ENGLISH Issue 79

March
2012

Tprofessional
EACHING
The Leading Practical Magazine For English Language Teachers Worldwide

Micro-mechanics
Chris Roland
In praise of improvising
Lisette Allen
Creative tools for
creative minds
Laura Besley
Under pressure?
Nick Fletcher

• practical methodology

• fresh ideas & innovations

• classroom resources

• new technology

• teacher development

• tips & techniques

• photocopiable materials

• competitions & reviews

w w w . e t p r o f e s s i o n a l . c o m
Contents MAIN FEATURE BUSINESS ENGLISH PROFESSIONAL

MICRO-MECHANICS 4 BALANCING CONTENT AND LANGUAGE 49

Chris Roland puts tasks through the grinder Phil Wade recommends horses for courses
to achieve a better blend

TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
FEATURES
UNDER PRESSURE? 58
A SECOND SELF 2 8 Nick Fletcher addresses stress
Jill Hadfield introduces her students to their
Ideal L2 Self THE TEACHER AS JUGGLER 60
Ana Lía Passarotto reflects on the demands made
MUSICAL STORYTELLING 13 of teachers
Phil Keegan exploits the inspirational properties
of music and stories
TECHNOLOGY
THE DOOR TO SPONTANEITY 15
Alan Marsh combines fluency and form EMAIL PROJECTS 64
Olga Lomakina and Tatiana Gustomyasova
THE ACADEMIC WORD LIST 18 promote sociolinguistic skills
Simon Mumford takes up the challenge of
teaching specialised lexis WEBWATCHER 67
Russell Stannard assesses the benefits of
YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND 26 podcasts for teachers and students
Wei-Wei Shen uses action research to define
a good writing teacher FIVE THINGS YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO 69
KNOW ABOUT: RSS
SPONTANEOUS TEACHER TALK 29 Nicky Hockly pulls it all together
Richard Gallen sees the importance of the
teacher as a model of natural language
REGULAR FEATURES
ECOLOGICAL INTELLIGENCE 34
Linda Ruas rejects trivial matters in favour TALKBACK 10
of the things that do matter
LANGUAGE LOG 40
IN PRAISE OF IMPROVISING 38 John Potts
Lisette Allen isn’t afraid to experiment
IT WORKS IN PRACTICE 42
OVER THE WALL 46
Alan Maley packs his bags for a literary journey REVIEWS 52
ONGOING ENGAGEMENT 54 SCRAPBOOK 62
Ramanujam Meganathan employs projects
as a way to encourage real language use
TEACHER ANXIETY 71
Rose Senior

TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS COMPETITIONS 41, 72

CREATIVE TOOLS FOR CREATIVE MINDS 22
Laura Besley helps children assemble and organise INTERNATIONAL SUBSCRIPTION FORM 70
their ideas
Includes materials designed to photocopy

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 • 1

 Editorial wo of the articles in this issue begin by pointing Another subject that several contributors address is

T out the emphasis placed by most teacher

training courses on lesson planning and clearly-
defined teaching and learning objectives. Whilst
acknowledging that it is important to know what we
want to achieve in a lesson, both contributors then go
on to stress the equal importance of allowing and
encouraging an element of spontaneity – Alan Marsh
with respect to setting up communicative speaking
activities which don’t act merely as a form of language
drill, and Lisette Allen in terms of being capable of
improvising when our carefully-laid plans don’t turn out
quite as we expected.
that of stress. Ana Lía Passarotto identifies some of the
stress-inducing demands that are placed on teachers
and acknowledges how difficult it is to achieve a
sensible work–life balance. Rose Senior and Nick
Fletcher both have advice for teachers suffering from
anxiety on how to cope with the pressures they are
under. Chris Roland’s ‘micro-mechanics’ technique –
for breaking down problems (and tasks) into smaller
increments to make the issues clearer and easier to
deal with – is one way that teachers might improve their
own lot as well as achieving the objectives they set for
their classes.

Richard Gallen finds the spontaneous teacher talk he

hears in his own Spanish classes to be a valuable
source of linguistic input. He recommends that we
highlight the unplanned language that we use naturally
in the classroom – when chatting to our students, Helena Gomm
Editor
explaining things or giving instructions – so that they
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
can use it as a model and an additional resource.

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2 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 M A I N F E AT U R E
Micro-
mechanics
Chris Roland grinds
M
down his approach to tasks
y brother likes coffee. He
really likes coffee. He gave
me the object shown in the
photo. It’s a 19th-century
to stop trouble brewing with cast-iron coffee grinder, made by
Archibald Kenrick and Sons of West
his teens. Bromwich, Staffordshire, UK. This is a
size 2 mill, with a brass hopper and a
brass plaque at the front showing the
company logo. The beans go in the top,
you turn the wheel and the ground
coffee falls into the drawer at the
4 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
bottom. This model is probably over
150 years old and I can still use it every
day to make my drinks.
When my brother asks somebody if
they like coffee, there is a certain hidden
depth to the question. The fact that he
owns over 60 coffee mills from around
the world and even in winter can be
found sitting in his garden roasting
beans over a charcoal fire in an antique
French barrel roaster may become
apparent with further conversation.
Most of us who are coffee drinkers
tend to think about the coffee we drink
only when it touches our lips or at the
point when it’s just gone down the back of
our throats. If we like it, we go back to the
same café. If we don’t, we choose another
one. By the time the coffee hits my
brother’s throat, he’s already selected and
ordered the raw beans, scheduled a roast
for maximum freshness, decided how long
to cook the beans for and adjusted the
grinder on his selected mill. By the time
the coffee hits his throat, he’s got a pretty
good idea about how it’s going to taste.
I’d like to use this as an analogy for
classroom activities and task design. We
may have a tendency to go through
activities as if we were hammering
through espresso bars: Yep, that one
works. I like that one. Nope, that one
didn’t work. Don’t like that one. Won’t
use that again.
What we should perhaps be asking
is how every decision we make,
including those before we even start an
activity with our teenage students,
affects the outcome. It’s this structuring,
these decisions and this thinking that I
call task micro-mechanics. I’ve never
subscribed to the idea that ‘you can
think about stuff too much’. I do agree
that you don’t always have time to think
about things enough, though, but that’s
what I see a micro-mechanical approach
as – taking as many factors into
account as time and energy allow.
Articulating problems
Inspired by some of the reactive teacher
training that Paul Seligson was giving, I
recently ran a couple of small
workshops where I invited participants
to bring along a problem, positioning
myself as a kind of ‘ELT agony uncle’
for teachers of teenagers. One thing I
noticed about the problems that came
up was that they tended to be very
broad and general articulations that lent
themselves, without exception, to
further micro-analysis. One session went
something like this:
Teacher My students won’t speak.
Me Ever? Does that mean they sit
in silence?
Teacher No! My God! No.
Me So they will speak.
Teacher But not in English.
Me They won’t speak in English at
all?
Teacher Not really.
Me Will they read English to each
other in pairs?
Teacher Well, yes, maybe, but that’s
not speaking.
Me Yes it is and that would be a
start. But what’s your idea of
speaking?
Teacher You know ... when they are
creative with the language.
Me So you’re looking for them to
be spontaneous and
imaginative and generate
original sentences.
Teacher Yes. Isn’t that what fluency is?
Me OK, yes, but that’s much more
than just speaking. It’s quite
hard to be creative on
demand. Could you provide a
number of prompts as a
framework? You might not get
the kind of spontaneity you
are aiming for, but it sounds
as if you’ll get more than you
are doing at the moment.
Teacher OK.
Me Also, could I ask, when are
you asking the teenagers to
speak? Is it in open class?
Teacher Sometimes.
Me Try groups or pairs. There’s
less pressure.
Teacher But they won’t listen to each
other anyway. So what’s the
point?
Differentiating problems
Now this is a different issue. We’re in
danger of ‘cross-problematising’ here –
jumping from one classroom issue to
another without getting to the root of
either and, in any case, we’re serving
ourselves problems that are too big.
What we need to do is to break this big
problem up into as many individual
parts as possible and keep fragmenting
and fragmenting until the situation is as
fractured as we can cognitively deal with.
In this way, the situation simultaneously
becomes clearer and more complex:
clearer because we see each constituent
element for what it is; more complex
because we need to take on board a
greater number of elements and the
relationships that exist between them. It’s
the development of a faculty for this
kind of ‘clear complexity’ that is central
to the idea of micro-mechanics. It’s the
idea that it is better to have a tangible
but fractured grasp of many separate
things than a global but more hazily-
conceived ball of compounded concerns.
One trick is to know when you have a
single classroom issue in your head and
when you need to break that problem up
into two parts and deal with each part
on its own. The basic distinction here is
between one problem and two problems.
It sounds easy, but it isn’t. It’s the eternal
art of telling the difference between
things. As a rule of thumb, one problem,
in its simplest form, will have one
solution. If a problem requires more
than one solution, note the first solution
down, and keep on working on the
remainder of the problem to try to find
the next solution.
Me So when do you really want
your students to listen to each
other?
Teacher When one is speaking, for
example.
Me Speaking to whom?
Teacher Speaking to me.
Me So when one student is
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
speaking to you, who is the
interaction primarily between?
Teacher Me and the class.
Me Are you sure?
Teacher OK, between me and that
student.
Me And you want the rest of the
class to listen to that
conversation as if it were
their own?
Teacher Basically.
Me Well it’s not very natural is it?
I mean, they might do that
out of politeness for a while
but they can hardly keep that
up. We listen to people when
we are involved in the
conversation. The chances of
your teenagers listening will
go up radically if it’s their
conversation and if they are
being directly addressed by
the speaker.
A micro-mechanical
approach
So to get to a place where the task has
purpose and structure, for example
where the students in the above scenario
have a reason to listen, we need to ask
ourselves a number of questions:
Structure
 What is the structure for the students?
 What is each student doing at each
moment in the class?
 If half the students are talking to a
partner, what are the other half doing?
If Partner A is speaking, is Partner B
timing them, recording them, evaluating
them by filling out a simple form or
preparing a couple of follow-up
questions?
 What is the rationale for two students
to communicate in English when they
may share a common L1 through which
they can express themselves perfectly?
 If Partner A is reading a paragraph
to Partner B, is B listening for
pronunciation errors, or trying to notice
where A has changed words from the
original, or seeing if they can remember
what the next word is when A stops
reading suddenly?
Task design
 Does my task design mean that there
will be any eddies of unengaged energy



