Making EFL Matter Pt. 6: Prepared to Learn

image of students

The present series of posts is looking at how EFL courses and classes in Japan might be improved by considering some of the techniques and activities emerging in ESL and L1 mainstream education settings. Previous posts have looked at goals, data and feedback, discussion, portfolios, and prolepsis and debate. The basic idea is to structure courses in accordance with the principles of formative assessment, so students know where they are going and how to get there, and then train them to think formatively and interact with their classmates formatively in English. All of the ideas presented in this series came not from TESOL methodology books, but rather more general education methodology books I read with my EFL teacher lens. I realise that this might put some EFL teachers off. I don’t think it should, since many of the widely-accepted theories and practices in TESOL first appeared in mainstream classes (journals, extensive reading, portfolio assessment, etc.); also,  the last few years have seen an explosion in data-informed pedagogy, and we would be wise not to ignore it. In this post, however, I’d like to go back to TESOL research for a moment and look at how some of it might be problematic. Actually, “problematic” may be too strong a word. I’m not pointing out flaws in research methodology, but I would like to suggest that there may be a danger in drawing conclusions for pedagogy from experiments that simply observe what students tend to do or not do without their awareness raised and without training.

I’ve been reading Peer Interaction and Second Language Learning by Jenefer Philps, Rebecca Adams, and Noriko Iwashita. It is a wonderful book, very nicely conceived and organized, and I plan to write a review in this blog in a short time. But today I’d just like to make a point connected with the notion of getting learners more engaged in formative assessment in EFL classes. As I was reading the book, it seemed that many of the studies cited just seemed to look at what learners do as they go about completing tasks (very often picture difference tasks, for some reason). That is, the studies seem to set learners up with a task and then watch what they do as they interact, and count how many LRE (language related episode) incidences of noticing and negotiation of language happen, or how often learners manage to produce correct target structures. Many of the studies just seem to have set learners about doing a task and then videoed them. That would be fine if we were examining chimpanzees in the wild or ants on a hill; but I strongly believe it is our job to actively improve the quality of the interactions between learners and to push their learning, not just to observe what they do. None of the studies in the book seem to be measuring organized and systematic training-based interventions for teaching how to interact and respond to peers. In one of the studies that sort of did, Kim and McDonough (2011), teachers just showed a video of students modelling certain interaction and engagement strategies as part of a two-week study. But even with that little bit of formative assessment/training, we find better results, better learning. The authors of the book are cool-headed researchers, and they organize and report the findings of various studies duly. But my jaw dropped open a number of times, if only in suspicion of what seemed to be (not) happening; my formative assessment instincts were stunned. How can we expect learners to do something if they are not explicitly instructed and trained to do so? And why would we really want to see what they do if they are not trained to do so? Just a little modelling is not bad, but there is so much more that can be done. Right Mr. Wiliam? Right Ms. Greenstein?

Philps et al. acknowledge this in places. In the section on peer dynamics, they stress the importance of developing both cognitive and social skills. “Neither can be taken for granted,” they state clearly (pg. 100). And just after that, they express the need for more training and more research on how to scaffold/train learners to interact with each other for maximum learning:

“Part of the effectiveness of peer interaction…relates to how well learners listen to and engage with one another…In task-based language teaching research, a primary agenda has been the creation of effective tasks that promote maximum opportunities for L2 learning, but an important area for research, largely ignored, is the training of interpersonal skills essential to make these tasks work as intended” (pg. 101).

But not once in their book do they mention formative assessment or rubrics. Without understanding of the rationale of providing each other with feedback, without models, without rubrics, without being shown how to give feedback or provide scaffolding to peers, how can we expect them to do so, or to do so in a way that drives learning. Many studies discussed in the book show that learners do not really trust peer feedback, and do not feel confident in giving it. Sure, if it’s just kids with nothing to back themselves up, that’s natural. But if we have a good system of formative feedback in place (clear goals, rubrics, checklists, etc.), everyone knows what to do and what to do to get better. Everyone has an understanding of the targets. They are detailed and they are actionable. And it becomes much easier to speak up and help someone improve.

Teachers need to make goals clear and provide rubrics detailing micro-skills or competencies that learners need to demonstrate. They also need to train learners in how to give and receive feedback. That is a fundamental objective of a learning community. The study I want to see will track learners as they enter and progress in such a community.

 

Kim, Y., & McDonough, K. (2011). Using pretask modeling to encourage collaborative learning opportunities, Language Teaching Research,15(2), 1-17.

 

Making EFL Matter Pt. 3: The Challenges and Benefits of Discussion

image of balls in a tray

 

Well, what do you think? This question and answer form a basic opinion exchange that is sometimes called a discussion. And it is, sort of. But just as a single decontextualized sentence is of limited use in understanding grammar, so too a brief opinion exchange does not have enough context–with all its intentions, personalities, and sociolinguistic depth–to really be called a discussion. A discussion is more complex, and ultimately more powerful, because it has a goal and requires input and interaction from multiple members, which should allow them to collectively generate better ideas (solutions, plans, etc.) than any one of the participants could have done alone.

This sounds good in theory, but it is difficult to achieve in classrooms–especially EFL classrooms where learners have a layer of linguistic difficulty on top of the conceptual and procedural challenges inherent in establishing a system of rich academic discussions. The first thing we must acknowledge is that academic discussion skills, like Rome, are not built in a day. As I mentioned earlier, they need to be incrementally developed, starting with basic conversation and interaction skills.  Without basic conversation skills, discussion is not attainable. Students who are used to pairwork and are able to use the basic greetings, openings, and closings of common conversation “scripts” (Hi. How’re you doing? So, what did you do on the weekend? Well, nice talking to you!), and can react to each other’s utterances (Uh-huh, Really?! Oh, I love that!, Really? How was it? etc.) will find discussions accessible. Absolute speaking beginners will struggle and likely fail. Speaking must be taught, skills must be developed, and regular opportunities for fluency development given, or else activities like academic discussions, and the opportunities to flex critical thinking muscles that go with them, won’t be achieved. A little bit of speaking tagged on to the end of a lesson won’t get you there (as programs in high schools in Japan are slowly waking up to).

