heads of a rival company to
tackle the same issue or, even more
interestingly, a negotiation between the
union representatives and managers from
each division. This could then be opened
up for the whole class to discuss in a
follow-up task. When the students are
out of character and back in their own
shoes, they will be able to reflect more
and be more honest, but they will also
probably be more confident.
During these moments, you may
find their accuracy slips, but as this is
essentially a fluency exercise, it is best to
give them only a little linguistic help so
as not to destroy the real conversation.
Also, don’t be afraid to ‘stoke the fire’
and be controversial. It is impossible to
get everyone to agree – and also very
boring. Students who are confident
enough to disagree, explain their views
and justify them will push the
conversation into new areas.
Procedures for lessons
1 Group discussion about the main
points in a case which has been
read for homework 10%
2 Language/cultural/business
focus 5%
3 Case-related task such as a roleplay/
negotiation/brainstorming 60%
4 Writing work, such as a report,
email or letter 10%
5 Post-task discussion 10%
6 Feedback and further/homework
allocation 5%
Planning for courses
When planning a course, it is a good
idea to plot what type of cases you will
use, the business theory perspective and
the type of interaction that will take
place as well. This way you avoid
repeating the same lesson formula and
also topics. Using grids or tables like
those here will help you accomplish
these goals. If your students come to
class very enthusiastic or opinionated
about what they read, then allow time
and provide activities to build on this.
On the other hand, if they are
uninterested in the case, you may need
50 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
to simplify or relate it better. When
completing your post-lesson assessment,
reflect on what went well and what
didn’t. You may need to adapt or even
revisit areas of interest or necessity.
Business theory
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
SWOT
PESTLE
PPPPP
Business Plan
Marketing Plan
USP
PLC
Business skills
Presentations
Negotiations
Meetings
Brainstorming
Discussions
Reports
Using supplementary
videos
Case studies, particularly long ones, can
be quite intensive. A video can be the
ultimate antidote to heavy work and
will add a new interesting dimension to
the topic. Of course, a directly related
video will be perfect but if you can’t
find one, then something which
develops the main idea in a new
direction or demonstrates skills such as
negotiation or presentation could also
be useful. The internet has numerous
sites where you can find business-related
videos. Using a video introduces the
idea of speaking and will always create
a response. Linking the case and the
video is the important part and when
this is done successfully, the result is a
more mixed-skills lesson which utilises
authentic reading and listening.

‘Virgin’ lesson plan
This is a video-based case study lesson,
designed for use with laptops or tablets.
However, it could also be delivered via a
main projector/laptop combination.
www.diako.ir
Pre-class
Ask the students to go to
www.thetimes100.co.uk/case-study--
implementing-a-new-vision-at-virgin-
trains--156-399-1.php, read the case
study about Virgin and complete some
of the tasks.
In class
1 Ask the students to find and make
notes on as many Virgin companies
as possible in five minutes from
www.virgin.com/company/world-map.
Discuss the individual companies
2
(activities, markets, customers, success)
and the Virgin company as a whole.
3 Discuss how the students think
Virgin motivates its staff.
4 Watch the ‘Virgin Vision’ case study
and make notes on their ‘Virgin
Media Shout’ scheme for increasing
staff morale and the end result
(www.youtube.com/watch?v=
S5Fv8E7kruU).
5 Ask the students to work in groups
to evaluate the scheme and decide
how it could be introduced to all
parts of Virgin.
6 The groups present and debate their
ideas.
7 Discuss why the scheme would or
would not work in other companies
and countries.
Free case studies available online:
www.thetimes100.co.uk
http://aics.acadiau.ca
www.business2000.ie/Case_Studies.html
www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/
contentBankByTheme?bank=CASE_STU
DIES&count=0&theme=startingabusiness
&topicId=1073858805
www.smarta.com/advice/case-studies
www.inc.com/guides/growth/20806.html
www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/content/Case_
Web_Resources/Free_Access_to_Web-
Based_Cases.html
Phil Wade has a Business
degree, a PGCE, the
CELTA, MA TESOL and
DELTA Module 3. He has
managed an MA business
English course and has
taught corporate,
foundation, undergraduate
and pre-MBA courses. He
is a Cambridge examiner,
materials writer,
contributor to BESIG and
member of the TESOL
France editorial team.
philawade@gmail.com
 IN THE CLASSROOM
A mare’s
NEST?
Andrew Sampson untangles learners’ beliefs
about native speakers.
M
any language schools and
other ELT organisations
proudly advertise the fact
that they have native
English-speaking teachers (NESTs)
among their staff, and this is often
assumed to be what learners want. While
the Charter of Fundamental Rights of
the European Union (2000) dictates that
organisations in the EU may not, in fact,
discriminate against non-native speakers
of English, ELT job adverts can still be
found requesting ‘native speakers only’.
Employers seeking native speakers but
wishing to appear to heed EU legislation
may, of course, accept applications from
non-native speakers and then choose to
dismiss these on some other grounds.
While there has long existed a debate
over the relative merits of NESTs and
non-NESTs, what is often overlooked is
the opinion of the learners themselves.
Do learners actually prefer native-
speaking teachers? And if so, why? This
article reports on a small-scale survey
conducted at a private language school
in Spain to find out learners’
preferences, and discusses the extent to
which these opinions reflect current
beliefs within the ELT profession.