5
 Micro-
mechanics



as the students are forced to wait,
through logistical reasons, for a chance
to do what we’ve asked them?
 What are the minimum criteria to
accomplish the task?
 If they are speaking, how long does
each speaker speak for? Thirty seconds?
A minute? How many words do they
have to write, images do they have to
find or people do they have to
interview? How might the students try
to shortcut these criteria, and how will
it be clear whether they have or haven’t
fulfilled the task requirements?
Classroom management
 What will the class sound like and
look like during the activity? Will it be a
smooth continuous grinding or will I
have to keep stopping to replace rogue
beans that have jumped out of the
hopper of their own accord? Will the
students be sitting down, moving
around or making noise?
 How will the exact order of things to be
done be made clear to the students? Once
I’ve given my initial instructions, and
maybe an example of the final product,
could I also provide a list of the steps on
the board or on a handout, telling them
how long to spend on each task?
 What will the groupings be? If the
task is designed for pairs, will I accept
threes? If so, will groups of three have
to produce more than pairs? If so,
exactly how much and have I made this
clear at the outset?
Evaluation
 With regard to pressure-to-perform,
are the students aware of how they are
being evaluated? If they are speaking,
will their partner’s evaluations, if they are
written sensibly, carry any weight? Am I
also walking around monitoring, and if
so, what do those little ticks I am putting
by each student’s name stand for?
 With regard to pressure-to-produce,
will the final product carry enough
indications of whether each student has
worked sufficiently? If the class are
producing posters, will I be looking for
different styles of handwriting on the
6 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
poster to show that the students have
been participating equally? How will the
points be distributed between
presentation and content? Will the
students get extra points for using the
latest vocabulary from the unit?
Contact and input
 Where are the contact points between
me and the students, and will the new
language come from me, from a text or
from the board?
 Have I unwittingly set up a situation
where students need vocabulary and
language that only I have, thus creating
a bottleneck to the task? Or are there
means for the students to get the
additional language and explanations
they need – access to online
encyclopaedias, wordlists from their
books, bilingual dictionaries?
Agendas
 Where will the element of play be for
the students? That is, what will be the
most exciting part of the task for them
in their teen agendas, the part that
enables them to get through the class
without going insane? Will it simply be
having the chance to get up and move
about, to find some funny images on
Google and laugh at them or to go
outside the class to interview some
other kids on the school patio? Will my
pedagogic/class management agenda
and the students learning/play agendas
be compatible?
Planning and follow-through
 What pre-activity planning is
required? Have I actually got the beans
I want in the cupboard?
 How will I integrate scores on this
activity into the students’ term records?
 Is there the possibility for recycling
and repetition in the activity?
 Where students are talking in pairs,
could this also be a rehearsal for an
end-of-month, one-to-one interview
with me on the same topic?
 If the students are producing a
poster, will they be given the chance to
talk me through it, too? Will the coffee
actually taste nice and who am I going
to drink it with? What part of the
activity am I actually going to enjoy as
the teacher and where is the shared
satisfaction that we might feel as a
group? How will the students be aware
of the value of the task?
All the questions above constitute
micro-settings which can be adjusted,
tightened or loosened. Each setting will
have a bearing on how well an activity
goes – and could be its making or its
downfall. If you look again at the
somewhat clumsily presented Socratic
agony uncle dialogue on page 5 (before
I resorted to seven sections of pure
questions) you may now get a better
sense of some of the micro-settings
which are inextricably integrated and
which I was trying to uncover in my
questioning.
A micro-mechanical approach like
this centres task design very much in the
here-and-now world of the teenager who
is asking: What do I have to do to get
through this lesson and what happens if I
do or don’t do it? This is a world where
macro-maxims such as: ‘It will improve
your English’, ‘You should do it out of
respect for the teacher’ or ‘If you
continually work hard over the whole term,
then your end-of-year marks will go up’
can seem a very long way away and,
though nominally acknowledged by the
vast majority of teenage students, will not
have the immediacy to be a useful tool
in the ordering of your class. Similarly,
whereas the macro-maxim ‘Let’s go and
see where we can get a decent cup of
coffee’ is likely to deliver disappointment
as often as it does delight, just a little
while with my brother and his mills will
set you up for ages. ETp
Chris Roland is based
at Active Language in
Cádiz, Spain. He has
previously worked at the
British Council centres in
Barcelona and Damascus
and at the English
Language Institute in
Seville. He is currently
interested in the areas
of task design, the logic
that teachers and
students run on and how
they talk to each other.
chris.roland@gmail.com
Writing for ETp
Would you like to write for ETp?
We are always interested in new writers
and fresh ideas. For guidelines and
advice, write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
 IN THE CLASSROOM
A second
self 2
Jill Hadfield explores n the first article in this series, I
I
the Ideal L2 Self.
provided a brief history of
motivation theory and introduced
a new theory, Zoltan Dörnyei’s L2
Motivational Self System. In the next
three articles, I will look again at the
three ‘pillars’ of this system, pose
various questions about how these
could be translated into classroom
practice, give examples of possible
classroom activities, and finally, in the
fifth article, offer some suggestions for
their integration into a teaching syllabus
as a ‘motivational programme’.
Just to remind you of the structure
of Dörnyei’s L2 Motivational Self
System, its three pillars are defined as:
● The Ideal L2 Self
This is the L2-specific facet of one’s
ideal self. If the person we would like
to become speaks an L2, we can
speak about an ‘Ideal L2 Self’, which
is a powerful motivator to reduce the
language gap between our actual and
ideal selves.
● The Ought-to L2 Self
This concerns L2-related attributes that
one believes one ought to possess in
order to avoid possible negative
outcomes (eg letting down one’s parents
or failing an exam), and which,
therefore, may bear little resemblance to
a person’s own desires or wishes. Of
course, in an ideal case the ideal and
the ought-to L2 selves – that is, what we
want to become and what we think
we should be able to do – coincide!
8 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
● The L2 Learning Experience