So now we know it’s difficult and requires a program of incremental skill development starting with a foundation in basic interactive conversation skills. One question we might ask is: is it worth the trouble. Given a limited amount of time, why should so much be devoted to conversation and discussion skills development? Well, the answer comes from sociocultural learning theory. As Daniel Siegel puts it in his forward to the wonderful Social Neuroscience of Education: “We evolved in tribes, we grow in families, and we learn in groups.” Walqui and van Lier (2010), in listing up the tenets of sociocultural learning theory for their QTEL approach, focus on some of the key points: “Participation in activity is central to the development of knowledge; participation in activity progresses from apprenticeship to appropriation, or from the social to the individual plane; and learning can be observed as changes in participation over time” (pg. 6). That is to say, we learn through active participation (engagement and collaboration) with others. “Language is primarily social”…and “…learning…is essentially social in nature” (pg. 4-5). This learning does not happen by chance, however. The really really hard thing to do is to get students into that sweet spot where they are developmentally ready and linguistically scaffolded  up to the point where they can function and learn. Development becomes possible when “…teachers plan lessons beyond the students’ ability to carry them out independently” (pg. 7), but create the proper community and provide the proper scaffolding to allow for success with such lessons. To answer the question that started this paragraph, the potential benefits of learning in groups are great enough to warrant using this approach. Students can learn content and language, and collaboration skills, essential skills for the 21st century according to Laura Greenstein (who also helpfully provides a rubric and suggestions for assessing collaboration, as well as other skills).

One more potential objection to focusing on academic discussion comes from Doug Lemov. Actually, it’s not so much of an objection as request to rethink and balance your choices. In Teach Like a Champion 2.0, he suggests that both writing and discussion can be strong tools for “causing all students to do lots of the most rigorous work,..but if I had to choose just one, which admittedly I do not, I would choose writing. Hammering an ideas into precise words and syntax and then linking it to evidence and situating it within a broader argument are, for me the most rigorous work in schooling” (pg. 314).  Writing is great, and cognitively more “precise” perhaps, and definitely needs to be part of the syllabus. Discussion is by nature more social. You can do both and you should do both; finding the time to do so is challenging, however.

So what do we teach? And what are discussion skills that students need to learn and develop? The best list can be found in Academic Conversations by Jeff Zwiers and Marie Crawford. It needs to be said, however, that this book is made for L1 learners and you will need to adapt as you adopt. But the basic list and framework make it easy and intuitive to do so. Here is the list of skills:

  1. Elaborate and Clarify: Make your thinking as detailed and clear as you can, carefully explaining the rationale behind your thinking.
  2. Support Ideas with Examples: Use examples to illustrate thinking. It is a particular and powerful way of elaborating and clarifying ideas.
  3. Build On or Challenge Partners’ Ideas: Actively respond to and develop the ideas that arise, either by expanding on them or tweaking them, or pruning out the bad ones through well-considered disagreement.
  4. Paraphrase Ideas: As ideas arise, paraphrase them to both show your understanding and create a springboard for idea development and improvement.
  5. Synthesize the Discussion Points: Bring all the ideas you’ve been discussing to a conclusion. Produce a group decision or plan.

These skills need to be introduced incrementally. Some of them are more difficult to teach and practice than others, particularly with students who lack proficiency or fluency, but also for cultural reasons. Some students in Japan find it challenging to disagree, and may have trouble ranking or pruning some ideas from their synthesis. These can be trained and taught. In my experience, students are not used to making their thinking so explicit and considering  ideas so carefully. Once they get the hang of it, however, they clearly become better listeners, better collaborators, and better thinkers. And after gaining some fluency with the formulaic expressions required to do academic discussions, they sound considerably more proficient.

Assessment is not as difficult as you may imagine. Ms. Greenstein’s rubric provides a nice overview of expected performance and can be used together with teacher observations, and peer or individual reflection and feedback. Performance tests are easy to organize because we can check several students at once in their group. Focusing on the success of the group in terms of process and outcome is actually not that hard to measure.

This post is part of a series considering ways to add more focus and learning to EFL classrooms by drawing on ideas and best practices from L1 classrooms.

Part 1 looked at the importance of goals.

Part 2 looked at using data and feedback.

 

 

Making EFL Matter Pt. 2: Data and Feedback

imafiling cabinet

 

In the last few years, I’ve found myself increasingly reaching for books that are not on my SLA or Applied Linguistics shelves. Instead, books on general teaching methodology have engaged me more. It started a few years ago when I came across John Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers, a book in which various approaches in education are ranked by their proven effectiveness in research. This led me to further explore formative assessment, one of the approaches that Hattie identifies as particularly effective, citing Yeh (2011). I was impressed and intrigued and began searching for more–and man is there a lot out there! Dylan Wiliam’s Embedded Formative Assessment is great (leading to more blogging);  Laura Greenstein’s What Teachers Really Need to Know about Formative Assessment is very practical and comprehensive;  Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn by Hattie and Yates has a solid  section; and Leaders of Their Own Learning by Ron Berger et al., the inspiration for this series of blog posts, places formative assessment at the heart of curricular organization. There is, as far as I know, nothing like this in TESOL/SLA. I’m not suggesting, I would like to emphasize, throwing out bathwater or babies, however. I see the content of these books as completely additive to good EFL pedagogy. So let’s go back to that for a moment.

One of my favorite lists in TESOL comes from a 2006 article by Kumaravadivelu in which he puts forth his list of macro-strategies, basic principles that should guide the micro-strategies of day-to-day language classroom teaching, as well as curriculum and syllabus design. This list never became the Pinterest-worthy ten commandments that I always thought it deserved to be. Aside from me and this teacher in Iran, it didn’t seem to catch on so much, though I’m sure you’ll agree it is a good, general set of directives. Hard to disagree with anything, right?