Data collection
A total of 30 adult learners of general
English were asked if they preferred to
be taught by a NEST or non-NEST, and
why. The problems involved in actually
defining NESTs and non-NESTS have
been well documented, for example by
George Kershaw, who asserts that
linguistic competence, particularly in
pronunciation. This reflects the
traditional view, cited by Peter Medgyes,
that, compared to NESTs, non-NESTs
generally encounter more difficulties in
‘fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation,
listening comprehension, grammar, and
idiomatic English’ and NESTS are
usually, as Robert Phillipson puts it, ‘the
final arbiter of the acceptability of any
given sample of language’. Recent
studies into the language competence of
native speakers (NSs) and proficient
non-native speakers (NNSs) continue to
reveal differences between them. Anna
Siyanova-Chanturia and her colleagues,
for example, find that even very
proficient NNSs are slower to process
idiomatic language when reading;
Parvaneh Tavakoli finds that NNSs
pause more often than NSs, and for
longer periods, when speaking.
However, there are many cases of
‘native speakerness is used as a yardstick
educated non-NESTS whose language
for employability, and yet there appears
competence is superior to that of many
to be no operative consensus as to what it
native speakers. Kimberley Mulder and
entails’. For the sake of simplicity, I
Jan Hulstijn, for example, in their study
told the learners in this survey that
into the competence of native Dutch
NESTs are teachers raised in an
speakers, found a high degree of
English-speaking country and non-
variability in native speakers’ language
NESTs are teachers raised in Spain.
knowledge and skills. Mark Rebuck,
While the wording of individual
surveying BBC radio online
responses differed from one respondent
programmes, finds that native-speaker
to the next, there were broadly six types
speech contains a wide variety of
of response, as summarised in the box
grammatically incorrect and lexically
below.
inappropriate utterances. Linguistic
‘NESTs can provide a better model of competence appears to depend not solely
language, especially pronunciation.’ on whether a person is a native speaker
Almost half the learners surveyed or not, but rather on factors such as
expressed a preference for a NEST on their level of education, profession and
the assumed grounds of greater age. And, as Phillipson points out, in
Number Prefer to be
of taught by a NEST
students or non-NEST? Why?
14 NEST ‘NESTs can provide a better model of language,
especially pronunciation.’
6 Non-NEST ‘Since non-NESTs have learnt English as a second
language, they are better qualified to teach it.’
4 NEST ‘Since NESTs are more competent users of English
than non-NESTs, they can focus their efforts on how
best to teach it in the classroom, rather than on their
own production of it.’
3 Non-NEST ‘Non-NESTs are better equipped to diagnose
learners’ problems since they speak the same L1.’
2 NEST ‘NESTs can teach about the target language culture.’
1 No preference No reason given.

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 • 51
www.diako.ir

A mare’s

NEST?
cases where the pronunciation of non-
NESTs is not ‘native-like’, they can still
provide learners with exposure to native
accents by using ‘recordings and other
technical resources which now permit
listeners to be exposed to a wide range of
native speaker models’.
‘Since non-NESTs have learnt English
as a second language, they are better
qualified to teach it.’
One fifth of the respondents expressed a
preference for non-NESTs on the basis
of their previous experience as L2
learners, a view supported by Medgyes:
‘only non-NESTs can serve as imitable
models of the successful learner of
English’. Precisely because they have
learnt English as a foreign or second
language themselves, non-NESTs are
often considered more able to teach
learning strategies, analyse language
and effectively anticipate potential
learner problems and solutions.
However, such qualities can also be
attributed to well-trained NESTs.
Anticipating linguistic problems,
suggesting possible solutions and
raising awareness of learning strategies
are techniques that are taught on initial
teacher training courses such as CELTA
and CertTESOL. On this point,
Phillipson recognises that teachers,
whether NESTs or non-NESTs, ‘are
made rather than born … the insight that
teachers have into learning processes, into
the structures and usage of a language …
definitely have to be learnt’.
‘Since NESTs are more competent
users of English than non-NESTs, they
can focus their efforts on how to best
teach it in the classroom, rather than
on their own production of it.’
As we have seen above, it is not
necessarily true that NSs are more
competent users of English than NNSs.
And even if an NS does have highly
developed linguistic awareness, this does
not necessarily translate into the
pedagogic ability or metalinguistic
awareness required to be an effective
teacher of the language. Phillipson goes
so far as to say that without this ability
and awareness, ‘the untrained or
52 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
unqualified native speaker is potentially a
menace’. Knowledge of effective
teaching methodology for both NESTs
and non-NESTs is a result of training
and experience, and not necessarily of
linguistic competence.
‘Non-NESTs are better equipped to
diagnose learners’ problems since
they speak the same L1.’
Medgyes claims that ‘the ideal NEST is
the one who has achieved a high degree of
proficiency in the learners’ mother
tongue’; Phillipson agrees that in order to
be effective teachers, NESTs should ‘have
a detailed acquaintance with the language
… of the learners’. While this would
appear to be a major advantage of non-
NESTs, given the usefulness of being
able to contrast L1 and L2, the argument
does appear to presuppose that the root
of most linguistic difficulties is L1
interference, when in fact a great number
of learners’ developmental errors occur
regardless of which mother tongue they
speak. Jeremy Harmer also reasons that
NESTs with no knowledge of their
learners’ L1 can still harness the mother
tongue for pedagogical purposes by
asking questions such as ‘Do you have
an expression for this in your language?
Is it literally the same? Can you translate
it back into English?’
‘NESTs can teach about the target
language culture.’
Two of the learners surveyed consider
NESTs’ knowledge of the target language
culture to be an advantage. There is, of
course, no reason why a non-NEST who
has lived in an English-speaking country
cannot also teach about cultural aspects.

