Answering questions in a VLE

Had a conversation today with the participants in the VLE about how they felt about answering questions in 'text chat' mode.  I can see that the advantage of this pedagogically is that more people get to answer, and it does help to show up any misunderstandings or misapprehensions that they are labouring under. On the other hand, it's more of a permenant record of a mistake and it's very public, so I wanted to know how people felt about this.  The people I asked acknowledged that this was true, but didn't find it too embarrassing.  Other things that were mentioned, however, were that :

• some people don't type fast, and so the touch typists have an advantage and that
• sometimes people don't know whether to type or talk. 

Re the second point, I think it is an idea to make this explicit and to 'train' people to understand that:

•  text chat works best as a whole group
• If you want to speak you should put up your hand or a confused icon etc
• When you're not speaking, you should turn off your mike -this is causing some problems in the breakout rooms with feedback.

What we did do today that was a great success was that the participants wrote on the whiteboard screen to provide answers and this worked very well, both in the breakout rooms and in the main room.

Thoughts on the recordings

A few interesting comments on the recorded sessions vs the live sessions today. I had thought that the recordings wouldn't be as popular as the live versions as the latter would be more interactive, more immediate, more motivating and there is the option to ask, to question, to clarify.  However, there were comments that they liked the recordings because they like to make notes and having the recordings allowed them to do that, also to pause, rewind, have a break etc.  One keenie even said that she listens to the recordings even if she's been in the sessions! That's dedication!

Someone also suggested that I should sat up a facebook group for people to be able to contact each other, and I think this is a good idea - I could post up interesting bits and pieces as well.

Beth Grant's thoughts on on-line teacher training

Hi, I am Barbara, half of the Bethandbarbara double act but we haven't yet learned the art of writing together when physically apart. Beth is at home in Cheltenham recuperating from a knee operation and I am in Northamptonshire, blogging and wondering who I am 'talking to', if anyone at all. Not that I am averse to a bit of talking to myself but for the real joy of communication I do like to know who I am talking to, to gauge reaction, to have encouragement to go on or even to see a glazed look to shut me up. The Microsoft dog barking at my typos is just not the same as a live human being. But that is the way it is these days, - we must use technology to communicate, to teach, to discuss, to keep up with friends, and even for language teaching and teacher training, the twin loves of my professional life.  So here are a few thoughts from this grumpy old teacher trainer.

Now I am not against computers, - in fact, one of my best friends is a computer, -well, I spend a lot of time with it, - but is this insistence on everything 'on-line' really the best way forward in teacher training?

I know, I know, -you can work in the comfort of your own home, at your own pace, in your own time…but lets consider a few aspects of teacher training that might want to get the teachers out of the comfort of their own homes and at a pre-set time not of their choosing, -what are the benefits?

People need people.- real voices,  real emotion, real smiles ,-the  demented smileys jumping up and down are a poor substitute. And when did a computer last pat you on the back or console you with tea and biscuits when you failed? The printed word is stark, nuances of intonation are lost and spur-of-the moment comments hard to include, - indeed, they rely on the toing and froing of ideas at the speed of sound.

The value of doing a taught teacher training course, be it CELTA, Delta or in-service courses, is surely the learning from colleagues and sharing ideas and experiences. Talking is a highly effective way to learn and I am not convinced that on-line discussion is the same. When I have taken part in moodle teacher training discussions, it seemed to me, comments have lacked depth (and dare I say it, wit?).

Cambridge ESOL no longer holds assessor meetings for standardising CELTA and Delta, - it's all done on-line with a brief feedback to tell assessors they have 'passed'.  I find it quite dispiriting, - I miss the contact with other professionals, I miss listening to other trainers' observations and experience, I miss the many good practice ideas I used to pick up. I know, the cost…. but is it relatively any more than it used to be?

Another concern is that lesson observation could move to videoed lessons rather than live observations, - video always seems to render lessons more boring, it can't capture the atmosphere, cameras can intimidate the learners and there is a danger that the trainees are jazzing up the lesson for the camera and reducing the learners to the role of wall-paper.