  1. Maximize learning opportunities
  2. Facilitate negotiated interaction
  3. Minimize perceptual mismatches
  4. Activate intuitive heuristics
  5. Foster language awareness
  6. Contextualize linguistic input
  7. Integrate language skills
  8. Promote learner autonomy
  9. Raise cultural awareness
  10. Ensure social relevance

But what is missing from the list (if we really want to take it up to 11) I can tell you now is Provide adequate formative feedback. One of the great failings of communicative language teaching (CLT) is that is has been so concerned with just getting students talking, that it has mostly ignored one of the fundamental aspects of human learning:  it is future-oriented. People want to know how to improve their work so that they can do better next time (Hattie and Yates, 2014). “For many students, classrooms are akin to video games without the feedback, without knowing what success looks like, or knowing when you attain success in key tasks” (pg. 67). Feedback helps when it shows students  what success looks like, when they can clearly see the gap between where they are now and where they need to be, and when the feedback provides actionable suggestions on what is being done right now and what learners should  do/change next to improve. It should be timely and actionable, and learners should be given ample time to incorporate it and try again (Wiliam, 2011; Greenstein, 2010).

One of the most conceptually difficult things to get used to in the world of formative feedback is the notion of data. We language teachers are not used to thinking of students’ utterances and performances as data, yet they are–data that can help us and them learn and improve. I mean, scores on certain norm-referenced tests can be seen as data, final test scores can be seen as data, and attendance can be seen as data, but we tend, I think, to look at what students do in our classes with a more communicative, qualitative, meaning-focused set of lenses. We may be comfortable giving immediate formative performance feedback on pronunciation, but for almost anything else, we hesitate and generalize with our feedback.  Ms. Greenstein, focusing on occasionally enigmatic 21st century skills, offers this:

“Formative assessment requires a systematic and planned approach that illuminates learning and displays what students know, understand, and do. It is used by both teachers and students to inform learning. Evidence is gathered through a variety of strategies throughout the instructional process, and teaching should be responsive to that evidence. There are numerous strategies for making use of evidence before, during, and after instruction” Greenstein, 2012, pg. 45).

Ms. Greenstein and others are teachers who look for data–evidence–of student learning, and look for ways involving learners in the process of seeing and acting on that data. Their point is we have a lot of data (and we can potentially collect more) and we should be using it with students as part of a system of formative feedback. Berger, Ruben & Woodfin, 2014) put it thus:

“The most powerful determinants of student growth are the mindsets and learning strategies that students themselves bring to their work–how much they care about working hard and learning, how convinced they are that hard work leads to growth, and how capably they have built strategies to focus, organize, remember, and navigate challenges. When students themselves identify, analyze, an use data from their learning, they become active agents in their own growth (Berger, Rugen & Woodfin, 2014, pg. 97).

They suggest, therefore, that students be trained to collect, analyze, and share their own learning data. This sounds rather radical, but it is only the logical extension of the rationale for having students track performance on regular tests, or making leader boards, or even giving students report cards.  It just does so more comprehensively. Of course, this will require training/scaffolding and time in class to do. The reasons for doing are worth that time and effort, they stress. Data has an authoritative power that a teacher’s “good job” or “try harder” just don’t. It is honest, unemotional, and specific, and therefore can have powerful effects. There are transformations in student mindsets, statistics literacy, and grading transparency, all of which help make students more responsible and accountable for their own learning. Among the practices they suggest that could be deployed in an EFL classroom are tracking weekly quiz results, standardized tests, or school exams, using error analysis forms for writing or speaking assignments, and using goal-setting worksheets for regular planning and reflection.

You can see the use of data for formative assessment in action in a 6th grade classroom here.

This post is part of a series considering ways to add more focus and learning to EFL classrooms by drawing on ideas and best practices from L1 classrooms.

Part 1 looked at the importance of goals.

Part 3 looks at the challenges and benefits of academic discussions

 

References

Yeh, S. S. (2011). The cost-effectiveness of 22 approaches for raising student achievement. Charlotte, North Carolina: Information Age Publishing.

Language on Stage: Debate and Musicals

In his 2011 book Creative Thinkering, Michael Michalko explains the idea of conceptual blending. What you do is take dissimilar objects or subjects and then blend them–that is, force a conceptual connection between them by comparing and contrasting features. It’s an enlightening little mental activity that can help you to come up with creative ideas or insights as you think about how the features of one thing could possibly be manifested in another. In the past few days, I’ve tried blending two activities that I’ve seen push EFL improvement more than any other: performance in club-produced musicals, and competitive policy debating. I’ve compared them with each other and with regular classroom settings,

musical image and debating image

I chose these two because over the last few years I have seen drama and debate produce language improvements that go off the charts. This improvement can be explained partly in terms of the hours on task that both of these activities require and the fact that students elect to take part voluntarily, but I don’t think that explains everything. There are certainly other possible factors: both require playing roles; both are team activities; both have performance pressure; both reward accomplishment; both require multi-modal language use and genre transformation; both require attention to meaning and form; both are complex skills that require repeated, intensive practice to achieve, and that practice is strictly monitored by everyone involved, who then give repeated formative feedback. Not complete, but not a bad list, I thought.

But then while reading Leaders of Their Own Learning, a wonderful sort of new book by Ron Berger, Leah Rugen, and Libby Woodfin, I came across this quote by a principal of a middle school in the US:

“Anytime you make the work public, set the bar high, and are transparent about the steps to make a high-quality product, kids will deliver.”

I think the speaker hit the nail on the head as to why activities like debate and drama work: public, high expectations, and clear steps. Aha: public! The dominant feature of debate and drama is that there is a public performance element to them. Students prepare, keenly aware that they will be onstage at some point; they will be in the spotlight and they will be evaluated. Of course students need support and scaffolding and lots of practice before they can get on stage, but unless there is a stage, everything else won’t matter as much. It is the driver of drivers. Is that pressure this message  suggests? Yup, but also purpose. I have seen kids transformed by the experiences of competitive debating or performing in a musical. I refuse to believe that the mediocrity I see in so many language course and programs is the way it has to be.