Most of the learners surveyed stated a
preference for native-speaking teachers,
on the assumed grounds of superior
language competence and performance
and an ability to teach about the target
language culture – supposed
characteristics of NESTs which, as we
have seen, may not necessarily be true.
While some of the respondents
recognised qualities that non-NESTs
bring to the learning process, such as
their experience as learners of English
and their appreciation of potential
pitfalls and learning strategies, the
results suggest that schools and ELT
organisations could do more to inform
learners of the benefits of both kinds of
teacher, particularly the benefits of non-
www.diako.ir
NESTs, and also of the crucial
importance of teacher training and
qualifications over native-speaker status.
It would be very interesting to hear if
other ETp readers have posed the
‘NEST or non-NEST?’ question to their
learners and, if so, how they responded.
Given that native and non-native
teachers bring different qualities to the
learning process, surely the ideal
scenario in any language teaching
organisation is a balance of NESTs and
non-NESTs, a balance that reflects the
English-speaking world outside the
classroom – a world in which, besides
the 330 million or more speakers of
English as an L1, there are some 235
million speakers of English as a second
language. If our job is to prepare
learners for real-life communication,
then the most effective approach would
appear to be one in which English is
taught by qualified NESTs and non-
NESTs alike, and which welcomes
cultural and linguistic diversity. ETp
Harmer, J The Practice of English
Language Teaching (4th edition) Pearson
2007
Kershaw, G ‘Review: the native speaker
in applied linguistics’ ELTJ 48 (1) 1994
Medgyes, P ‘Native or non-native: who’s
worth more?’ ELTJ 46 (4) 1992
Mulder, K and Hulstijn, J H ‘Linguistic
skills of adult native speakers, as a
function of age and level of education’
Applied Linguistics Advance Access
(http://applij.oxfordjournals.org) 2011
Phillipson, R Linguistic Imperialism OUP
1992
Rebuck, M ‘Using the L1 ‘errors’ of native
speakers in the EFL classroom’ ELT
Journal 65 (1) 2011
Siyanova-Chanturia, A, Conklin, K and
Schmitt, N ‘Adding more fuel to the fire:
an eye-tracking study of idiom
processing by native and non-native
speakers’ Second Language Research
2011
Tavakoli, P ‘Pausing patterns: differences
between L2 learners and native speakers’
ELT Journal 65 (1) 2011
Andrew Sampson has
worked as a teacher,
teacher trainer, DoS
and Director in
Ecuador, Colombia,
and, most recently,
Spain. He currently
works as Director of
International House
Palma, where he also
leads the Cambridge
exams team and
tutors CELTA courses.
andrewesampson@yahoo.co.uk
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Phew!
We’ve
finished!
Dorothy Sommer and
Annette Stemmerich
tell a tale of MA survival.
W
orking in the field of ELT,
we are all involved in
education, and it seems,
therefore, to be a logical
and natural step to be involved in life-long
learning and professional development
ourselves. Studying for a Master’s degree
is one way of doing this. We are two
teachers who took the plunge – each of us
found an MA programme that suited our
needs – and we haven’t looked back. Now
that we have finished, we both feel, with
hindsight, that it was the best decision
we have made since we started teaching.
Here, we offer some advice and
guidance for anyone who is thinking
about embarking on a similar path.
Before you start
Motivation
First of all, you need to decide whether
you really want to do an MA, and then
start gathering information about different
programmes in order to find out which
one best fits your needs and career
goals. Be sure to choose your university
according to your specialised area or
focus: some degree programmes emphasise
certain broader fields, such as young
learners, or areas of research, such as
pronunciation. There are different kinds of
motivating factors; some of them may
be intrinsic, eg your desire to learn more
about ELT; some may be extrinsic, eg a
manager or administrator requires you
to have a higher degree before you can
move up into a coveted position.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
Choices
So, what is possible for you and what is
a realistic choice? Naturally, there are
some practical aspects of doing an MA
that we would like to point out. Most
programmes at American, British or
Australian universities can either be
done on campus (full-time or part-time)
or by distance learning. Some
universities offer MA courses or selected
modules off campus at a location close
to interested students, making it easier
for them to attend. Some distance-
learning MA programmes have no face-
to-face modules, others have a balance
of compulsory meetings at intermittent
weekends or for intensive two-week
sessions. It is necessary to think about
what will work for you in your present
life situation.
Finance
In addition, financial aspects need to be
taken into consideration. The cost for
an entire programme can be anywhere
from 12,000 upwards, and careful
planning and attention must be given to
the fact that this will have to be paid
within a certain time frame, perhaps in
one year or within three years.
Support
Finally, it’s not only important to
consider your financial situation, but
also crucial to think about the amount
of time you will have available. Are you
teaching full-time or can you cut back on
the number of hours in the classroom
for the duration of the degree course?
Do you live alone or do you have the
support of people directly involved in
your life, such as family or friends, who
can help take care of daily chores, cook
dinner and watch small children for you?
Are you going to be able to find time in
your busy schedule for about 15–20
hours a week for reading course
material, related ELT books and
professional journals? In addition, you
will need to allocate time for studying for
exams and writing the papers that you
will be required to produce, as well as
for researching and writing your thesis.
The course experience
Back to school
You might be returning to academia
after a long absence from a university
setting. You may have almost forgotten 
53
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Phew!