What about lesson feedback? How do you feel about lesson feedback via e-mail rather than a face-to-face discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of a lesson? Do you feel something is missing or are you relieved it's more impersonal and takes the sting out of any criticism? What about communicating with tutors and colleagues by e-mail? E-mails are undoubtedly quick, maybe too quick to judge by the appalling grammar and spelling often seen in them, -great for a bit of information but they always leave me feeling a bit cheated, especially when sent as a thank you or birthday greeting.

Finally, the 'virtual' staffroom. Of course, the websites run by the publishers are a huge benefit to teachers and trainees but in addition to and not instead of a real staffroom. Don't teachers benefit from the collegiate aspect of the staffroom, the buzz as teachers share successes in the break and the lesson ideas picked up at the photocopier? And how do you have an after work coffee/drink on line?

Well, that's my first blog finished, - it took much, much longer than speaking it would have done,-and worryingly there is now a permanent record of what I said, -but on the plus side, no-one interrupted, heckled, sent surreptitious text messages, nodded off… or maybe they did, how will I ever know?  Do tell me what you think.

Till the next time, happy teaching.

Tips by Olivia Mitchell

18 Tips on How To Conduct an Engaging Webinar

by Olivia Mitchell

I’ve just completed my first large webinar as part of Ellen Finkelstein’s Outstanding Presentations Workshop Webinar Series. Before doing my own webinar I attended webinars by webinar experts Ken Molay and Roger Courville. In particular I wanted to get to grips with the difference between a face to face presentation and a webinar. Here are the tips and tricks I’ve learnt on how to conduct an engaging webinar:

1. Use more visuals

This is the major difference between a face to face presentation and a webinar. In a presentation, the audience can see you and if there’s no visual slide, their attention will be focused on you. But in a webinar, if there’s no visual or you have the same visual for an extended length of time, their visual attention will wander.
I used twice as many slides as I would for a face to face presentation – I had 85 slides for a 30 minute presentation, and most of these slides had some animation. Keep things moving visually.

2. Highlight what you want people to look at on the slides

In a face to face presentation, I physically point to the item on a slide that I want people to look at (laser pointers are for wimps!). Most webinar software does have drawing tools that you can use to draw attention to items on a slide, but I decided to keep things simple for myself by building highlights in my animation. I did this by creating a grey rectangle set to 40% transparency and having it cover everything on the slide. Then I selected the items I wanted to highlight and clicked “Send to Front”. Here’s an example:

3. Avoid slides that you only want to show for a few seconds

I had some slides which I only needed up for a few seconds. Unfortunately because there was a slight time lag between me clicking on the slide and attendees seeing the slide, some attendees only saw it for a microsecond. Here it is, in case you missed it:

In a similar vein, don’t build a sequence of slides that is reliant on exact synchronization between the slides and what you say.

4. Have a photo of yourself near the beginning

This allows people to visualise you talking to them during the webinar. Ellen’s title slide for the webinar had a photo of me, and then I also used a photo for the slide where I put my webinar into the context of the previous webinars in the series by Rick Altman and Nancy Duarte.

5. Show a slide while you’re taking questions

In a face to face presentation I never show an “Any questions” slide. But I realised that unless I had a special “questions” slide I would be stuck on the slide I was showing just before we paused for questions. And that slide might be irrelevant to the question I was answering. I created this slide to use during question time:

6. Have a printout of slides

This is good advice for face to face presentations too! I made a printout of my slides by doing a screenshot of 15 slides in the SlideSorter view. This is better than printing out your slides in the Handout option because the slide number is shown next to each slide. That means that you can jump between slides by keying the number of the slide and pressing “Enter” on your keyboard. This came in useful when an attendee asked me about a previous slide. I was able to quickly click to it, without clicking through multiple slides.

7. Use headphones

I’ve used skype for years because I have family in the UK and I’m in New Zealand. With skype you don’t need headphones. But it seems with webinar software you do. Otherwise your microphone picks up the sound coming out of the speakers and you get a very disconcerting echo.

8. Use a remote control

Although I was sitting at my computer to deliver the webinar and I could have clicked on my space bar or used the mouse to navigate between my slides, I decided to use a remote. It reminded me of the feeling of presenting to a face to face audience!