So, to get back to the whole reason for this little thought experiment: how can we take these best features of debate and drama and apply them to language programs? The key, I hope you will agree, is introducing a public performance element. There needs to be some kind of public element that encompasses a broad range of knowledge, skills, and micro-skills, and then there needs to be sufficient teaching, scaffolding, and practice to ensure public success. But how…?

Over the next few blog posts, I’ll be exploring these issues, drawing from ideas that are being developed in K-12 education in the US, particularly in approaches that have been working in high-challenge schools with English language learners and other at-risk learners (for example, by Expeditionary Learning, WestEd, and Uncommon Schools). In particular, I’ll be looking at ideas in Leaders of Their Own Learning (mentioned and linked above), Scaffolding the Academic Success of English Language Learners, by Walqui and Van Lier, and the soon-to-be-released second edition of Teach Like a Champion 2.0 by Doug Lemov. I’ll be looking at all of these through the lens of an EFL teacher in Japan. Many things in these books won’t be applicable in my context, but I suspect many may help inform ways of improvement here.

 

Is CLT the Right Approach for Japanese High Schools?

Image offerening

In 2013, I observed a sample lesson at a middle-level high school in Japan. The purpose was to demonstrate a style of lesson and convince the attending English teachers to emulate it. One of the targets of emulation was teaching English in English, and the other was teaching English communicatively. Dozens of English teachers from across the prefecture were there, dutifully and cautiously observing the sample lesson, in which a teacher managed to conduct a textbook unit explanation and lead a productive task almost entirely in English.

Few doubts or complaints were aired by the observing teachers. They know which way the wind is blowing. They know that the education board staff running the lesson observation/training have an agenda, and that agenda comes down from the Ministry: teach English in English; do productive tasks; teach communicatively. They understand that  it is something that they should probably be doing, even though they did not experience this type of lesson themselves as students, even though they were never really trained to teach this way in college teacher training courses or on the job, even though they have doubts about their own English competence and are reluctant to put their shortcomings on display too much. So, they nodded politely, and promised to take the ideas back to their schools for further consideration.

Where, of course, it would be back to business as usual.

Nishino (2009) produced a paper that I still have trouble comprehending, but which I believe continues to sum up attitudes to teaching English communicatively in high schools in Japan. She found that Japanese teachers have pretty positive attitudes toward communicative language teaching (CLT), but mostly choose not to engage in it themselves. The reason, I guess, comes back to the lack of experience, training, and language proficiency on the part of teachers. But in my present position, it is my job to promote a greater use of English in the classroom by teachers and students, and that naturally involves more communicative activities.

For most Japanese teachers of English, however, this goes against their strengths, which often include techniques for grammar and vocab explanation, classroom management skills, and a proficiency with tasks that raise awareness of language features and encourage memorization. The CLT techniques my group (and the Ministry, and the BOE) are recommending often seem less than exemplary when observed in real classrooms, despite the authority of SLA research that stands behind the approach. This becomes painfully obvious when it is put on display, as in the class mentioned above, where the teacher had students write a short opinion about the topic and then share it with a partner and then the whole class. Even I couldn’t help thinking that the intellectual level was pretty low, and the pace was very slow. I’m sure many of the teachers observing with me had the following thoughts going through their heads: this is dumb and really inefficient.

And this brings me to the main point of this post. The dabbling with CLT that I have seen in classrooms here makes me wonder if it is worth the effort of teacher awareness raising, of teacher skill training, particularly if we see it as a goal unto itself. It seems that a little more CLT in classrooms is unlikely to make much of a positive difference in language classrooms. Students don’t seem especially more engaged, and the trite bits of incorrect language that often get produced are depressing–and are often incomprehensible to other students without a quick translation from the teacher. I know that  the system is failing pretty much at producing kids who can use the language right now. But I don’t think the fix will come with a few more CLT activities and a strict English-only policy on the part of teachers.

Of course, the answer cannot be business as usual either. Teachers have been yakking at students for years, explaining and translating, and that hasn’t worked out well at all. Van Patten (2014) in Interlanguage Forty Years Later, is particularly blunt in his assessment of the teaching of language by the teaching of rules, the kind most common still in Japan: “competence is not derived from explicit instruction/learning…[and that] holds true for all learners and all stages of development…” (pg. 123). Yes, instruction gets you something, but it is not competence. Form-focused instruction is very limited in what it can do for language learners, that much seems obvious to everyone–well, almost everyone….

So what it is the answer? I’m not sure, but more language, more language use, and more focused teaching seem to be the only way forward. Standing in the way, though, are the lack of proficiency of teachers (along with their lack of training/familiarity with alternative approaches), the culture of expectations that makes change difficult (the parents, the cram schools, the perceptions of entrance exams, the publishers, etc.), the passivity of students and their unfamiliarity with the kind of active use of the language needed to leverage learning, and the well-meaning souls whose hearts warm satisfactorily when students produce any kind of utterance (even when it is intellectually low, and mostly incomprehensible). Framed another way, what we need is more language processing and more responsibility for doing so in a comprehensible and academically appropriate manner.

korenbooksjapanesebooks

 

The image above (from a presentation on vocabulary by Rob Waring) shows a bookshelf with Korean English textbooks on the left and Japanese ones on the right. Notice the size difference? That translates to Korean students being exposed to thousands of words more during their years in mandatory education. The poverty of input argument for Japan is pretty easy to make if we look at just the amount of language students are exposed to, compared to Korea or Mexico (as Mr. Waring did), both of whom now handily beat Japanese scores on high stakes tests (TOEFL iBT, 2013: Japan 70, Korea 85).

There may be other reasons why Korean TOEFL test scores are higher. But certainly language exposure is one of them. Perhaps it is time to admit that in Japan, teachers explain too much in Japanese about too little target language. Adding a little “communicative” jibberish to that is unlikely to make a big difference, and may actually be detrimental in the long run if it lowers expectations further. In my opinion, more language immersion in the form of CLIL-type lessons at the high school level might be an interesting option to explore , since it provides CLT with sufficient input, thinking rigor, and responsibility.