We’ve
finished!
 what year it was when you finished your
BA, and on top of that, your first
degree might have been in a different
field, making you wonder how you are
going to build on what you have learnt
so far. So, don’t be too disappointed
when you realise that your study skills
are a bit rusty and your writing needs a
large amount of editing before it sounds
just right. It takes a while to get back
into the swing of things, but once you
are on the right path, it’s an enjoyable
and extremely rewarding experience.
Materials
One of the keys to success on an MA
course is reading a wide variety of
material in your area of interest. Finding
the right material, comparing and
analysing viewpoints and articles as well
as discussing these is, for the most part,
possible at most universities in the UK
or the USA. However, if you are on a
distance-learning programme with few or
virtually no face-to-face meetings at the
university of your choice, it is imperative
that you have access to a good academic
library in your area. Although many
journals and professional magazines can
now be found online, buying the books
which are needed above and beyond the
course material can prove very costly.
The outcome
Becoming more professional
One of the things that we found had
changed after finishing the degree
programme was our attitude towards
teaching. We are now both much more
conscious of curriculum design and
long-term planning. Our background
knowledge about second language
acquisition, assessment, pronunciation
and their implications when put into
practice have given us a much greater
insight into what our learners can learn
and how we can support them in their
learning. What better way of motivating
our students than to understand more
about language learning and showing
them that we, too, are involved in the
process of life-long learning?
54 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Two programmes,
two different approaches
Here are the details of the two MA
programmes that we chose (many
others are, of course, available).
1 MA ELT, University of Reading, UK
Department of Applied Linguistics
Available on campus or distance study
Distance study: a flexible course
designed for students unable to study
on campus
Start: May or November
Length: 2–5 years part time;
recommended: 3 years
Reputation: 30+ years; over 1,300
graduates from more than 40
countries
Requirements: 5 required modules;
3 optional modules; 3 additional
modules or dissertation
Study materials: module materials,
set reading materials, textbooks, use
of library, e-learning platform
(Blackboard)
Student group: diverse multinational
group from all over the world
2 MA ELT and Applied Linguistics,
King’s College, London, UK
School of Social and Public Policy,
Department of Education and
Professional Studies
Available on campus as a one-year
full-time course or two years part time
Start: September
Requirements: 5 required modules;
2 optional modules; dissertation
Study materials: module materials,
textbooks, use of library, e-learning
platform (Blackboard)
Contact hours: 4 classes spread over
two days per term, in third term some
evening classes
Self-study: set reading mainly of
research papers for classes and
assignments (8 assignments +
dissertation)
Student group: large diverse
multinational group (native speakers a
minority in full-time course)
www.diako.ir
Professional prospects
An MA in your pocket is not necessarily
an automatic door opener once you have
finished, unless, of course, you have been
asked to complete the course by your
employer. However, the subtle changes
in our careers and the opportunities
that arise over time prove that a more
in-depth knowledge of the ELT field is
much appreciated by students and
colleagues alike. In any job application,
an MA in ELT will stand out as it is
clearly not a widespread qualification.
In the case of one of the authors, the
MA has led to full-time employment at
a renowned German university.

As we said at the beginning, studying
for an MA was for us an enjoyable and
extremely rewarding experience. By
scratching beneath the surface, we have
had the great opportunity of deepening
our knowledge about the ELT field quite
extensively. The resulting satisfaction in
attaining our personal and professional
goals because we were compelled to
continue to keep pushing forward during
the course was well worthwhile. ETp
More information on the two courses we
chose can be found here:
www.reading.ac.uk/app_ling
www.cl.ac.uk
www.kcl.ac.uk/prospectus/images/assets/
MA_ELT_handbook_2010-11.pdf
Originally from the USA,
Dorothy Sommer
teaches young learners
and business English
near Berlin, Germany.
She has an MA in ELT
from the University of
Reading, UK, a BA in
Business and German
and a CELTA. She began
teaching in 1995 in
Switzerland and France.
dorothy.sommer@gmx.de
Annette Stemmerich
has been teaching ESP
and EAP at different
universities in Germany
for 18 years. She has an
MA in ELT and Applied
Linguistics from King’s
College, London, UK and
an MA in English, French
and Business Studies
from the University of
Giessen, Germany.
Annette.Stemmerich@gmx.de
 T E C H N O L O G Y
M-learning
W
Nick Cherkas looks at hen I first heard the current
buzz word m-learning
mobile learning from the (mobile learning), I was
initially confused about how
students’ point of view. mobile phones and other devices could be
used in the classroom. I didn’t understand
how they could help students, but later I
realised their potential. I also realised
that students in my setting – Morocco –
always had mobile phones with them.
Some lucky people had shiny
smartphones, some had older, more
basic models. But they all brought their
mobiles to class every lesson – some
students forgot to bring a pen, but they
always had their mobiles! I decided to
view this as an opportunity rather than
an inconvenience, and I started to
encourage my students to use the cameras
and voice recorders in their phones
more and more. I incorporated the use
of mobiles into some of my existing
classroom activities and developed some
new activities using them as well.
I though it best to write about m-
learning from the students’ point of
view – the following words are mine,
although the sentiments come from
students whom I’ve spoken to. (My own
comments are in blue.)
My parents always tell me that I use my
mobile too much – I always have it on me
so I can check my Facebook page, take
photos (Why should I carry a camera
with me like my mum does when I’ve got
a great camera on my phone?), check the
time (Who needs a watch?), listen to the
radio and keep in touch with my friends.
At school, teachers always tell us that
we’re not allowed to use our mobiles in
class but it doesn’t stop anybody – isn’t
that what ‘silent mode’ is for?