9. Turn off all your phones and dogs

OK, it’s hard to turn the dogs off, but I did shut the door so that if they did start barking at a rabbit on the lawn, they wouldn’t intrude too much. And you’re probably used to turning off your cellphone before delivering a presentation, but remember to turn off your landline as well.

10. Have a clock

I don’t have a clock in my office as I normally rely on my computer to tell me the time. And I wasn’t wearing my watch as I only put that on when I go out. So I had no way to tell how the time was going. Luckily I had rehearsed my presentation multiple times and knew exactly how long it would take. And Ellen was in in charge of managing the time I spent answering questions. But next time, I’ll have my own clock!

11. Rehearsal

An extra rehearsal is required for webinars compared to face to face presentations. There are two layers of technology involved: your slideware and the webinar software. So once you’ve got your basic presentation well-rehearsed, then rehearse using the webinar software.

12. Let people know when you’re going to be silent

In the webinar that I attended on giving engaging webinars, Ken Molay made the point that your voice conveys your presence. He recommends that if you’re going to be silent, for example, you’re going to take a sip of water, you let your audience know. That makes sense but I struggled with how to manage showing slides with quotes. In face to face presentations, I often introduce a slide, click onto it and then stay silent while the audience reads it. After some thought and getting some advice from Ellen, what I did in the webinar situation was introduce the slide by saying “I’ll let you read what Bill Clinton has to say about Kiva”:

13. Use micro-pauses

Ken Molay also made the point that the long dramatic pauses you might use for effect in a face to face presentation don’t work so well in a webinar context. Attendees might be concerned that they’ve lost the sound! Instead of long dramatic pauses use micro-pauses. You can build micro-pauses into your speaking by chunking. Chunking is speaking in short bursts of words with silence in between. A chunk of words can be a phrase or a short sentence. Chunking has three  additional benefits which you can read about in these posts:
How to look authoritative when you feel anything but
How to eliminate filler words
You don’t have to slow down to be an effective presenter

14. Break for questions

In face to face presentations I recommend taking questions throughout. In this situation, I couldn’t see the questions coming in, only Ellen could. So we arranged that I would stop at the end of each section of my talk and she would ask me the questions that attendees had asked. This worked effectively. Attendees could type in their question at the time that it occurred to them, and they didn’t have to wait too long to get the question answered.

15. Have someone else ask you questions

As I couldn’t see the questions, I had to have Ellen ask me them. However, I think this is the best arrangement. As I’ve argued in relation to monitoring the Twitter backchannel, it’s very hard to present and monitor what the audience is audience is saying or asking via Twitter or other chat application. Ideally, giving a webinar should not be a solo affair.

16. Have a spotter

Ellen had wisely organized a colleague to act as a spotter. The spotter’s task was to let Ellen know (via the chat pane that only Ellen could see) if anything went wrong from an attendee’s point of view.

17. Have a Plan B

I had sent my PowerPoint slides to Ellen the night before, so that if something went wrong with my computer the slides could be shown from her computer. Luckily we didn’t have to use this. An alternative is to have another computer ready to go, should your primary computer crash.

18. The fundamentals stay the same

Planning your presentation  so that you provide value to your audience is just as important in a webinar context. For more guidance on this, download my guide “How to Make an Effective PowerPoint Presentation.”
Those are the tips and tricks I’ve picked up. As well as Ken Molay’s and Roger Courville’s websites, here are some other resources I found useful:
15 Tips for Webinars: How to Add Impact When You Present Online
Webinar Tips for Presenters and Attendees
I’d love it if you could add in the comments what you’ve learnt about giving webinars – whether it’s as a presenter or as an attendee.