This concerns situation-specific
motives related to the immediate
learning environment and experience
(eg the positive impact of success or
the enjoyable quality of a language
course).
These three components offer a
progression from internal through to
external motivation. The vision of an
Ideal L2 Self springs wholly from
internal motivation – the personal wishes
and desires of the learner. The Ought-to
Self is largely socially conditioned,
springing from social pressures, for
example the wishes of parents and
teachers or pressure from a peer group.
However, these external pressures can
become internalised if they coincide
with personal desires and ambitions.
The L2 Learning Experience is related
to factors wholly outside the learner’s
control – enjoyable activities, good
group relations, inspiring teaching, etc.
In this article we will look at the
first pillar, the Ideal L2 Self.
The Ideal L2 Self
As we have said, then, the Ideal L2 Self
is defined as the learner’s personal
vision of themselves as a future L2
speaker. This may range in fluency from
completely bilingual to being able to
cope with the basic demands of tourist
language on a short holiday. It may
range in nature from purely
instrumental – a self who is able to do
business or study in the L2, for example
– to more integrative in nature:
someone who wants to understand the
culture and literature of the L2 country.
Eight questions
The process of translating theory into
practice is not simple and rarely
straightforward! In translating the
theory into practice, Zoltan and I had a
long dialogue which centred around
eight questions.
You might like to try answering
! these questions yourself before
looking at the answers given in the
following section.
1 What would be the aim, in teaching
terms, of this component of the L2
Self System?
2 How could this component be
broken down into sections, steps or
aspects?
3 Is each step actually translatable
into practice? Are they all
necessary?
4 What kind of activities would each
step entail?
5 What is the relative importance of
each step?
6 How much time should be devoted
to each step?
7 Do the steps form a logical teaching
sequence, or do they need
reordering?
8 Where should each step be realised
within a course – at the beginning,
in the middle, at the end or
throughout the course?
Eight answers
Here are some answers to the questions
posed above.
1 The aim of this component would
be to help the learners to create a
motivating vision of themselves as
future L2 speakers.
2 Research into the Ideal L2 Self
System highlights a six-step programme:
● Creating the vision
● Enhancing the vision
● Substantiating the vision
● Operationalising the vision
● Keeping the vision alive
● Counterbalancing the vision
3 This outline of what is involved in
creating a rich yet realistic vision of the
Ideal L2 Self is admirably clear and
logical and has an immediate intuitive
relation to classroom practice. However,
one step (Counterbalancing the vision),
although clearly validated by theory,
seems problematic in terms of
classroom practice. It is clear, both from
research and from intuitive everyday
experience, that fear of failure is a
powerful motivating factor. Motivation
to study for an exam, for example, is
caused by a desire to succeed and a fear
of failure. However, knowledge of this
truth does not necessarily mean it must
be translated into classroom practice.
As teachers, we feel that dwelling on
failure or invoking the ‘feared self’ (the
‘stick rather than the carrot’ approach)
is counter-productive in terms of
classroom practice. However, some
consideration could be given to the
possibility of not achieving aims, if it
were done in a practical and helpful way
by focusing only briefly on the
possibility of not realising the Ideal Self
vision, and moving on quickly to more
direct practical considerations of what
might get in the way of realising the
vision and discussing ways of
overcoming these.
4 It is clear from the importance of
vision in the theory that activities in
‘Creating the vision’ will involve guided
visualisation. ‘Enhancing the vision’ and
‘Keeping the vision alive’ will also
involve visualisation, to add more detail
to the original visualisation and to
sustain the vision throughout the
course. ‘Substantiating the vision’ will
involve subjecting the vision to a reality
check to make sure it is achievable. This
would involve more cognitive activities,
such as discussion. ‘Operationalising the
vision’ would also involve the more
cognitive activities of goal setting, goal
breakdown, task setting, strategy
selection, progress checks and
reward/recognition. ‘Counterbalancing
the vision’ would involve some
consideration of the possibility of not
achieving the desired goal, though (as
suggested above) this should be very
brief and should then move on more
productively to identification of barriers
to learning, such as self-distraction, and
suggestions for ways of overcoming
these. Activities suggested by Dörnyei
for ‘Keeping the vision alive’ include
cultural events and visits by guest
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
speakers and role models and could also
include continued visualisations,
roleplay and simulations.
5 and 6 The steps all seem equally
important, though they differ greatly in
the amount of time each would take in
teaching terms. It seems clear that
‘Creating, Enhancing, Substantiating and
Counterbalancing the vision’ would be
relatively short processes, taking perhaps
a lesson each, whereas ‘Operationalising
the vision’ and ‘Keeping the vision alive’
would be much longer processes, needing
to be sustained throughout a course.
7 In the original theory, the steps were
listed as elements identified by research.
However, the order of steps or aspects
in a theory does not necessarily form a
logical teaching sequence. In translating
theory to practice, the steps needed
reordering according to ‘classroom
logic’: it seemed, for example, that
‘Substantiating the vision’ should come
before ‘Enhancing the vision’. In other
words, you need to make sure the vision
is achievable before embroidering it to
make it more concrete and detailed. It
also felt intuitively right that
‘Counterbalancing’ should come before
‘Enhancing the vision’, since it is better
to end on an upbeat note than on
considering what might go wrong. It
also seemed that since ‘Operationalising
the vision’ and ‘Keeping the vision alive’
are lengthy processes, the other, shorter,
processes should all come first.
8 The short processes, ‘Creating’,
‘Substantiating’, ‘Counterbalancing’
and ‘Enhancing’, should come in the
first week of a course, to begin the
programme of study with a powerful,
though realistic, vision of the Future
Ideal L2 self. Thereafter, time should be
devoted throughout the course to goal
setting and task identification activities,
in order to operationalise the vision,
and to simulation, roleplay, contact with
L2 speakers and role models and
cultural events, in order to keep the
vision alive.
My Future Ideal L2 Self
Procedure
1 Introduce the idea of a Future Ideal
L2 Self. Ask your students what
they would like to be able to do in
the L2. What situations would they
see themselves in? Who would they
be speaking to?