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
Recently, though, my English
teacher has been doing some really cool
things with us in class. He actually lets
us use our mobiles for activities! At first
we couldn’t believe it, but we had a class
discussion about using mobiles in the
lesson. Here are some of the things we
decided:
● We all use our mobiles every day, so
it’s useful for us to learn English
using something that’s relevant to our
lives outside the classroom.
● We can use our mobiles to have more
fun in class as they can be used as a
camera and a recorder, as well as a
phone.
● Sometimes we can use our mobiles
when we leave the classroom and go
around the school grounds and the
neighbourhood: we’re still practising
English and it’s great to do this in
other places rather than the same old
classroom.
● We need to have some rules. When
the teacher tells us to, we have to turn
off our phones, for example if we’re
concentrating on something else, like
writing or drama.
● We have to be respectful to each
other. If we have each other’s
numbers, we’re not allowed to send
mean messages or take photos that
they won’t want other people to see.
This is a form of bullying and we
have strict rules in our class about
this. If we break these rules, then we
might not be able to use our mobiles
in class anymore. (This is a
potentially tricky area – it’s best to
be open and honest with the
students, and each school might
have its own policy about this. Think
about the cultural issues around
recording voices and taking photos
as well. Individual students who
don’t want to do this can still take 
55

M-learning
 part and contribute to activities,
even if they don’t want to record
themselves or have their photos
taken.)
● Our teacher would have a meeting
with all our parents to explain how
we would use mobiles in class so they
wouldn’t be upset about this.
● We wouldn’t use our mobiles all the
time, to make sure that it didn’t
become boring. Our teacher
explained that mobiles are just
another tool which can help us to
learn and have fun with English, like
computers, coloured pens or CDs.
(Variety is the spice of life, but too
much is haphazard – and reliance on
one tool just gets boring!)
It’s really fun to use our mobiles, and
it’s easy because we always have them
with us. We like it because it shows that
the teacher understands how we
communicate with each other and how
we have fun outside school, and it lets
us enjoy English more. I think that if
you’re having a good time in the
classroom, it’s easier to learn, and I
always look forward to my English
lessons because they’re different and
more interesting than other lessons.
Feelings, nothing more
than feelings
Last week, our teacher asked us what
was important when communicating in
English. We said that it was important
to be clear, to use correct language, to
use body language, to maintain eye
contact, and to use proper intonation so
that people know if you’re asking a
question and how you feel.
Our teacher wrote some ‘feelings’
words on the board, which we had
learnt the week before:
disappointed pleased suspicious
upset curious confused
worried excited
He then wrote this sentence on the board:
You went for a coffee?
(Some students may question this and
tell you it’s not grammatically correct,
which will spark an interesting debate
in itself.)
56 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
He said the sentence, and we had to
guess which feeling he had while he was
saying it. It was really funny! After we
had guessed a few, he put us into
groups, asked one person in each group
to take out their mobile and find the
voice recorder. (The first time, you
might want to give a bit of extra time
for this.) Then he pointed to one of the
feelings on the board and we had to
record ourselves saying the sentence as
if we felt that way. My favourite one
was curious! When we’d done this, we
listened back to our sentences and had
to guess which feeling matched with
which of the sentences.
It was really useful for me because it
helped me remember the meaning of
the feelings, and I could hear my
pronunciation and correct my mistakes.
For example, I learnt that we don’t say
for a as two separate words – it actually
sounds more like ‘furra’! English is a
funny language. It was really good fun
and we’ve done this activity with other
feelings. It’s really useful to hear your
voice recorded to help you to correct your
pronunciation, and we can correct each
other’s pronunciation in this way, too.
(This is where you could incorporate a
study skills session on how students
can improve their pronunciation.)
With a little help from
my friends
Before this, we had had a discussion in
class about how it was really difficult to
listen to conversations in English and
how, whenever we spoke to a native
speaker, we sometimes found it difficult
to speak. We also thought that the
listening exercises in our book didn’t
really sound like any of the real English
conversations that we had heard. So our
teacher connected his mobile to some
speakers, and then called one of his
friends (with a little help from more
technically-minded colleagues). We
had been studying about advances in
science and technology, and our teacher
started a conversation with his friend
about this. (I had a few questions in
mind to guide the conversation, and
the friend was expecting my call, but
didn’t know the topic. This was to try
to make it as spontaneous as possible.
Depending on your ethics – and friends
– you could call them out of the blue.)
It was very interesting, although his
friend was very clever and used some
big words we didn’t understand. (Don’t
www.diako.ir
worry, I didn’t understand all of them
either!) After the conversation had
finished, we spoke to our partners about
what we had understood. Then our
teacher asked us to think about some of
the words they had used in the
conversation: to agree (that’s right …
totally), to show that they understood
(I see … of course … uh huh), to give
their opinion (in a nutshell … basically
… at the end of the day). Fortunately,
our teacher had also recorded the call
on another phone so we could listen
again. The words and phrases which we
heard can all be used to help us have a
conversation, and we practised using
them. Then we wrote them on some big
pieces of paper and stuck them on the
wall of the classroom so we can use
them again and remember them better.