 

 

 

Does this Shirt Make me Look Fat? Motivation and Vocabulary

I love the topic of motivation in language learning (past posts here, here, and here, for example). In the world of TESOL, however, it’s a little  like that old joke about the weather–everyone seems to talk about it but nobody does anything about it. In Japan, I often hear students voicing out loud how they wish they could speak English (even though they are students and even though they are enrolled in an English course at the present). They  sound a lot like the people I know who talk about losing weight or exercising more: vague, dreamy, and not usually likely to succeed. TESOL research and literature talks a lot about integrative and instrumental motivation, ideal selves, and willingness to talk, etc., concepts that just seem so far from the practical reality teachers and those dreamy-eyed students really need.  So  in this post I would like to focus on the positive and practical and provide a list of things to do that improve the chances of success, drawing on formative assessment ideas and general psychological ideas for motivation.The idea is to approach motivating learners the same way one would go about motivating oneself to lose weight or start and stick to an exercise program. Instead of talking about fuzzy motivations, let’s focus on just doing it. The enemy in my sights is much the same enemy that faces the would-be dieter or exerciser,  procrastination, a powerful slayer of great intentions.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: you can’t do much about the motivation kids bring with them to your class on Day 1, but after that, you certainly can. What you and your students do together affects how they think and feel about language learning and themselves. That is, teachers can change attitudes by changing behaviors. And as a teacher, you have a lot of power to change behaviors. As BJ Fogg says, you shouldn’t be trying to motivate behavior change, you should be trying to facilitate behavior change.

Vocabulary learning is the perfect place to try out techniques for motivation success and overcoming procrastination because it is in many ways the most autonomous-friendly part of language learning. It can easily be divided into manageable lists, and success/failure/progress can be fairly easy to observe by everyone. It is also a topic I have to run a training session on this summer and I need some practical ideas for teachers to try out with their students.

OK, here we go. In addition to using teaching techniques that make the vocabulary as easy to understand and remember as possible, try the following:

  1. Make a detailed plan with clear sub-goals that are measurable and time-based. Break the vocabulary list into specific groups and set a specific schedule for learning them. This provides a clear final target and clear actionable and incremental steps, important tenets of formative assessment. Create a complete list and  unit-by-unit or week-by-week lists. Be very clear on performance criteria for success (spelling, pronunciation, collocations, translation, etc.). Make the plans as explicit as possible, and put as much in writing as possible.
  2. Provide lots of opportunities for learners to meet and interact with the vocabulary. Learners need to actively meet target items more than 10 times each (and more than 20 times in passive meetings) if they are expected to learn them. Recycle vocabulary as much as possible.
  3. Create a system that requires regular  out-of-class study (preview/review). Out-of-class HW assignments should start by being ridiculously small at first (tiny habits–see below), such as write out two sentences one time each. Grow and share and celebrate from there.
  4. Ensure success experiences. Success is empowering. The teacher’s job is to ensure that learners can learn and can see the results of their learning. Do practice tests before the “real” test, and generally provide sufficient learning opportunities to ensure success (“over-teach” at first if you need to). Lots of practice testing is a proven technique to drive learning, and students need to do it in class and in groups, and learn how to do it on their own.
  5. Leverage social learning and pressure. Have learners learn vocabulary together, teach and help each other sometimes, encourage each other, and just generally be aware of how everyone else is succeeding. Real magic can happen if a learning community puts its mind to something.
  6. Have learners share their goals and progress, publicly in class  and with friends, family and significant others. Post results on progress boards, challenge and results charts, etc. At a very minimum, the teacher and the student herself should always know where they are and what they need to do to improve.
  7. Remind learners of the benefits of success. Provide encouragement, especially, supportive, oral positive feedback at times when it is not necessarily expected.
  8. Make sure that sub-goal success is properly recognized and rewarded. This provides a stronger sense of achievement.
  9. Make 1-8 as pleasant (fun, energetic, meaningful) as possible.

You may already be doing these things and still not getting the progress you hope for because the students just aren’t studying enough outside of class. Products of their age, they are driven by distractions–the need to check their Twitter feeds, for example, and the pressing issue of  incoming LINE comments, or whatever. But they also suffer from the oppression of the same procrastination monster that we all suffer from. Oliver Emberton has a nice post on dealing with procrastination. For teachers, I would like to call attention to the last two items on his list of recommendations: Force a start, and Bias your environment. “The most important thing you can do is start,” Mr. Emberton writes. This is certainly true.

yellowBrickRoadStart

You can counsel them on the need to turn off their devices and “study more.” But unless you give them clear, doable, and manageable tasks and start them in class, and require and celebrate their use, it is unlikely they will get done. BJ Fogg recommends that you facilitate behavioral change by promoting tiny habits. His work makes the establishment of positive habits seem so much easier. You can watch an earlier overview of his method here, or a fun TED talk here. Much of what he describes can only be done by the individual learner, but as a teacher you can set the target habit behavior and you can help learners see the fruits of their newly established habits. Just choose a vocabulary learning strategy, reduce it to it’s simplest form, and provide a place to celebrate success. Then try to grow and celebrate the continued use of these positive habits. This modern world is a hard one to study in. There are really too many distractions too close at hand. It takes real strength, real grit, to resist them and start or keep at something new. Helping students to develop this strength and grit is now part of any teacher’s job description, I think.

If you are looking for more on how to teach vocabulary, including a nice section on web and mobile app tools that can help, Adam Simpson’s blog has a nice post on vocabulary. If you are looking for something that combines the latest in TESOL theory on motivation with practical techniques for the items I listed above, Motivating Learning by Hadfield and Dornyei is the best thing I’ve seen. It has 99 activities to choose from.

Has EFL Become ESL?