9
 A second
self 2



2 Tell the students that you are going
to get them to relax to prepare for a
visualisation. Play some gentle
music to set the atmosphere if you
like and then ask them to close their
eyes. Begin to read the Relaxation
script (see below), pausing and
allowing time for the students to
follow the instructions and relax.
3 Read the Future Ideal Self script,
again allowing enough time for the
students to visualise.
4 Ask the students to open their eyes
and share their visualisations with a
partner.
5 Open this up to a class discussion by
getting the pairs to share their
visualisations in fours, then getting
each group of four to report back to
the class.
Follow-up
Get the students to write up their
visualisations. You can display these as
a poster and also use them as a basis for
discussion on what is realistic, given the
time frame of your course. Going on
from that, you can get the students to
identify any issues and problems that
might get in the way of realising the
vision, and suggest ways of overcoming
these obstacles. Finally, following this
work, you can get them to rewrite or re-
visualise their initial visualisation in
more concrete detail.
Relaxation script
Close your eyes ... listen to the music ...
take long breaths as you listen ... try to
focus on your breathing ... and empty
your mind. Now begin to relax … begin
by relaxing your toes ... your feet ... your
legs. Let them feel relaxed. Now your
body and your shoulders ... your arms …
your hands ... your head ... now your
whole body is relaxed.
Future Ideal Self script
Imagine yourself in the future as an
English speaker ... perhaps at the end of
this course, perhaps after more years of
study.
How well can you speak English now?
In what situations do you use your
10 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
English? ... work? ... study? ... travel? ...
social networks? ... with friends? Which is
most important to you?
TALKBACK!
Choose a situation which is important
to you and try to see yourself in that
situation. Try to imagine as many details
as possible. Imagine the place – are you
inside or outside? What is around you? ...
Now imagine who you are talking to. ...
How many people? What do they look
like? ... What are you talking about? ...
Imagine you are talking very fluently in
English ... You can understand everything
that people say and they can understand
you. ... How do people react to you? How
do you feel about yourself?
Note
Before doing this with a class, you
might like to try it on yourself – as an
L2 speaker if you are learning another
language. But why not try envisioning
your future possible Teacher Self ?
Visualise yourself in five years’ time,
feeling happy and fulfilled with your
life. Where are you? ... What institution
are you working in? … Who are your
colleagues? … What have you achieved?
... What is your current role? … What
are your responsibilities? …
Imagine vividly where you would
like to be, then start to envision the
steps you might take to get there. ETp
Jill Hadfield has
worked as a teacher
and teacher trainer in
Britain, France, China,
Tibet, Madagascar
and New Zealand.
She edits ELTmag
(www.eltmag.com), and
her books include the
Communication Games
series (Pearson), Oxford
Basics, Classroom
Dynamics and An
Introduction to Teaching
English (all OUP).
Motivation, co-authored
with Zoltan Dörnyei, will
be published by Pearson
this year.
jillhadfield@mac.com
Do you have something to say about
an article in the current issue of ETp?
This is your magazine and we would
ENGLISH TEACHING professional,
Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) Ltd,
Email: helena.gomm@pavpub.com
Peter Wells’s article ‘No gain
without pain’ (Issue 78) deserves a
full rebuttal, but there’s not enough
space here for that. Rather, I
would like to stand up for authors
of graded readers as creative
writers, and refute the implicit slur
that they are mere hacks.
Penny Hancock and Sorrel Pitts,
both involved in the graded
reader scene, have each just
published first novels. Sorrel Pitts
is Readers Editor at OUP and
Penny Hancock is an author of
readers for CUP.
Sorrel’s The River Woman is
described by Sir Michael
Parkinson as ‘A fascinating story
told by a very promising writer’.
In the book, Nicola is saved from
a snowy death and finds herself
drawn into the secrets of her
father-and-son rescuers, while she
still guards her own dark secret.
S J Watson (author of Before I
Sleep) describes Penny’s Tideline
as ‘Brilliantly written and totally
gripping’. It’s the story of Sonia’s
obsession with a teenage boy she
imprisons in her Thames-side
house, awakening disturbing
memories of her own childhood.
The River Woman is available at
www.indigodreamsbookshop.com
and Amazon, and Tideline is
published by Simon and Schuster.
Both novels show that ELT writers
can break through into mainstream
fiction.
Philip Prowse
Cambridge, UK
really like to hear from you.
Write to us or email:
PO Box 100, Chichester,
West Sussex, PO18 8HD, UK
Fax: +44 (0)1243 576456
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Musical
storytelling
Phil Keegan gets his am not a social anthropologist
students to collaborate
creatively.
I but, to the best of my knowledge,
language, music and storytelling
have existed in some form or other
in every society ever known. It seems
obvious to me that humans have a
fundamental need to communicate and
express themselves and that language,
music and storytelling are universal
tools for doing so.
Music
Music and stories are much more than
mere entertainment. Music is a powerful
expression of emotion. It can provoke
strong and meaningful emotional
responses in both a positive and negative
way, and it is no accident that film
makers invest a huge amount of time,
energy and money into getting the
musical soundtrack to a film just right.
Try to imagine an action film, a thriller
or a love story without an appropriate
musical soundtrack. It wouldn’t work.
Sound expert Julian Treasure argues that
music is the most powerful form of
sound that can affect our emotional
state. Music, indeed sound in general,
has physical effects on the body and
psychological effects on the mind, which
make it a rich resource for the classroom.
Storytelling
Stories are a major way in which we
make sense of our worlds, our culture
and our relationships. According to
Mark Turner in The Literary Mind,
stories are a fundamental instrument of
thought: ‘Most of our experience, our
knowledge and our thinking is organized
as stories.’ I found this reference in Dan
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
Pink’s fabulous book A Whole New
Mind, and Dan Pink himself has a
succinct description of what a story
actually is: ‘Content enriched by emotion.’
We are all constantly telling stories
to our friends, colleagues, nearest and
dearest and, of course, our students.
Even a simple account of something that
happened to us is a story: it’s our own
personal interpretation of what occurred
and we infuse it with emotion, colour,
metaphor, possibly humour and our own
view of the world – and the longer ago
it occurred, the more of a story, rather
than a factual account, it becomes. ‘We
are our stories,’ says Pink. ‘We are each
the authors of our own lives.’
Creation and
collaboration
I try to get my learners to create stories
as often as I can. With young children,
this is usually not difficult at all, but
when asking teenagers and adults to
make up stories, I have often
encountered resistance. ‘I can’t think of
anything’ and ‘I’m not creative’ are
frequent laments.
The activity described here is
designed to address the issue of ‘I can’t
think of anything’. It works on the
principle that collaboration supports
and promotes the creative process. I
fully agree with Ken Robinson and
Steven Johnson that creative ideas are
often the result of bouncing ideas off
other people and being inspired by their
ideas and thoughts to create something
more interesting, more valuable or even
completely new. ‘Collaboration is the
stuff of growth’, as Ken Robinson says.