Hanging on the
telephone
One time, our teacher really surprised
us. In the middle of the class, he took
his phone out of his pocket and
answered a call! We all went quiet and
couldn’t believe it – some students felt a
bit angry that he would do this. I felt
like I had to listen, though. Anyway, he
ended the call – and then told us that it
wasn’t really a call! We had to tell our
partners what our teacher had said, and
then he asked us some questions about
the call – was he happy or angry? Was it
from his family, a friend or his boss? Our
next task was to rewrite the conversation
and imagine what the person on the
other end of the line had said. Again,
the teacher had recorded what he said
so we had a chance to listen again to
check our answers. After this, we wrote
our own conversations and acted them
out in groups – one person acted one
side of the conversation to one group,
the other person to another group. Then
we had to guess what the other person
was saying, before we checked with
another group. It was a bit chaotic but
lots of fun!
(Thanks to Nick Bilbrough for this
activity.)
Pictures of you
One of my favourite ways we used
mobiles was in storytelling. Our
homework was to take three photos: a
photo of something in our house, a photo
of something in our street and a photo of
something in our neighbourhood. We’ve
 got a class Facebook page, so we had to
upload these into an album on the page.
Our teacher then split these up on the
page so that there was one album of
about six photos for each pair of
students. We worked together, and we
had to write a story which linked all the
photos together. We could then share
these with other groups, and we all voted
on the best story. I was really pleased
because a photo that I had taken of a
graffiti picture in my neighbourhood was
in the best story! It was great fun, and we
decided that we would do a class project
in the same way, telling the story of the
neighbourhood our school is in. We
printed out the results and did a
presentation of this at school – the
other teachers loved it and couldn’t
believe we’d done it through Facebook!
(This is a fun way of using photos,
although you could simplify the
approach with the students building
stories from photos they’d taken
themselves and using the visuals as a
prompt. This can be much more
motivating than giving them cut-out
photos from magazines as the content
comes entirely from them, and the
instructions can be as specific – eg
take a photo of an interesting piece of
architecture in your city/neighbourhood
– or as vague – eg take a photo of
something beautiful/interesting – as
you like.)
So this is what a great deal of students
think about m-learning. Some dismiss it
as yet another ELT fad, but a fad only
becomes accepted because many people
try it, enjoy it and keep doing it. It
seems ridiculous not to exploit the fact
that almost all our students have their
mobiles with them all the time and they
can use these as cameras, voice
recorders, browsers, dictionaries, games
© iStockphoto.com / Jon Larson
consoles …
Here are some tips for using m-learning
in your classes:
● Find out what your students use their
phones for and exploit this. In some
countries, smartphones will be
common and internet access easily
available and cheap. Use this to your
advantage! ENGLISH
● Do some study skills work with your
students. Show them how they can
Tprofessional
EACHING
record themselves speaking and use
the result to improve their This is your magazine.
pronunciation. Show them ELT apps
which are available – the British
We want to hear from you!
Council have a wonderful suite on
iTunes and Android which are free,
fun and easy to use. 
● Talk to your superiors at work about IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
what you’re doing. Share your Do you have ideas you’d like to share
experience with your colleagues in with colleagues around the world?
your school and with any professional Tips, techniques and activities;
association you’re a member of. Write simple or sophisticated; well-tried
about it on a forum. Often, or innovative; something that has
principals, school governors and
worked well for you? All published
education ministries are keen to invest
contributions receive a prize!
in technology for the classroom, but
Write to us or email:
not in training on how to use or apply
the technology. It may become more helena.gomm@pavpub.com
and more apparent that m-learning is
a way of incorporating ICT into the
classroom which doesn’t need
expensive hardware and is, therefore,
TALKBACK!
Do you have something to say about
worth investing in through training to
an article in the current issue of ETp?
see instant positive results.
This is your magazine and we would
really like to hear from you.
Imagine Write to us or email:
Imagine your students talking about helena.gomm@pavpub.com
their English lessons to their friends,
comparing how fun they are to how
drab their other lessons seem. Imagine Writing for ETp
them carrying on enjoying English
Would you like to write for ETp? We are
throughout their studies, learning more
always interested in new writers and
and more, and ascribing a great deal of
fresh ideas. For guidelines and advice,
their success in English to their
write to us or email:
wonderful teacher who showed them
that learning English is fun. ETp helena.gomm@pavpub.com
Bilbrough, N Dialogue Activities:
Exploring Spoken Interaction in the It really worked
Language Classroom CUP 2008
for me!
Nick Cherkas is a Project Did you get inspired by something
Manager for the British
Council in Morocco. He you read in ETp? Did you do
manages ‘English for the something similiar with your students?
Future’, a programme
covering 17 countries in Did it really work in practice?
the Middle East and Do share it with us ...
North Africa which aims
to help young people helena.gomm@pavpub.com
achieve their educational
and career aspirations
by strengthening the
teaching and learning of ENGLISH TEACHING professional
English. His previous Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd,
experience includes
teaching, teacher
Rayford House, School Road,
training and academic Hove BN3 5HX, UK
management in Australia, Fax: +44 (0)1273 227308
Russia and the UK.
Email: admin@pavpub.com
nick.cherkas@britishcouncil.org
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 • 57
www.diako.ir
 T E C H N O L O G Y
Five things you always wanted to know about
QR codes
(but were afraid to ask)
1 What are QR codes?
You know those barcodes you see on
supermarket products? A QR (short for
‘Quick Response’) code is similar: it is
information encoded in a two-dimensional
graphic. Whereas a supermarket barcode
consists of vertical lines, a QR code
encodes information vertically and
horizontally – so you can get more on it.
There is an example at the top of this
article.
You scan QR codes with your mobile
phone (more on this below). There is a
limit to the amount of information you
can put in a QR code. Typically it will
include a short amount of text: up to a
couple of lines or a website link (url). If
your phone is internet-enabled, you can
immediately click on the url and go to the
web page.