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Years ago as a new teacher in Japan I learned very quickly to avoid materials that were not made specifically for Japan, very much a place where English is taught as a foreign language (EFL),  a context very far removed from the English-speaking world.  After a few painful slogs, I realized that, in particular, ESL (English as a Second Language) materials, or materials made to teach immigrants to England or Canada or the US, just wouldn’t fly in  classrooms in Tokyo. They assumed too much background knowledge. They contained too much content. They were long. They assumed that students would be much more active–in learning, in giving opinions, in communicating. What worked instead was easy-to-memorize dialogs, short, focused worksheet exercises, and zippy little info gap speaking activities. In a system with low expectations for communicative success and  limited opportunities for English use outside the classroom I guess we can say that it worked OK. At the time and for the most part, Japanese students  didn’t especially learn English to communicate with people from other countries and cultures; they learned English to pass exams and to appear more international/educated/cultured to other Japanese.

A lot can change, however, when  millions of people begin to travel overseas every year, record numbers of foreigners begin to visit, and just about everyone gets connected to the Internet. Indeed, the whole world changed. It has become, as this Economist article in 2009 suggested, much more difficult to find parts of the world that are not affected by the global movement of people and ideas. Japan included.

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So what does this mean for English teaching in Japan? A lot, though you’d be hard-pressed to find changes in most jr. and sr. high school language classrooms in public education. A few teachers are making use of a few online resources, occasionally showing bits of Youtube videos for example, but most are oblivious to the fact that each student has in their pocket all the tools they need to learn English when they want to. The culture of learning is moving glacially, luckily for these teachers. Textbooks are still reassuringly analog, and teachers can still get away with explaining the content like mathematical formulas removed from wider communicative application. English is still being treated as a culturally distant “other,” needed in a certain way (mostly) for entrance exams, and otherwise put off indefinitely. And despite adding a few TOEIC courses, English conversation schools are still somehow managing to continue with a business model that basically sells access to native speakers, the same as they did in 1986.

But things are changing, make no mistake. Businesses are increasingly feeling the need to procure/cajole staff enough to double the number of people who can really function in English (from the 2012 level of 4.3% to 8.7% by 2017, on average) according to Diamond Weekly. And the larger the company, the higher the percentage. Companies with staff numbering over 2000 are generally aiming for having close to 20% of their workforce at a functional level (TOEIC scores over 730 at least). This is blowing back to public education, where there is increasing pressure to start teaching English earlier, and to start aiming kids at big proficiency tests earlier. In a Japan Times piece the other day, Osaka’s English Reformation Project is described. They are planning to put more emphasis on English, and more emphasis on the TOEFL test, believing that there is a global standard that needs to be accepted, and that Japan can no longer be an island that uses English in its own way for its own limited purposes.

Of course,  real change will only come when certain present mindsets change:  English must be learned in a formal institution; it must be learned from native speakers; you need to gain a certain proficiency level before you can begin using it for real communication; you prepare for entrance exams by cramming discrete vocab and grammar points; etc. Already we can see cracks. As the world continues to shrink, these cracks are likely to grow. Right now, if you can Skype and aren’t bothered by the accent of your conversation partner/teacher, you can begin practicing/learning English with a real live person for as little at 125 yen for 25 minutes. Similar services are sprouting up and there are more than a dozen companies ready to help you learn this way (not that you need a company, BTW), mostly making use of the large number of English speakers in the Philippines. The conversation school mentioned above doesn’t even have the Philippines on their map! But this, too, will change. The interactive multimedia do-it-yourself approach (as opposed to the go-to-the-bookstore-and-buy-a-book-written-mostly-in-Japanese approach, or the join-an established-conversation-school approach) has been slow in developing in Japan. But it is growing. It’s too pedagogically effective and cost effective to keep ignoring. Take a look at how some polyglots are making effective use of free web-based resources to learn any language they want. 

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So where is this post going? Well, the point I really wanted to make is that the the shrinking world is also driving a new way of conceptualizing  English as a foreign language (EFL). With English on video, English on the radio, English podcasts, English groups and clubs, MOOCs, easy access to English books, and apps or websites available for any  language  learning  detail  you  can  imagine, does it make sense to assume that our students are really far removed from English-speaking opportunities and cultures? It may make sense to talk about English as foreign language as a starting point, but pedagogy should shift to recognize that English is no longer so, well, foreign. I have begun to think that all English teaching can now be thought of more the way that learning English inside English-speaking countries (ESL) has traditionally been defined. That is, what you learn in class, you can usually try out quite easily outside of class, if you have a mind to. Out of class time in EFL contexts can now be equally considered potential language use/exposure time.

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I think this is one reason for the recent popularity of content and language integrated learning (CLIL, or content-based learning) in Europe and other places. This approach recognizes that English exists as a system of content and interaction that learners can plug into and work with. The idea is to create an immersive language learning environment in the classroom, wherever that classroom may be. This involves a rethinking of teaching and learning focus and goals, and more training for learning skills (such as discussion skills, presentation skills, and writing skills). If you are interested in further exploring CLIL or how to use rich tasks to facilitate better learning, I have two books to recommend. The first, on CLIL provides a good overview and rationale for this approach, while Pauline Gibbons’ book gets into the details of how to operationalize that in the ESL classroom, but as an EFL teacher, I found most of it attractive and applicable to the context in which I teach, a reaction I would not have had circa 1994. Click on the images for more information. The real question of what skills/language are most appropriate for the Japanese context is still being worked out, though. Test and test-prep schools have become so established that they cannot be ignored in any new approach. Certainly at the moment they are having a negative impact on learning English, at least for the purpose of enjoyment of communication and development of productive skills. A CLIL approach seems a interesting option, but it will require mindset changes, digital learning literacy; and cram schools and many entrance exams will have to redifine themselves.

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An Idea for Introducing Debate in EFL Classes

Debate in EFL has a heavy image. Partly it is the result of formal debating. Politicians and bureaucrats often love the idea, but then they would, wouldn’t they? Teachers are wary of it: most think it is too much trouble for too little benefit. There is always reams of text to get through, dozens of expressions to teach, and long…agonizing…blocks…of silence that need to be waded through. And students, well, they don’t really have any idea about what good thinking is, why it is important, how it can help them, and how an activity like debating can be a way to learn it. In summary, almost nobody is screaming for debate. And yet it seems clear that the skills involved in debate are critical for learning, critical for learning success, and (in my humble opinion) a possible solution for the tragedy now occurring in high level (進学校) English classes.