13
 Musical
storytelling



Preparation and procedure
You first need to think of several pieces
of instrumental music. Variety is most
definitely the spice of life here (and I
also must stress that it should be
instrumental music and not songs, as in
this activity we don’t want the lyrics or
themes of the song to influence the
learners).
You will need three different pieces
of music to represent characters in a
story, and either one longer piece to
represent the soundtrack or several
shorter pieces that you play in a given
sequence to represent it. The latter –
several short pieces – works better.
On a practical note, saving your
music selections as MP3 files on a
laptop makes things a lot easier. As a
Mac user, I simply create folders in
iTunes and can then click on each piece
of music in turn, which is a lot easier
than changing CDs or cassettes.
Step 1 symphony, for example) or, alternatively,
Put the students into groups of four.
One or two students in each group need
to act as note-takers. Tell the groups
that you are going to play some pieces
of music and that they should follow
your instructions.
2 Penguin 2010
Step
Play the first piece of music, telling the
students that they should imagine a
character from a story or film. Avoid
giving them hints or any extra
information. They should just listen and
think what character the music suggests
to them. There are no right or wrong
answers. They can start discussing and
taking notes as soon as they want. I
always stress that they should not worry
about grammar, correct English, and so
on at this stage. There will be plenty of
time for that later. Two and a half to
three minutes of music is usually enough.
Fade the music out, allow the students a
minute or so to continue their discussion
and then move on to the next stage.
Step 3 You can ask the groups to write up the
Now tell the students that you are going
to play the second piece and that they
need to imagine another character. At
this stage the characters are not
14 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
connected. The students should just let
the music suggest a character to them.
As before, they should discuss and take
notes.
Step 4
Repeat this procedure a third time with
a different piece of music and the same
instructions.
Step 5
Give the students a couple of minutes
or so to talk over their three characters,
adding and developing the character
portraits as they see fit. It is important
to emphasise again that there are no
right or wrong answers.
Step 6 types of instrumental music can be used:
Now tell them that they are going to
put the three characters into a story.
However, just as with films, the story has
a musical soundtrack. You are going to
play a piece of music and, as they listen,
they should start creating the story with
the characters they invented, in whatever
ways the music suggests.
At this point there are some
alternatives. You can play a longish piece
of music (a movement from a classical
you can play three or four shorter pieces,
saying that this is the first part of the
story, then the second part, and so on.
This gives you the opportunity to
choose a variety of music – for example,
a slow piece, a fast, hectic piece, an eerie
piece, an upbeat, joyous piece, and so on.
Step 7 Turner, M The Literary Mind OUP 1998
When you have played all the music, ask
the students to put the story together.
They are under no obligation to stick to
what they came up with during the first
part of the activity, and can make as
many changes or adaptations to the
characters as they like. You can
emphasise that this is how the creative
process usually works and is, therefore,
perfectly in order. Around 15 or 20
minutes is normally enough time for the
groups to come up with a story, but if
they are actively engaged in developing
their stories, I am usually happy to let
them have more time.
8 the USA, Germany,
Step
story in prose, either in class or for
homework. Instead, or in addition, you
can ask each group to act out their
story, playing the soundtrack music as
they do so. This seems to work best
with one student acting as narrator and
the others miming the story, possibly
adding some ad-libbed or prepared
dialogue, though that is not a must.
The acting-out part is usually a lot
of fun. It is also a nice touch if the
teacher is prepared to jump in and
mime an extra character if need be.
I have done this activity many times and,
although some students have protested at
first that they are not creative and can’t
do it, it has never failed to work. All
classical, folk, jazz, rock, jazz rock, etc,
though I would avoid using real film
music as this will unduly influence the
learners if they recognise which film it
comes from.
I am convinced that both music and
storytelling are inspirational and
motivating to most learners and that
combining them creates a very powerful
learning tool. In my humble opinion,
this activity is creative, communicative,
collaborative and confidence-building.
It hits a lot of ‘Cs’, in fact. ETp
Johnson, S Where Good Ideas Come
From Riverhead Books 2010
Pink, D A Whole New Mind Marshall
Cavendish 2008
Robinson, K and Aronica, L The Element
See also the following TED.com talks by
Julian Treasure, Ken Robinson and Steven
Johnson:
www.ted.com/talks/julian_treasure_the_4
_ways_sound_affects_us.html
www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ken_robinson
_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_
bring_on_the_revolution.html
www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/steven_
johnson_where_good_ideas_come_
from.html
Phil Keegan has been
an English teacher since
1985 and a teacher
trainer since 1996, and
has worked in the UK,
France, Austria, Turkey
and Malaysia. His book
In my Opinion is
published by Pro Lingua
Associates.
elt@philkeegan.com
 S P E A K I N G
The door to
spontaneity
Alan Marsh reconciles ne important aspect of
fluency with a focus on form.
O teacher training courses is
that they impress upon
trainees the need to have
clearly-defined teaching and learning
objectives, often expressed in terms such
as ‘By the end of the lesson, the learners
will be able to ...’ (eg use the present
perfect to talk about holiday
experiences) or ‘By the end of the lesson,
the learners will have practised ...’ (eg
skim reading for gist and scanning for
specific information). At the same time,
they are also told of the apparently
contradictory importance of giving
space to the learners to talk about their
own lives, experiences and cultures and
to ‘go with the flow’ when something
unplanned and interesting happens in
class which engages everyone.
But this must be confusing for new
teachers. On the one hand, they feel the
need to have clear lesson aims set out in
a lesson plan with clearly-defined
procedures which need to be carried out
within a clearly-defined time frame
(usually the time the lesson takes). On
the other hand, they are trying to take
on board the need to be flexible and
versatile and to respond to the ebb and
flow of the lesson, with their trainer’s
cry of ‘Teach the learners, not the plan!’
ringing in their ears.
Fluency and form
In recent years, therefore, I’ve been
looking at ways of reconciling these two
clearly-felt needs: how to set up
communicative speaking activities which
really engage the learners in talking
about themselves, their lives, beliefs and
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
experiences in ways that are spontaneous
and authentic, while at the same time
having language-learning objectives
which go beyond sometimes vaguely-
defined (and hard-to-evaluate) aims
such as ‘promoting speaking fluency’.
One difficulty, however, is that once
you have an overt, explicit language-
learning aim, expressed in terms of a
lexical or grammatical feature of the
language (eg using do to ask questions
about daily routines in the present
simple), and you then set up a
communicative, fluency-focused activity
(ie one with no specific, overt or explicit
grammatical or lexical aim), there is the
One important aspect
of teacher training
courses is that they
impress upon trainees
the need to have clearly-
defined teaching and
learning objectives
danger that your learners will see the
communicative activity merely as an
oral controlled-practice stage. The end
result is likely to be very little
spontaneous language use at all.
One solution is to make the
communicative speaking activity the
focal point of the lesson and for the
teacher to input or extract from it a
grammatical or lexical (or phonological
or discoursal) language point. If the