2 Where can you find these
codes?
A QR code is placed on a physical object
and can be scanned with a mobile phone
to access specific information, or online
resources, connected to that object. On a
breakfast cereal box, it might contain
nutritional information; at a bus stop, it
might have travel information or a link to
an online timetable. A QR code can be
included on a business card, eg to give a
direct link to an online CV. Placed on a
class handout, it may contain further
references or links to resources, such as
an online video. In short, it’s a quick and
easy way to link the physical world with
the virtual world. You’ll find some unusual
and interesting examples of QR code use
in this Mashable blog post:
http://mashable.com/2009/01/07/qr-codes.
3 How do you read
QR codes?
You need two essential things to read a
QR code: a mobile phone with a camera
and a piece of software called a QR reader.
58 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Try reading the QR code on this page.
Here’s how:
● Download a free QR reader to your
mobile phone from here: www.mobile-
barcodes.com/qr-code-software. (This
site helps you choose the correct
reader for your phone.)
● Open the QR reader app on your phone.
Point your phone camera at the QR code
on this page and take a photo. Resize
and fit the photo so the QR reader can
scan it properly. Click on ‘OK’, ‘Use’ or
‘Read’ (depending on your reader).
● If your phone is scanning the code
correctly, you will then see a link. Click
this link and if your phone is internet-
enabled and currently online, you will
be taken to a website with information
about QR codes. If you can’t get your
phone to scan the code properly the
first time, try again. The quality of your
camera and how close you are to the
page will both affect how easily your
camera deals with QR codes.
4 How do you create
QR codes?
Creating your own QR code is remarkably
easy. There are a number of free websites
which will generate one for you. You can
then print it out, download it or embed it
in a web page. Here’s how:
● Go to a QR code generator site like
Kaywa: http://qrcode.kaywa.com.
● Decide whether you want a code that
shows a url, a short text message (aim for
about 160–250 characters), an SMS or a
phone number. Fill in the relevant details.
● Click on ‘Generate’. The code appears.
You can now embed it, save it as an
image or print it out.
The more information you store in your
QR code, the more complex it will be. In
other words, the geometric pattern will
be denser, and therefore more difficult for
phones to scan and interpret accurately.
All the information may not be stored if
you try to include too much – bits may be
left off. If you want to generate a QR
www.diako.ir
In this series, Nicky Hockly
explains aspects of technology
which some people may be
embarrassed to confess that
they don’t really understand.
In this article, she examines a
strange symbol that seems to
be popping up all over the place.
code for a website, it’s useful to shorten
the url first, for example by using a
service like Bit.ly: http://bit.ly. Put the
shortened url into a QR code generator
and the ‘picture’ will be less complex.
5 How can teachers use
QR codes?
● Create a series of QR codes and
attach them to physical objects in or
outside the classroom as part of a
treasure hunt. Each code can supply a
clue and a link to further information,
which the students need to collect to
complete the treasure hunt.
● Get the students to research a topic and
present their findings in posters which
are then displayed on the classroom
walls. The students create and include
QR codes in their posters, which link to
online multimedia resources connected
to the project topic. This is an excellent
way to create low-tech multimedia
poster presentations.
● Add a QR code url to extra
reading/resources on the final slide of a
PowerPoint presentation in a talk.
Participants with QR code readers can
scan it before they leave instead of
having to copy down a url letter by
letter. (Of course it’s also a good idea
to include the url in full on your slide
for those without a QR reader!)
● Include QR codes in published books,
journals or on paper handouts, which
link to further resources. ETp
Nicky Hockly has been involved in
EFL teaching and teacher training
since 1987. She is Director of
Pedagogy of The Consultants-E,
an online teacher training and
development consultancy. She is
co-author of How to Teach English
with Technology, Learning English
as a Foreign Language for
Dummies and Teaching Online. She
is currently working on an e-book:
Webinars (the-round.com/labs).
She maintains a blog at
www.emoderationskills.com.
Contact Nicky at nicky.hockly@theconsultants-e.com and
let her know of any other ICT areas you’d like her to
explore in this series.
Webwatcher
Web
t is not often that I write about a technology before I have
I used it myself in class or with my trainee teachers, but I am
going to make an exception this time.
For a long time I have been looking for a tool like Voxopop
(www.voxopop.com), which I heard about recently in a talk.
Voxopop is like an oral discussion board. You set up a topic for
discussion, say ‘technology’, then record a question. Your
students can then go onto Voxopop and record their answers.
This can be a great way of brainstorming and sharing ideas
around a topic, or for simply having discussions around a theme.
The students can listen to your question – and listen to all the
other recorded answers – and then add their own answer. It
works just like a discussion board, but everything is oral.
Of course, you are not limited to just one question. You can
set up as many questions under a theme as you want; you can
even add a new question halfway through the discussion. The
tool is really flexible. You could end up having seven or eight
recorded questions under a theme – and then each question
could have as many answers as you have students in the class.
Here are some ideas for more ways to use it:
Chain stories
Voxopop isn’t just good for discussions; you can also use it for
chain stories. A chain story can be done with the whole class,
but it is much more interesting to put the students into groups of
four or five and get each group to create their own chain story.
Instead of starting with a question, one student simply records
the first part of a story and then the next student records the
next part. It is advisable to give them time to prepare their
stories. You might provide them with a theme or some key
words which they have to use. Once the students have decided
on their story, you can get them to record it bit by bit, with each
student recording one part.