John Hughes' reflections on giving webinars

Tips for giving webinars

Posted on May 9, 2011 by trainingelteachers.net

4

I’ve given presentations at hundreds of workshops and conferences and I’ve delivered training online but none of this quite prepared me for giving my first webinar. It’s unlike other forms of delivery and it taught me a great deal. So I thought I’d share some of what I leanred from the experience and try to sum it up in tip form for any other trainers out there who are running webinars for the first time. And of course if you have your own experiences of webinars already, then please add your own tips and comments.
The background to this is that BESIG (Business English Special Interest Group at www.besig.org) have started running online weekend workshops. Yesterday I gave a workshop on business writing. This along with other workshops by people like Pete Sharma and Andrew Wright will eventually be available to watch. I’ll post details here when they are up on the Besig site. (James Keddie is also doing the next one in June.)
Anyway, the presenter  talks into a webcam at home and people log on and watch/listen. They can interact by typing questions and comments at the bottom of the screen. The presenter shows slides and clicks through them as you would any other kind of powerpopint. So, in many ways, the process is similar to giving a normal presentation or leading a workshop but here are some of the key differences and points which I noticed.
1 Rehearsal
Meet the organisers or hosts of the webinar site earlier in the week to briefly run through things. This way you become familiar with the logging on process and what you’ll need to click. It’s also a chance to check the technology. For example, we discovered that my microphone echoed and the settings on my webcam needed fixing in order for it to work with the system. Leaving all this to the actual day would have been a really bad idea. And even though we had check everything a few days earlier, on the day there was still a problem with my microphone which was fixed at the last minute – you have been warned!
2 Slides
With normal presenting in a  room full of people, the general rule is to use slides with very little text (maximumum of five lines with five words per line). But in a webinar your audience is in front of the screen so suddenly you can put up much more detailed slides with lots of text. So, for example, I could show pages from course books and refer to different exercises. Normally, I’d put these on a handout but it was useful to have them on the screen. Also there’s a small arrow you can use to point and draw attention to certain exercises.
3 Meeting the participants
Normally in a presentation or workshop I like to get to the room early and meet people as they come in. I want to know who’s there, why they’ve come and build rapport. It’s a fast way to gauge the interests/needs of your participants. In a webinar it’s suddenly harder because you can’t see who’s there and you get no body language clues. The only way to get feedback is to ask people to type at the bottom of the screen. So initially I showed some images of my books and asked if anyone had used them. (Cheap publicity I know but at least it generated an audience reaction)
4 Managing the chatter
During a presentation you normally expect people to listen without speaking unless you ask them to. During a webinar there’s an endless chatter. Some people are commenting and agreeing with you, others are raising questions, others are saying they have technical problems and some people arrive 15 minutes after you’d started and everyone starts saying hello. The trick here – from what I can see – is to incorporate certain comments to show you are reacting to your audience. So if someone raises a question or comments on what you’ve just said, I think it’s useful to refer to the comments so nominate individuals with some like… ‘And thanks Mike in Germany, yes I agree with you…’  It seems to be the equivalent of smiling at someone in the room or noticing their agreement/disagreement etc. You also have to pick and choose which comments need a response, not to mention that some people are talking to each other as much as to you – again, not a normal feeling!
5 Turn everything else off.
In my case, because I was speaking from home, it meant making sure everything was off. The phones were off (including unplugging the landline) , the dog was out, the kids went to the neighbours, and I hoped the doorbell wouldn’t ring.
6 Interactive tasks
You might think a webinar as a workshop wouldn’t be quite so interactive. You can’t put everying in pairs/groups, and then ask for their feedback. So I had to really think what tasks I could include. I also wanted to demonstrate classroom activities that teachers could use with their classes the following day. As a result, I spent more time explaining the activity that I might normally but then I set part of the task where I thought everyone – individually – could type their answers and responses. I was fairly clear when I wanted this kind of reponse by saying – “OK. I’m going to stop taking for two minutes and let you type…” I think using silence (your own) during the webinar is useful and you need to be explicit when you are going to do it. Overall, my impression is that the participants (or attendees as they are called) enjoyed the interactive tasks which resembled a whole room brainstorm - though I could only gauge this by the ones who replied! I’m sure others were lurking in their pyjamas.
Since writing these initial thoughts down I’ve found more articles online with tips for presenting in webinars. Click here to read one I liked and which echoed some of my thoughts above. I’d welcome more tips from other experienced ‘webinar presenters’ below…

Illness and shyness

A couple of things that have come up as observations from learners, and that I hadn't thought of as advantages for a VLE are that if you are new to the class, (someone joined recently) they said that they felt less intimidated coming into the more anonymous environment of an on-line classroom - this was particularly so as she was a pre-celta applicant and the other people int eh room were teachers working in India, SIngapore, China and Malaysia! The other thing that came up tonight was that someone was ill at home in bed, but was still able to access the class successfully. She did say that she would like to be more of an observer than a particiant tonight, but that's fine, too!