15
 The door to
spontaneity




communicative activity (normally an
information gap) is intrinsically
interesting, this will divert the learners’
main attention away from the language
point and towards the communicative
objective.
Here is an example (inspired by an
original idea in John Hughes’ excellent
little book Lessons In Your Rucksack)
which I’ve used in my multilingual classes
here in Malta, where I live and work.
The years of my life
1 Review or introduce a) the
formation of past tense questions with
Did + subject + bare infinitive (eg Did
you go?), b) the lexical chunk Were you
born / Was X born? and c) how to say
the year in English (eg 1999 = nineteen
ninety-nine; 2008 = two thousand and
eight; 2014 = twenty fourteen).
2 Write on the board five (or more)
dates that are personally significant to
you (and, in a mixed nationality class,
your country or region). In my own
case, these might include five of the
following:
a) 1952 b) 1960 c) 1964 d) 1972
e) 1978 f) 1987 g) 1993 h) 1994
i) 2004
3 Ask your students to guess the
significance of the dates by asking you
questions. However, they can only ask
questions beginning with Did or Were
you born / Was X born? Otherwise, you
won’t answer! And to spice it up, give
them a time limit. The class will fire a
barrage of questions at you (make sure
everyone hears the questions and the
answers). Tick off each date as they
guess it. If they run out of ideas, give
them clues and hints.
(And in case you were wondering …
a) My mum and dad met for the first
time (a bit more fun than I was born in
... !), b) My football team, Burnley, won
the Football League, c) Malta became
an independent country, d) I travelled
abroad alone for the first time, e) I
started teaching (so long ago!), f) My
first child was born, g) I came to live in
Malta, h) My second child was born, i)
Malta became a member of the EU.)
16 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
4 Put the learners into small groups
to see if they can remember the
significance of each date. If not, they
can ask other groups. Then elicit
question words, including What, Why,
Who, Where, When, How long, How old,
etc, and write them on the board.
5 In groups, the learners now have to
think of any follow-up questions they
would like to ask you. Ask each group
to think of at least two questions. Give
them a little time for this. You may want
to ask them to write their questions
down, though this may stifle the
activity.
Sit down if you can and answer the
questions as honestly as you can. Avoid
short answers – expand and offer more
information. Try to turn it into a chat
more than a question-and-answer drill.
Allow more questions if they are
spontaneously offered.
6 Now ask the learners to write their
own significant dates. In small groups,
they then repeat Stages 3, 4 and 5 for
each group member’s dates. Make sure
that plenty of time is given to Stage 5,
as this is now the communicative
fluency stage and can become quite
interesting for the learners, especially if
they come from different countries. In
some of my recent multilingual classes,
as well as exchanging fascinating
information about their own cultures,
learners have held their colleagues
mesmerised with tales of revolution (in
Eastern Europe), romance, heroism,
sport and personal achievement.
7 At this point you can ask for some
feedback on anything interesting that
the learners were told in their groups,
and it is here that a class conversation
might really take off. Learners may talk
about events and experiences which are
truly meaningful to them and, as they
do so, they can really begin to
unshackle themselves from their form-
focused language concerns. What is
particularly interesting here is that, as
they try to express what is important
and meaningful to them, all sorts of
‘hidden’, hitherto unexpressed language
often emerges: what Luke Meddings
and Scott Thornbury in a Dogme
approach might call ‘emergent
language’. This can be a very powerful
and memorable moment in a language
classroom.
Opening the door
The activity is intrinsically interesting as
many learners are curious to know facts
about their teacher’s private life. Indeed,
they are sometimes amazed that we
have hobbies, interests and children – in
fact, that we’re human beings at all!
Needless to say, they are also eager to
know more about their fellow-learners’
lives when they repeat the activity in
small groups.
Because they are sometimes so eager
to crack the dates puzzle in Stage 3,
they sometimes forget to use Did ...?
and will only be reminded when the
teacher refuses to answer. Already, the
learners are more interested in the real
objective (cracking the puzzle) than in
language practice.
Another issue that is worth pointing
out is that by ‘opening the door’ and
allowing the learners into our lives
beyond the classroom in this way, we
are also modelling the activity for them.
In Stage 5, where we talk about
ourselves quite openly, we are providing
a model for Stage 6 (and giving really
useful ‘live listening’ practice, too, where
learners listen to, and interact with, a
real person talking to them, rather than
listening to someone in a recording).
If we are ready to share facts about
our private lives, then the learners are
given tacit approval to talk about
themselves, too. The amount of
(controlled) intimacy offered by the
teacher is nearly always reflected in what
the learners then share. However, this
activity achieves its best results only when
the teacher has developed a rapport with
the class and when the learners have
developed one amongst themselves.
Interestingly, the activity itself (and others
like it) also contributes significantly to the
development of such a rapport: what
Meddings and Thornbury refer to as
socialisation, one aim of which is to ‘…
make the classroom a discourse community
in its own right, where each individual’s
identity is validated, and where learners
can easily claim the right to speak’.
This, in turn, will help the learners
to ‘claim the right to speak’ outside the
classroom, too.
The activity clearly has a language
practice aspect (the rapid-fire Did ...?
questions), but in reality this is mainly a
preparation for the follow-up
communicative speaking fluency stage,
where the learners ask and talk openly
about their own and their countries’
histories, experiences and achievements.
Objectives relating to both accuracy and
fluency are achieved, and the
meaningful exchanges that result
contribute considerably to a richer
learning environment.
If we wanted to look at the format
of this form–fluency activity in a
template diagram, it might look like the
one in the box below:
Opening the door:
the teacher as a model for
a form–fluency task
1 Introduction/review of language
forms
2 Setting up of idea prompts
3 Practice of language forms in
information-gap/problem-solving
task
4 Preparation of fluency task
5 Expansion: teacher models fluency
6 Learners practise fluency: Stages 3,
4 and 5
7 Unplugged and spontaneous: more
opportunities for emerging language
ENGLISH
Tprofessional
EACHING
Pavilion Publishing (Brighton) Ltd,
PO Box 100, Chichester,
West Sussex, PO18 8HD, UK
Fax: +44 (0)1243 576456
Email: info@etprofessional.com
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The ETp website is packed with practical
tips, advice, resources, information and
selected articles. You can submit tips
or articles, renew your subscription
or simply browse the features.
www.etprofessional.com
Keeping the door open
The same format can be used for many
communicative grammar practice
activities: the difference is that the
learners ask the teacher questions first
(and follow them up in a live listening-
to-teacher activity) and then use the
same questions to ask about (and then
explore) their classmates’ experiences.
For example, a popular grammar
practice activity is Find someone who …
+ structure. So in Stage 1, the focus of
the introduction/review might be the
present perfect simple interrogative and
short answers (Have you ever ...? / Yes, I
have / No, I haven’t). In Stage 2, the
teacher might write several prompts, of
which some are true experiences they
have had, eg
a) use a parachute
b) ride an elephant
c) cross a desert
d) do an extreme sport
e) swim in the sea in winter
f) eat insects
g) get lost
h) have a pet
i) go to a live rock concert
j) be in trouble
In Stage 3, the class ask questions to
determine which of these the teacher
has actually done, then in Stage 4, they
revise what they found out and prepare
follow-up questions after question-word
prompts have been established. In Stage
5, the teacher models the fluency task
by expanding on the original answers
IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
Do you have ideas you’d like to share
with colleagues around the world?
Tips, techniques and activities; simple or
sophisticated; well-tried or innovative;
something that has worked well for you?
All published contributions receive
a prize! Write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
Writing for ETp
Would you like to write for ETp?
We are always interested in new writers
and fresh ideas. For guidelines and
advice, write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
and then the learners prepare their own
prompts and ask about and explore
experiences in Stage 6. Finally, in Stage
7, the teacher can elicit feedback and
stimulate whole-class conversation.

By first of all creating a relatively ‘safe’,
scaffolded, form-based information-gap
activity and by opening the door to our
own lives and backgrounds, we can also
open the door to exchanges that are
intrinsically interesting for our learners
... and in so doing, we may be opening
the door for them to the world of
speaking fluency, a door that may have
been locked previously. And it is also a
world in which meanings and ideas
which are important in our learners’
lives can provide an opportunity for
new and spontaneous language to
emerge. ETp
Hughes, J Lessons In Your Rucksack
Modern English Publishing 2005
Meddings, L and Thornbury, S Teaching
Unplugged Delta Publishing 2009
Alan Marsh lives in
Malta and has been an
EFL teacher for over 30
years. He is a freelance
teacher trainer on
Cambridge CELTA and
DELTA courses and also
works with primary,
secondary and adult
teachers on Comenius
and Grundtvig courses.
amarmski@go.net.mt
TALKBACK!
Do you have something to say about
an article in the current issue of ETp?
This is your magazine and we would
really like to hear from you.
Write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
Reviewing for ETp
Would you like to review books or other
teaching materials for ETp? We are always
looking for people who are interested in
writing reviews for us. Please email
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
for advice and a copy of our guidelines
for reviewers. You will need to give your
postal address and say what areas of
teaching you are most interested in.
17
 E S P

The Academic
Word
C
List
Simon Mumford ompared to general vocabulary,
teaching the Academic Word
List (AWL) presents its own
● Collocation: Words tend to combine
with other words in specific ways.
suggests solutions for ● Pronunciation: Words are often
special challenges. These can be multisyllabic and may, therefore, be
specific problems. summarised as follows: difficult to pronounce.
● Meanings: These are often complex Although these features can create
and abstract, making words difficult difficulties for both teachers and
to explain with a simple synonym or students, such challenges can also act as
translation. Furthermore, words may inspiration for new vocabulary activities.
have multiple meanings. The following techniques and activities
● Form: Words can have different forms are designed to deal with these various
depending on the class of word aspect of academic vocabulary.
(adjective, noun, verb, etc) eg stable –
stability – stabilise. Another problem Non-verbal
is the similarity between some pairs of
words, eg involve and evolve.
communication (NVC)
NVC is an important aspect of academic
● Context: Words are less frequent in
communication, especially for students
informal speech, but are found in
practising formal presentations. Gesture
formal contexts, such as academic
and voice can also be used in drills to
and news texts, lectures and formal
reinforce meaning, as in the following
presentations.
examples:

Word Gesture Voice

creative hands as fists either side of the head, deep breath, representing
suddenly opening, representing ideas inspiration

discrimination hands together out in front, then pulling away aggressive

from each other quickly

emerge hands closed together, then moving up and slow, emphasising process
opening out

focus hands moving quickly together so that fingers clear, definite

from both hands meet at one point

income pull hands towards you on in, put hands in positive, approving
pockets on come

prohibit hold hand in front, palm forward authoritarian

range spread arms out in a wide sweep extend the word, plenty of
movement in the pitch