Another way to use the chain idea is to combine it with a
listening comprehension. You could play the students a story in
the class, then put them into groups and get them to rebuild the
story as a group. They could then go onto Voxopop and try to
record the story, again part by part.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 81 July 2012 •
www.diako.ir
Russell Stannard
goes mad for Voxopop.
The news
Again, this idea would work well with groups of four or five
students. Get each group to think of a number of news stories
which are current in their country. Tell them to brainstorm each
story so that they more or less agree on the details. Then ask
each student to prepare one of the news stories by making notes
and working out the basic structure. The students can practise
presenting their news stories in their groups before recording
them on Voxopop. Once they are happy that they know their
stories well enough, they can go to Voxopop and record a whole
news broadcast, taking turns to present their stories.
History
Voxopop is great for anything linear. Imagine, for example, that you
want to record the history of a certain country, person, club or
institution. In fact, anything with a linear history will work well.
Suppose, for example, that we asked our students to research
the life of Steve Jobs. They could work in groups of four or five
and each take a certain period or event in his life. They research
their part, take some notes and then practise presenting their
information orally within their group. Once they are clear about their
part of the story and have practised it, they can go to Voxopop
and take turns to record each part of the life of Steve Jobs.
The activity doesn’t have to involve something that the students
have to research. We could, for example, get them to work in
groups and prepare information about five important events or five
important people in the history of their country. Again, they could
discuss the topic and take notes, and then each student in the
group could practise talking about one person or one event. Once
they are happy that they are able to talk about their person or event,
they can go to Voxoop and take turns to record their part. A key
thing here is to give the students time to prepare and practise
before they go to Voxopop and do their recordings.

As you can see, Voxopop can be used for lots of different things.
As I admitted at the start of this piece, I haven’t actually used
the tool myself, though I am planning to try out some of these
ideas as soon as I am back in the classroom. I like any tools that
encourage students to do more oral work, and this one really
opens up lots of opportunities.
Voxopop is not as easy as some of the other tools I have
recommended. My advice is to watch my free help videos (at
www.teachertrainingvideos.com/voxopop/index.html) as these will
show you, step by step, how to use it. Voxopop is not particularly
difficult, but it will take a while to become sufficiently familiar
with it to be able to demonstrate it to your students. ETp
Russell Stannard is a Principal Lecturer in ICT at the
University of Warwick, UK, where he teaches on the
MA in ELT. He won the Times Higher Education
Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and
Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site of
the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council ELTon
award, all for his popular website
www.teachertrainingvideos.com.
Keep sending your favourite sites to Russell:
russellstannard@btinternet.com
59
 Prize crossword 54
ETp presents the fifty-fourth in our VERY FREQUENT WORDS * A small round green vegetable
series of prize crosswords. Send your *** To take the cover off something so * A very small spot of ink or colour
entry (completed crossword grid and you can see what is inside * A kind of oxygen found high in the
quotation), not forgetting to include *** Almost atmosphere
your full name, postal address and telephone number, *** To speak or write to someone in LESS FREQUENT WORDS
order to get information – A Latin word meaning as
to Prize crossword 54, ENGLISH TEACHING professional,
*** __ Swim-Two-Birds (novel by Flann – Assisting professional people such as doctors
Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd, Rayford House, O’Brien) or teachers
School Road, Hove, BN3 5JR, UK. Ten correct entries *** Personal pronoun – To open a piece of clothing or bag with a
will be drawn from a hat on 10 September 2012 and the *** __ Memoriam (poem by Tennyson) metal fastener
senders will each receive a copy of the second edition *** A metric unit of length – To lock a window or door using a metal bar
of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced *** First word of Hamlet’s most – One of several levels in an organisation or cake
Learners, applauded for its unique red star system famous soliloquy – The relationship between the circumference
showing the frequency of the 7,500 most common *** A word that offers a choice of a circle and its diameter
words in English (www.macmillandictionary.com). *** The physical structure of something, – To take a long time in doing something
including the head and limbs – An exclamation
*** Indefinite pronoun – Abbreviation of for example
15 1 2 19 6 23 1 26 1 15 5 21 14
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*** An organ for hearing wants and needs
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26 3 25 1 26 19 19 26 3
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25 2 19 21 20 21 9 20 25 1 3
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6 7 10 4 25 21 26 2 5 3 ** The state of resting and enjoying – Abbreviation showing you will accept slightly
yourself less than the price you are asking
1 19 26 4 5 22 5 21 1 25 26 ** A formal public event – A rich person with a high social position
Z
1 19 3 9 20 25 16 25 1 25
FAIRLY FREQUENT WORDS – A male member of a Christian group
* Inclined to do what a person or rule – Cheap wine of low quality
17 20 16 1 19 21 5 7 says you must do – To say something funny or clever
* A portable light operated by batteries – A rich and powerful businessperson
7 1 1 10 24 19 12 21 7 19 3 8 1
* To wash or swim – Latin for that is
* A substance that makes something – The long narrow part of a plant that holds the
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 unclean seeds
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 3 8 1 25 15 16 5 26 3 19 21 3 3 8 25 21
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To solve the puzzle, find which letter each number represents. You can
keep a record in the boxes above. The definitions of the words in the 5 3 26 25 20 15 16 8 7 20 3 3 5 23

puzzle are given, but not in the right order. When you have finished, you 5 15 16 1 3 1
Pierre de Coubertin
will be able to read the quotation.

60 • Issue 81 July 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

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