I still think it's not as good as a real class, but it's got some plus points!!

Feedback

Some useful feedback from Mike Carbarles

By the way I tried out the recording and noticed that when you go to breakout rooms, there's deadly silence. If you want to make this more marketable, I suggest you try leaving a few students in the main room for the recording.

Actually, I should appologize. When I opened my mic there was a lot of echo. That's because I was being lazy - using my laptop built in mic and speaker. so the sound was feeding back out of the built in speaker and into my built in mic. You should specify in the signup process that a headset with mic is absolutely necessary. Not only should it reduce background noise, but also eliminates the "talkback radio with the radio on" effect(which happened when I spoke).


Hope that is useful for future.

Ch.. Ch.. Ch... Changes....

'Keep it simple, stupid' might be a good thing to think about.  It's interesting how teaching the evening group (who are largely pre-celta trainees of the type I envisaged would do the course) is quite a different expereince to the afternoon group (largely overseas, post celta/ interested in the course/ know the grammar).  The session yesterday was much too easy, no challenge for them (of course!) and not very satisfying for me.  Tonight it was much slower, and I've gone back to simplify my input, put continuous (easier) before perfect aspect (more tricky) and to take out the slides I had on 'When isn't it perfect/ continuous?' looking at gerunds, participle clauses, -ing adjectives etc.  This is just too much for them.  They are really struggling with getting the basics.  More can come later.

On the technical side, the breakout rooms are better now, and I've adjusted my mike so that the sound is better.  I feel as if I'm getting to know them a bit, but I need a little profile of them near me, I think.  I might ask them to send me a pic, too....

Motivation

Only three people showed up last night (although I had an apology from one other).  I think that that is another one of those differences between an on-line class and one you have to commit to going to - because the barrier is lower in terms of easily being able to go, it's also psychologically easier to miss it.  I had the same experience when the Virtual Round Table conference rolled around - I had had it in my diary for months - I really wanted to go to some of the sessions - thought it wasa great idea.... and in the end didn't find the time to do it, life got in the way.

Not sure if this will be different if people have paid for it... I also think that perhaps I should allow the link to be available for, maybe a week after the session.  A limited time will (perhaps) make people make time to watch it if they want to.  If you know it's available indefinitely, do you ever do it....

Breakout rooms

This continues to be a journey of discovery.  I've explored the idea of using the timer when learners are in the breakout rooms, but what if they have finished before - Michael had a good idea today, to put a tick up when they have finished so that I can see.  I'm going to try that.

Maybe I need to put together a video or a 'do's and 'don't's of the virtual classroom and how to use it (including that).  It's also really annoying if people leave their microphones on if they are not speaking - it makes it all very echo-y.

Getting good feedback from people and feel as if I'm settling into the medium a bit more, especially as I get to know people a bit better. 

Feedback on breakout rooms

Hi Jo,

    It was fun being there with you. No doubt, the lesson was way too elementary, but i guess that was just the beginning. What I didn't enjoy is getting into rooms to discuss. Can we not just discuss it together? Getting into rooms is a waste of time as we all are just trying to talk or trying to listen if someone else is talking. I did go through the worksheet- its good , but am not sending it back to you. 

Also, i might not be there for the Thursday session due to last minute change. I might join in a bit later than the scheduled time. 

See you soon.

Tejashree

Thoughts from me - fewer breakout sessions? for longer?  in pairs, not groups?

First session in Pilot 2!

Just finished the first session on the 'big' pilot.  A bit wierd because I don't know people, I have to say - a bit impoersonal - it's better in the breakout rooms.  Still, 10 people came plus one of the trainers who is interested popped in.  The big thing is just that there still is too much information in that frst session  it took an hour and a half and couldn't have been done in much less.  It would be good to ignore articles, but they're so important.  Could they be moved to the third session? 