visualise cover eyes with hand soft, whispery, representing

imagination

18 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Word symbols them to mark the boxes where they think 4 Bad weather has a negative impact
the two meanings are represented by one on food production.
It may be possible to write a word in word (they don’t need to know the word 5 New musical forms evolved from new
such a way that it becomes a mnemonic at this stage). Check that all the students instruments.
for its meaning. Students may like to have found the correct boxes, then ask 6 The number of people without access
invent their own word symbols. Here them to think of the words. Prompt with to clean water fell by 10 percent.
are some examples: first letters and other clues as necessary. 7 Traditional techniques use too
Check that they are aware of any changes much energy.
Symbol Word/explanation of pronunciation or stress, eg in contract 8 Hundreds of new manufacturing
(verb) and contract (noun). companies were established in 2009.
A(ss)-E(ss) assess: give a grade (A to E)
9 Rigid thought is less effective than
a??ume assume: contains an Decoding notes creativity.
uncertain element 10 Businesses must not discriminate
It is important for EAP students to be against female employees.
b+n+fit benefit: a positive result familiar with the abbreviations and
symbols used in note-taking. The
x5 excess: looks like ‘multiply
following example sentences each
Collocation boxes
by five’, ie too much!
contain at least one academic word in In this activity, the students find the
xp+ expand: + means and, x and reduced form. The sentences provide correct word for each collocation box.
+ are symbols meaning context, also in note form, which must There are two collocations for each
multiply and add, ie get be decoded by the students. word, reading across and down. For
bigger
example, the answer for box a) is labour:
1 Drg use rstctd b/c new med regs the labour movement and higher labour
4m u/a formula: written as a
2 Some comp’ents need 2b mdfd b4 costs. There are more words than boxes.
formula
prod
£und$ funds: amounts of money 3 New vhcls must b prchsd asap accurate capable distribute
4 Bad wthr  - impt food prod finance function incorporate involve
imp-act>x impact: the effect on 5 New mus 4ms evld  new instr labour legislate source
something (of an action)
6 No ppl w/o acc. 2 cln wat 10% a) (Example)
main tain maintain: keep the present 7 Trad techs use 2 much NRG
level or balance 8 100s new manuf cos est’d ‘09 the
9 Rgd thght < effect than cr8vty higher labour costs
uLtimATE ultimate: latest, ie most 10 Bus mustn’t discr vs f emps
recent movement
Solution, with academic words in bold: b) more
1 Drug use was restricted because of
Meaning grid new medical regulations. in- grammar
This activity demonstrates that many 2 Some components need to be measurements
academic words have more than one modified before production.
c) The Minister of
meaning. Give the students the grid below 3 New vehicles must be purchased as
without the answers (in bold) and ask soon as possible. the project

d) exactly what is
short find out two parts subject something get live or
article facts relating or taken away smaller/ stay in a our -ment in the
about a to each problem (from the less place project
book other total)
-d?
edition of a
issue e)
newspaper evenly -d resources
careful copies to
review
examination everyone

coming to a f)
deduction not
conclusion
extremely staff
start a
establish of understanding
company

control by (Solution: a) labour; b) accurate; c) finance;

occupy d) involve; e) distribute; f) capable)
force

write letters
to someone
correspond Memorable differences
Students may need help to remember
written
contract the difference between pairs of similar-
agreement
sounding words. One possibility is to

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 • 19

 The Academic Reading the news
This activity gives students pronunciation
Ask the students to match the formal
expressions (academic words in bold)
with their less formal equivalents in the
Word List practice in a realistic context. You will
need a text which includes some
academic vocabulary. For example:
table, and then continue in the same
way.



teach short memorable rhymes which
News is just coming in of a serious Formal (academic Less formal
illustrate the differences. Here are some words in bold)
examples: accident on the M15 involving three
cars. According to the authorities, bad 1 His language was a) unexpected
pursue/persuade weather was probably responsible for inappropriate for results
I wanted to pursue a career in statistics, the incident, in which five people were that context.
But he persuaded me to change to seriously injured. This is the third time
logistics. this week that an accident has occurred 2 I’ll monitor the b) not right for
process carefully. that place
consumption/contribution on the same road. Police are trying to
Because of increased petrol consumption, establish the exact cause of the 3 We should modify c) find out the
We had to raise the passengers’ accident, but the principal reason was our approach. reason
contribution. thought to be poor visibility. Forecasters
are predicting that bad weather will 4 The crossword d) see a
conduct/deduct was intensely difference
continue, and police are urging drivers
challenging.
His conduct was outrageous, to adapt their driving to the weather
So money was deducted from his wages. conditions. 5 We perceive a e) very difficult
distinction between
involve/evolve Write the academic words (in this the two.
Academic vocab involves much learning, example there are 11 of them, shown in
But as a result you evolve as a person. bold) on the board in the order they 6 There were several f) rather quiet
appear in the text. Then explain and unpredicted
feature/factor outcomes of our
The unusual features of this dress practise them. Next, tell the class that
chat.
Were the main factor in its success. you are a TV newsreader. Appoint one
student to be a camera operator and 7 She declined to g) do things
ask them to stand by the board. The comment on the differently
Word form drills class watch as you stand facing the story.
Write ten or so academic words on the board and read the story aloud, looking
8 The children h) watch things
board. Call out suffixes for each word, up and reading the words from the seem somewhat
and ask the students to give the board each time you come to one. At restrained.
complete word. For example: the same time, make eye contact with
the camera operator, as if looking into 9 I’ll investigate the i) didn’t give any
Teacher: -lyst
the camera. motive for her opinion
Students: analyst decision.
Teacher: -matic Then, give out copies of the story to
Students: automatic the whole class, take the role of the (Solution: 1b, 2h, 3g, 4e, 5d, 6a, 7i, 8f, 9c)
camera operator yourself, and ask them
You can control the level of difficulty
by how much of the word you give. For
all simultaneously to read the story as 
you did. Finally, collect all the copies
example, to elicit specific, you could say
and ask the students to use the words Learning academic words represents a
-cific, -fic or -ic. The table below gives
on the board to reconstruct the story in considerable challenge for many students,
some examples. To make it more
pairs or groups. and they will need as much support as
challenging, write only the base forms
on the board. possible. One possible solution, then, is
The right register to devise a range of techniques and
Base form Suffixes activities that highlight the various
Using academic words in everyday
aspects of the vocabulary: ie form,
analyse -lyst -lysis -tical
speech is often inappropriate, making
meaning, pronunciation and use. ETp
the speaker appear self-important. One
automate -matic -mation -tically way of highlighting this over-formality
Simon Mumford has
benefit -fited -ficial -ficially is simply to give the less formal been teaching in Izmir,
equivalent, making a joke of the Turkey, for 25 years.
create -ative -ivity -tion He teaches EAP to
speaker’s pretentiousness. Get the freshmen students at
discriminate -nation -ted students to practise self-important and Izmir University of
humorous attitudes with the following Economics. He is also
involved with exam
function -al -ality -ed dialogue: writing and editing
academic articles.
respond -sive -sible -se A: I’ve ceased conversing with John.
specify -fication -ically -ic (self-important)
B: Oh, you’ve stopped talking to him!
stable -ility -ilise -isation simonmumford@gmail.com
(humorous)

20 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS 

Creative tools for

creative minds
Laura Besley has a plan
to help children produce
a ‘super’ piece of creative
writing.
W
hen I first started
teaching creative
writing to children, I
found it hard to know
where to begin. How do you get them
to come up with ideas? How do you
get them to expand on those ideas?
How does this turn into a good piece
of creative writing? I have since come
up with a six-step plan.
Step 1:
Create a word map
Whenever you ask someone to create
something, you need to check that they
have the necessary tools to do so.
Carpenters need tools and wood.
Writers (in this case our students) need
tools, too. Their tools are words and
structure, and these can most easily be
provided by means of a word map.
Begin by giving the students a topic:
a ghost story, for example. I divide the
word-mapping process into parts.
Firstly, I ask for all the vocabulary
they can think of related to ghosts. This
can either be done as a class activity, or
the students can be put into pairs and
they can put their ideas on mini-
whiteboards or pieces of paper.
Remember to set a time limit (two to
five minutes, depending on age and
level) and keep reminding them of this.
You could even make it a game and see
which pair can come up with the most
words within the time limit. At this
stage, spelling is not important.
Get all the vocabulary onto the
board and divide it into nouns, verbs,
adjectives and adverbs. Even if the
students are too young to grasp the
difference, over time it will become
clear. You can separate the words by
using a table, different spidergrams or
different coloured pens. Later on, if you
need to refer to specific types of
words, you can refer to the different
columns or to the ‘purple words’, for
example.
After I have completed the
collection of the basic vocabulary, I
draw the students’ attention to the kind
of vocabulary I am looking for. I ask
them which words are ‘normal’ and
which are more ‘exciting’. Exciting
words I call ‘super’ words. For example:
Normal Super
happy thrilled, excited, jubilant ...
walk creep, tiptoe, sneak ...
said whispered, shouted, yelled ...
Secondly, you need to brainstorm ideas
for where the story will take place.
Again, encourage the students to use
‘super’ words, either while
brainstorming or while putting the
ideas onto the board. For example:
Teacher: Can I have an idea for where
the story will take place?
Student: A cave.
Teacher: Is your cave bright or dark?
Student: Dark.
Teacher: Is your cave warm or cold and
damp?
Student: Cold and damp.
Teacher: So, we have a cold, dark and
damp cave.