Teaching debate is teaching thinking. In debating, we verbalize ideas, explain them, and assess them. To debate, you must have ideas about something. You must explain your ideas in a persuasive manner. And you must find and offer support for your ideas. You do this by building up your ideas (making them more persuasive and providing more powerful support), while looking for possible weaknesses in other arguments or ideas. The key words, from Bloom’s taxonomy, are Understanding, Analyzing, and Evaluating. In doing debate, you train yourself in these critical skills. This can help you in thinking, writing, giving presentations, and making decisions. That’s a lot of benefit from one activity! In learning how to debate, these skills are made visible. The process is visible. It can be taught. It can be seen, discussed, and evaluated in a social setting.

So there are good reasons for doing debate. But can it be enjoyable? Many people would say yes. If we believe what game designer Raph Koster says, “Fun is just another word for learning,” there is no reason why it shouldn’t be.

Below is an activity I tried recently as an entry-level activity to introduce debating. The purpose of this activity is to have students generate arguments, evaluate their arguments, and think about ways that they could make them stronger with support. The activity is based on pictures so we can accommodate different levels of proficiency and don’t need to spend time explaining language to students. The goal is for them to get involved in the process as quickly and completely as possible. It is and introduction to debate. And so the next step is to use their performance to see what their needs are and make decisions on subsequent activities and teaching. One of the eventual goals of the course is to have a full formal debate, but first we must focus on the thinking process.

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Day One

Step 1 Look at the pictures. Below are some pictures. In pairs try to answer two questions, using just information you can see in the pictures. Do not use any reference materials (dictionaries, websites, etc.). Just look at the pictures and answer the two questions. Try to generate as many possible reasons for your answers based only on what you see in the pictures.

  1. When do you think these pictures were made?

  2. Where do you think these pictures were made?

2000FlyThru

2000HorseCuriosity

2000Learning

2000VidConf

 

Step 2. Look at your answers to the questions. Look at your reasons. Look again at the pictures and try to generate more possible reasons. Then rank your reasons according to how strong you think they are. Choose the two reasons you think “prove” your opinion best. You can use the template at Exploratree to map out your ideas and explore them.

Step 3. Write out your answers to the two questions as two paragraphs. In each paragraph, carefully explain the two reasons you have for your answer.

Step 4. Share your ideas with a new partner and then with a small group. Listen carefully to the ideas of the other students.

Day Two

Step 5. In small groups, review the questions, the answers,  and the reasons you gave last time. Look at the reasons again carefully. They are opinions you have based on things you see in the pictures. Could you do any research to support your opinions? Think about what research you could do. What would provide “proof” for your opinions? Check around on the web or in reference books to find facts that support your opinions. Write these in the Supporting Evidence section of the graphic organizer.

Step 6. Share your views again in small groups. Listen carefully to any opinions that are different from your own. Write them down in the Conflicting Views section of the graphic organizer. [Teachers: you may need to shuffle groups here. It is important that each group contains some different opinions].

Step 7. Assess the different opinions the emerged from your group. Decide which ones you think are “correct.”

Step 8. Rank what you think are the most powerful arguments that emerged during this activity.

Step 8. [The teacher leads a discussion on the process the students have just undertaken. What they have just done is very similar to a debate: they have taken a stance, constructed arguments, and contrasted them with other arguments].

Step 9. [Optional: the teacher talks a little about the pictures. They were drawn by a man imagining the future. It is quite amazing that he got a lot right! In the pictures, he corrected predicted 1, a drive-thru, 2, a petting zoo, 3, e-learning, and 4, video conferencing. The power of human imagination is strong.]

 

 

 

 

 

By the way, the images were drawn by Jean Marc Cote between 1899 and 1910 in France. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_L%27An_2000

The images are available from many sources on the internet. One interesting source is the Paleofuture blog: http://www.paleofuture.com/blog/2007/9/10/french-prints-show-the-year-2000-1910.html

EFL Gamification 9: Jr. and Sr. High

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In August, I gave–or I should say attempted to give–a presentation titled Gamification and High School EFL. Things did not go well. I tried to condense a previous 3-hr. workshop into an informative and thought-provoking 30-minute presentation. That was problem No. 1. But it wasn’t the only problem.

The day before, a keynote speaker named Kishimoto Yoichiro had talked about gamifying his university class on game design. It was very similar to what Lee Sheldon (another game designer teaching another game design course at a university in the US) had done. You can see my mini-review of Mr. Sheldon’s book, The Multiplayer Classroom, at this page. I enjoyed the presentation. Mr. Kishimoto was a thoughtful presenter and explained his rationale nicely and walked us through his syllabus carefully, explaining the assignments and the interactions. Having read Mr. Sheldon’s book, I understood what he was trying to show and say. But I don’t think many people listening felt that what he said had any relevance to their own classes;  I don’t think many people left with a clear idea of what gamification is and how they could put it to work in their own classes. When I started my presentation the next day, I asked the participants if they had been at the gamification plenary the day before and if they now understood what gamification is. Most of them had: “Um…not really,” was the hesitant reply.

I had hoped to drag them into the light in my 30 minutes. But in the end, speaking too quickly and working on an unfamiliar computer and with one of my pair of two short videos refusing to play, I realized that I had failed. I think I managed to explain gamification fairly well. I think I managed to communicate what intrinsic motivation is and why it is important. I think I even got everyone to understand why narrative is so important. But what most certainly did not happen was enlightenment. Participants did not leave with any sense other than that gamification is a quirky, fringe movement, kind of like cosplay, that some people are doing, but definitely isn’t for everyone.