Working blind, as it were, it's difficult to judge the level that people are at. Big difference between this and f2f is that you can't easily tell how easy/ difficult they are finding it.....

I sent out a quick review type homework (two sentences to parse) afterwards, and I thik that's a helpful idea. 

But LA isn't all it takes to get a Pass B

Hi everyone.

I am enjoying these discussions too.  I must say that I agree wholeheartedly with Heath's arguments, in both his earlier and most recent post.   As a CELTA tutor of only three years' standing and a CELTA assessor of less than 1, it has been really interesting to read about all the different opinions people have about the CELTA course and the varied working environments/situations where the course is delivered and it does go someway to make up for the lack of 'group' standardisation.  I too miss being able to discuss the lessons/assignments with my colleagues.  Our team will sit down and do so once we have all finished the on-line standardisation though and just see where we meet - hopefully we will agree and if not we can openly discuss why we differed so that as a team we can ensure that are are all on same page for the future!

Personally, I find the CELTA criteria excellent and would compliment the original creators.  Yes, there are one or two rather obscure ones and others that could be expanded but it is hard to pin our 'art' down to 44 criteria and it can be frustrating at times to feel that the skill of teaching has become so 'prescriptive'.  However, as someone pointed out in a earlier mail, this has arisen presumably arisen for commerical/legal reasons.  We certainly benefited from this prescriptive criteria when faced with a formal complaint recently - the clear documentation and records in the CELTA 5 and feedback notes made our arguments and position clear.  As regards separating 2e into three separate areas - is this really necessary? When I have a candidate who is weak in one area or another I just write (2e- pron) or (2e - form), to make it clear which aspect of 2e they should focus on.

We do seem to have come full circle though with the discussion about criteria once again focussing on 2e - and candidates' ability with language awareness.  Although B grade candidates do and should display a greater awareness with language analysis both in planning and excecution in the classroom, that is not the only criteria which distinguishes them from a pass grade candidate.  We regularly have candidates who can analyse language very well on paper and even prepare and deliver some good concept checking questions in the classroom, but they do not achieve grade B because of a lack of consistent success with many other criteria.  Such candidates tend to 'explain' rather than 'elicit' , fail to grade their language explanations /teacher talk appropriately and have very little idea of how to create a student-centred classroom and all that entails.  There is a lot more to teaching than being able to teach grammar.

So ... the discussion goes on...

Kate

International House Buenos Aires

Jeff Mohamad on Pass vs Pass B being about LA

The list of criteria may be rather long but, as Steve Haysham mentioned, most of the items on it have been placed there because (some) trainers felt they were important. Naturally, some of the criteria are more important than others when it comes to grading trainees but I personally don't feel that the list needs any significant change.

In the center where I work we have always regarded a trainee's ability to analyze and deal with language well as being a/the key factor to examine when considering the award of a Pass B. This is also true of all the centers where I have assessed in the recent pass. The current system allows for this.

Before the criteria-based approach to grading was introduced, my personal experience was that some centers significantly underestimated the importance of trainees' language ability. It was not unusual for trainers to adopt their own idiosyncratic (often labeled as being "holistic") approach to grading and to award a Pass B to trainees who had good interpersonal and class management skills but little language awareness. "He's a good teacher," trainers would tell me when I assessed. "But is he a good language teacher?" I would have to ask. I find that I rarely if ever have to ask this question nowadays. So trainers seem to be managing to apply the grading criteria in a sensible and appropriate manner.

Incidentally, I don't feel that the course has become significantly more difficult over the years. In fact, I suspect that from the trainee's point-of-view it has actually become a little easier. Why? Centers are generally more organized than they used to be, they have better facilities and resources, there is more emphasis on pre-course preparation, coursebooks are easier to use, etc.
   