I was angry that I wasn’t able to show my second video. There was a contrast I wanted to show between two classroom scenes,  a before and after a-ha moment I wanted to induce. At the time, I felt like I had brought them to the cusp of understanding, but lacking an essential component, the whole idea had collapsed. Thinking about it later, though, I realized that the stark truth is that my second video probably wouldn’t have made much difference. The stark truth is that real gamification–what I’ve been calling gameful design–requires a much better understanding and acceptance of the role of formative feedback, and the role of engagement (fun) and involvement (meaningfulness). The stark truth is that a form of gamification already exists in schools. Yup, you heard that right. It’s the way things are: students get points of performing actions. What teachers need to learn is not actually what gamification is, but rather what is the difference between bad gamification  and good gamification. What Mr. Sheldon and Mr. Kishimoto are doing is not replicable in most high school classrooms, not bymost teachers or most normal human beings. That’s not only because it is uber-geeky and requires intimate familiarity with the culture of games (as it most certainly does!), but because those two teachers were willing to throw out the prevailing system of point-giving after teaching and testing, and replace it with a feedback system based on earned points for everything (user experience points). And they were not shy about having learners do unconventionally fun things in the classroom, sometimes things which mimicked game elements (quests, boss fights, zones), and sometimes quirky, fun things for no other reason than because they are fun (everyone wear yellow on project yellow day).

Knowing what I know about high school EFL in Japan–the primacy of the textbook, the tyranny of entrance exams, the necessity of loose coordination of syllabuses between teachers due to sharing of exams while accommodating different  approaches,  my advice for most high school teachers is instead of gamification, think about introducing more gameful design elements into your classes.

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Some of the features of gameful design will work so long as you concentrate your efforts on two things: formative feedback and fun. You must have both of these. If you have only formative assessment, you risk being joyless (though certainly you will still be pedagogically effective). If you have only the narrative/fun, you risk being delightfully ineffective and eventually being seen as old hat and dull. I should add at this point that in my observation, most classes now provide neither narrative nor effective formative feedback. And if you are at all unsure why, you probably have never experienced an English class at a Japanese high school and you need to read up on formative feedback (start here). The hardest thing for most people to understand is how narrative can be used. Simply put, narrative  is a story structure that can be used to add a meaningful context for activities. Activities under a selected narrative assume part of their meaning from the story.  If a Hunger Games narrative, or a Harry Potter narrative, or a Buffy the Vampire Slayer narrative is applied to a series of activities, these activities become embedded in a system in which the heroes, villains, and general story organization and progression are already familiar.

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So can any of this be useful to high school teachers? Absolutely. And below I am going to offer some things that can be tried in almost any class and that fit with the gameful design approach. Notice how each one has a narrative element (based on a story), has a play element (competition here, collecting or challenging), and a formative feedback element (students learn right away what to do and how to do it, since it impacts the ongoing play). These are only a few examples, but I think you’ll get the point. All aboard!

General Organizing Narrative Approaches

The Harry Potter Approach: Organize your class into three groups to match the houses in the Harry Potter series: Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, and Hufflepuff (leaving  Slytherin out). The three houses are told that they will compete for the house cup throughout the year. Points will be awarded for in-class effort, assignment, quiz and test performance, etc. Points may also be taken for behavior infractions. Different parts of the syllabus can be re-named according to various classes held at Hogwarts: potions (grammar), herbology (vocabulary), charms (speaking), and defense against the dark arts (writing). Just about anything you can think of doing in or with your class can be re-imagined as something from the Potter series. And the pull of Potter on HS students is strong. This past summer saw a Harry Potter exhibition in Tokyo (with 8000 yen souvenir wands!) and next year sees the opening of a Harry Potter theme park in Osaka.

For Homework or Discipline

The Homework Tessarae: If your high school is like my daughter’s, you have trouble getting students to do homework. Well, in addition to connecting homework to classroom lessons (make sure HW content is “necessary” in the subsequent lesson), try the Hunger Games Tessarae. Tessarae is a system in the book/movie where characters can get more food for their families if they add their name to the Hunger Games lottery (reaping). In the book, adding your name to the lottery increases your chances of being chosen for the games (and probably dying), but we can we can put a nicer spin on this by saying that if you COMPLETE your homework on time and to a certain standard, your name gets added into a pot for a class lottery with a good nice prize. This idea is similar to the speed camera lottery idea tried successfully in Europe. If you do an exceptional job, you can get your name added even more times! This gives the teacher an easy way to acknowledge and reward effort. For classes using a Harry Potter narrative, this could be a Goblet of Fire.

The Secret Student: This idea, via Dylan Wiliam, requires that you select and monitor one student each day–secretly. At the end of the day, if the student’s behavior has be sufficiently positive, the student is identified to the class and a point is added toward a future reward prize (a class trip, a class party, a special sweet, etc.). If the secret student’s behavior has not been good (the student has been uncooperative, disruptive, or failed to speak only in English during the pair work activities, etc.), then the class is informed that they didn’t earn a point for the day. The name of the unsuccessful secret student is NOT revealed. For classes using a Harry Potter narrative, this could be used just as it is, with the addition of house points also being given or taken away.

For Projects

From Project to Game (extended from an idea by Nicola Whitton in Using Games to Enhance Learning and Teaching): Ask students to design and make an A-Z school or community introduction booklet. Each pair of students is assigned a different letter of the alphabet and a different topic (a=art class, b=basketball club, etc.). Their task is to take a picture and write a short description introducing that thing. The goal of the project is to make a student-produced photo introduction to the school or community. For the game part, the teacher is assigned the letter X. The teacher makes a cryptic photo card explaining that the X marks the location of some kind of treasure or treasure map or clue to the location of some treasure that students have to puzzle out. Over the next few days/weeks, the students are engaged in solving clues or riddles to find the treasure. See the post on ARGs if you would like to know more about this type of activity.

That’s it for now. I hope to update this list in the future, but I think there is enough here to help you understand what gamification–or rather gameful design–can do for you and how it can do so.

This post is part of a series on gamification:

  1. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Rewards
  2. Triggers, Ability, and Motivation
  3. Mechanics
  4. The Downside and How to Avoid It
  5. The Whole Hog?
  6. ARGs
  7. Required Reading
  8. HabitRPG and Other Web-based Systems

 

First Image: Fagment from Train Wreck, 1922. Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Train_Wreck_1922.jpg

Second Image: Fragment from Train on a Big Bridge. Source: https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB:KSR_Train_on_a_big_bridge_05-02-12_71.jpeg