Jeff Mohamed
Cypress (nr. Houston), Texas     

-----Original Message-----

An interesting thought about the need for KAL in CELTA

Dear colleagues,
Rick Ansell has beat me to it and raised the ugly issue of the whole criteria system. I'm  fine with having a criteria-driven training course but find the number and balance of criteria rather frustrating.
Call me old fashioned but isn't there something about Language Teaching in the name CELTA ?
Which makes it a nonsense to have all the focus on language MFP condensed into our friend - criteria number  2e.  It's something like a trainee AA man having just one tick box for 'starting broken down vehicles ' among all the others for keeping his van clean and filling in little forms etc. Although,  like trainee teachers needing to have rapport , the AA man does need to be cheerful and friendly I guess!
Having worked with the award for over 20 years, I appreciate how it has become much tighter and we no longer give B's for  being vaguely stronger in language awareness , but the revamped 44 ( yes I counted when they first came out ... and lost the will to live in those first tutorials) criteria are totally unwieldy and to large extent irrelevant / unmeasurable as Rick and others have pointed out.
Most of you will remember the old CTEFLA criteria which broke down language into conveying  / checking meaning , focussing on form etc which made the new, all-in-one ( 2 e ) criteria  even more annoying . As an assessor and a tutor I find that the key area which makes a candidate a pass B rather than pass is the area of dealing with LANGUAGE , both in the planning  and teaching stages. It may be unfair, but surely this is what the certificate is very much about. Candidates with weak LA can and do learn about language on the job but I'm not convinced they they should get the pass B grading and the implication that they will be more independent in their first posting.
It's a huge issue - as the number of contributions to the debate on LA work has shown - so maybe we should focus energies on getting the criteria made more user friendly and with language as a key element.
Not sure if I'm a cat or a pigeon but with all this dialogue between trainers, perhaps it's time to convince Cambridge that it's time for a fresh look at the criteria !
Bill Harris

Bill Harris <bharrisefl@googlemail.com>  posted on the efl-celta-centres@lists.ucles.org.uk today.

Pre-lesson task

Would it be a good idea to, as well as providing follow up tasks to the lessons, to also give a short pre-lesson task.  This will necessarily have to be brief - they won't do it if it's going to take a lot of time, but perhaps something to give them some schema before you bombard them with information would be helpful.... Need to think about this.

Free introduction

One of the comments made in feedback on Saturday when I asked them if they would be willing to pay was that it would be good if a free introductory session was offered so that potential 'customers' could see what was involved.  I think this is an excellent idea, and could be a link on the website to a (short) recorded session, which was also available on YouTube.

Transmission vs collaborative learning

One of the things I'm noticing is that on-lin teaching is probably better suited to a transission model, or at least, that's where the balabnce more naturally sits.  It's easy to tell people things, but the pairwork is harder. This doesn't sit easily with me,  as it makes for a much more teacher centred classroom and I felt last night as if I were dragging them through it (another lesson to keep learning is to limit the amount of material.....

The main problem is that the breakout rooms are a bit isolated - you can't keep your eye on them in the same way that you can in a class, and it's less easy to see whether they are stuck/ finished etc. One of the suggestions from feedback was to put a timer on the breakout sessions, so that they knew when they were coming back.  I did this last night and I think it was a good thing overall, but one comment was that in one case, they were given too long (it was only 2 minutes...) for a particular task.  You can easily move between rooms to check out how they are, of course.  The difficulty when they don't have microphones is that the breakout rooms are laborious for them and difficult to quickly assess for me.  Hopefully, in the next group, I've emphasised sufficiently that they need a mic and they'll mostly have one...

Elluminate again

I tried Adobe ConnectPro again tonight and ended up giving up and going to Elluminate.  I think that this has to be the programme that I'll use, at least for the next course. It has it's drawbacks, but at least it works pretty reliably.  Two people haven't been able to log in and one had trouble with the sound - I guess that technical difficulties are always going to be the bind.

15 out of 22 trainees on this course have been to some of the sessions, so it's been more popular than I thought.  I haven't had a lot of written feedback from them, though (although I had some useful group oral feedback on Saturday.)

Scott Thornberry's Post on Focus on Form

In his absurdist, mildly funny novel Nowhere Man (Picador, 2004), Aleksandar Hemon describes a scene where the protagonist, a Bosnian, has applied for a job as an English teacher ('strictly out of despair') in an ESL school in Chicago. He is given a tour of the school, and visits an advanced class where there is a discussion in progress about Siamese twins:

"I must say," the man whom I recognised as Mihalka said, "that it is not perfectly pleasant when I watch them."

"They are monsters," said a woman in a dark, stern suit...

"They are humans," Mihalka said, then lifted his index finger, enunciating an important statement.  "When I had been a little child, I had had a friend who had had a big head.... Every child had told him about his big head and had kicked him with a big stick on his head.  I had been very sad," Mihalka said, nodding, as if to show the painful recoil of the big head.

"We are learning Past Perfect," the teacher said to us, and smiled benevolently...

"I must know Past Perfect," Mihalka said, and shrugged resignedly, as if Past Perfect were death and he were ready for it.

The scene nicely captures a number of the tensions that characterise interaction in the ESL/EFL classroom, not least the tension between, on the one hand, meaningful interaction ("Let's talk about Siamese twins") and, on the other, a focus on form ("Let's use the past perfect").

(Normally, of course, the focus on form is engineered by the teacher, not the learner. What's interesting, in this case, is Mihalka's dogged - if flawed - attempts to use 'the structure of the day'. Is this because he is conscious that the teacher's agenda is primarily form-focussed? Or is he the kind of learner who likes to try new forms out for size? Well, we'll never know.)

Just to remind you, a focus on form "overtly draws students' attention to linguistic elements as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning or communication" (Long 1991, quoted in Doughty and Williams 1998, p. 3). Typically, this might take the form of overt correction, or of gentle nudging, e.g. by asking for clarification, or by re-casting (or reformulating) what the learner has said. This incidental approach contrasts with the more traditional and deliberate approach, where teaching is based on a syllabus of graded structures (or forms), and these are pre-taught in advance of activities designed to practise them - what Long called (somewhat confusingly) a focus on formS.

A focus on formS (plural) entails the pre-selection and pre-teaching of discrete items of language (it is thus proactive), whereas a focus on form is essentially reactive, entailing "a prerequisite engagement in meaning before attention to linguistic features can expect to be effective" (Doughty and Williams, ibid. p. 3).   A focus on formS presumes a PPP methodology, where presentation of pre-selected and pre-graded items precedes production, and where it is assumed that fluency arises out of accuracy.  A focus on form, on the other hand, fits better with a task-based approach, where learning is driven solely by the need to communicate and where, as in first language acquisition, accuracy is late-acquired.

Focusing on the form of learner language that has emerged in classroom interaction is also a mainstay of the Dogme philosophy. As Luke Meddings and I point out (in Teaching Unplugged):

Focussing on learners’ lives means that the language that emerges in class will be relevant to them, but there is still work to be done if both you and they are to make the most of it. This is where a focus on form comes in (p. 60).

In our book, we offer some strategies as to how to exploit the language that emerges in classroom interaction so as to incorporate a focus on form, without sacrificing real communication. These include:

1.                  Retrieve what the learner has just said.  Otherwise it will just remain as linguistic “noise”. This might mean simple making an informal note during a speaking activity, or, at times, writing the learner’s utterance on the board.

2.                  Repeat it.  Repeat it yourself; have other learners repeat it – even drill it! Drilling something has the effect of making it stand out from all the other things that happen in a language lesson.

3.                  Recast it.  Reformulate the learners’ interlanguage productions into a more target-like form. This is not the same as correction. It is simply a way of indicating “I know what you’re trying to say; this is how I would say it”.

4.                  Report it.  Ask learners to report what they said and heard in group work. Apart from anything else, knowing that they may have to report on their group work encourages learners to pay attention to what is going on.

5.                  Recycle it. Encourage learners to use the emergent items in new contexts. This may be simply asking for an example of their own that contextualises a new item of vocabulary, or it may involve learners creating a dialogue that embeds several of the new expressions that have come up.

I'm now wondering: in the case of Mihalka, in the 'Siamese Twin' lesson quoted above, which of these - if any - might have been the most effective strategy?

References:

Doughty, C., & Williams, J. (eds.) 1998. Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition. Cambridge University Press.

Meddings, L., & Thornbury, S. 2009. Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language Teaching. Peaslake: Delta Publishing.