22 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS 
say
scream, shout, yell, adjectives
adverbs whisper, murmur scared —> frightened, terrified
to walk quietly
spooky, scary
to say happily softly old —> ancient, dilapidated,
very —> extremely, totally, haunted
absolutely, incredibly, ghost good —> great, wonderful,
completely, mega story fantastic, amazing
bad —> terrible, awful, evil
nouns dark —> gloomy
haunted house
verbs
house —> old, ancient, dilapidated
run —> dash, race
ghost witch
hide, scare, frighten
ugly evil
pearly walk —> amble, waddle, saunter
white
super-scary wrinkly creep, tiptoe, sneak

When I give the students two I use the following six-stage plan once they have learnt how to ‘plan’, it
options, I hold out my two hands, like a with my students: will become ingrained.
set of scales, to indicate that they can
For example:
have one option, or another. 1 Title
Thirdly, you have to work out who 1 Title The Haunted House
will be in the story. The students need 2 Beginning
to decide who their main character is. 2 Beginning My friend Gill and I
3 Action 1
Often at a young age it will be find a ghost.
themselves. Ideally, you’d like them to 4 Action 2
have another character so that there 3 Action 1 The ghost attacks us.
can be dialogue and interaction. With 5 Action 3
young students this can be an animal, a 4 Action 2 We throw water
sibling or a friend. They might even 6 Ending onto the ghost.
choose you!
Now you have the vocabulary, the Each student needs to think of 5 Action 3 The ghost laughs.
setting and the characters, the students something different, but it’s important
are ready to plan their story. to do the planning stage-by-stage as a 6 Ending Gill and I become
class. Thinking of a title can be the friends with the
Step 2: most difficult part, so allow them ghost.
Make a plan enough time. Once each student has a
I have made the mistake before of title, tell them that they need to think
simply saying to my students ‘write a of a beginning. Stress that this is not Step 3:
story’. This works fine for some the writing task, they just need to jot Set the rules
students – and spells complete disaster down a couple of words. Each stage Each student should be aware of what
for others! Sometimes there is no should only require a couple of words, is expected of them. How many words
content, sometimes the story doesn’t and you will need to monitor the do you want them to write? Do you
make sense, and at other times they students closely to make sure they are want it to include dialogue? How many
write on a topic completely unrelated not writing the full story. This process characters do you want the piece of
to what you are doing in class. will take a little time to consolidate, but writing to include?

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 • 23

 TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS
Creative tools for
creative minds



Before they start writing, I put the
rules up on the board. There needs to
be consideration for stronger and
weaker students, so I usually provide a
range, or a minimum.
 Word count: 100–150 words, or a
minimum of 100 words.
 ‘Super’ words: 10–15, or a minimum
of 10.
 ‘Super said’ words: 3–5 (if you are
including dialogue as a requirement).
Step 4:
Create the first draft
The first draft stage is for the students
to get their ideas onto paper. At this
stage, grammar, spelling and ‘super’
words are less important as there is an
editing stage later.
Tell the students that they need to
write their story and follow their plan. I
have known students to write a plan
and then write a completely different
story. Again, this is a process that needs
to be taught but, once done, it is
extremely useful. If necessary, ask them
to write in sections first.
Step 5:
Edit the draft
This is a useful stage as, over time, it
teaches the students to be more
critical of their own work. Can they
find their own mistakes? Can they
distinguish between ‘normal’ words and
‘super’ words?
Before they can start editing, they
need to check that they have the
minimum word count. If not, they need
to revise/add more before they can
start editing. Once they have fulfilled
this criterion, they receive a checklist
for their story (the checklists are a
replica of the ‘rules’ on the board,
which are modified according to the
class, level and, sometimes, student). A
checklist promotes student autonomy
and it enables the teacher to give more
support to those students who are
24 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Draft 2
The Haunted House
On a dark and gloomy night Gill and I are ambling through the deep
forest. We see a dilapidated house. I shout to Gill, “Look at that
house!” Gill whispers to me, “Let’s go check it out!”
We creep up the wooden stairs and push open the rusty door.
There is no-one inside. Suddenly we hear a noise. I scream, “What’s
that noise?” Gill and I tiptoe up the stairs and we see a pearly
white ghost. We are extremely scared. The ghost comes towards
us and we dash downstairs. We are in the kitchen and Gill throws
freezing cold water onto the ghost. The ghost chuckles. And then
we laugh. “Can we be friends?” I ask the ghost.
“Of course we can, replies the ghost. “I am
very lonely and want some friends.” Gill and
I tell the ghost we will be friends forever,
falling behind (whilst the speedy ones Step 6:
race ahead with their checklist). Produce a second
To help them find all the criteria on
their checklist, I give each student a
draft
highlighter pen. First, I ask them to Once the students have ticked everything
highlight the different words for said. If on their checklists, they can rewrite the
they have the required amount of ‘super piece on a clean sheet of paper or type it
said’ words, they can tick this on the up on the computer. If you like, you can
list. If not, they need to circle the get them to re-highlight all the ‘super
words for said and change them to said’ words and ‘super’ words to show
‘super said’ words. Once they have their parents that they are expanding
ticked off the ‘super said’ words, I give their vocabulary and to allow the
them a different colour and ask them students themselves to see the ‘exciting’
to highlight their other ‘super’ words. If work they have produced. ETp
they don’t have the required amount, Laura Besley taught
they can circle some ‘normal’ words and business English in
Germany for two years
change them into ‘super’ words, then and has also taught in
highlight them and tick them off the list the UK. She is currently
teaching at the British
once they have the correct amount. Council in Hong Kong.
This is when it is helpful for the
students to know the difference
between a verb and an adjective. They
can be prompted to use the vocabulary
from the word-mapping stage. besley.laura@gmail.com
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 W R I T I N G
Your wish is
my command
Wei-Wei Shen studies her students’ expectations.
believe it is important for teachers
I to find out about their students’
needs and beliefs and to use this
information to inform their
classroom practice. I have used action
research in the classroom to explore my
students’ expectations of a writing
teacher. In this article I will explain why
I decided to conduct this type of study,
show how I analysed my students’
responses and interpret the results.
Studying ‘good teachers’
and ‘good teaching’
It is the main purpose of teacher
education to show trainee teachers what
makes a good teacher or good teaching.
Jeremy Harmer points out that a good
language teacher is well-prepared, skilful
and adaptable and has a positive
personality and a good relationship with
the students. These qualities are
considered important from the
perspectives of language teacher trainers.
As adult students themselves often
have strong beliefs about what good
instruction should be like, research into
their perceptions of ‘a good teacher’ or
‘good teaching’ is important and of
value, and has been carried out in a
variety of educational settings. Martin
Cortazzi and Lixian Jin have investigated
students’ expectations of a good teacher
in some detail. The participants in their
research were selected from different
areas of the world, including South
Asia, the Middle East and the West.
They noticed that the responses of the
participants when asked to define a
good teacher could often be placed into
26 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
certain categories. Students who used
metaphors in their definitions of good
teachers employed expressions which
included: a friend, a parent, a source of
knowledge, a guide, a model, a moral
example, a gardener and an actor. Other
students used adjectives to define a good
teacher, including patient, humorous,
lively, friendly, responsible, sympathetic,
caring, warm-hearted, understanding and
helpful. Some described what good
teachers do, using the following
expressions: teaches students about life,
arouses students’ interest, uses effective
methods, explains clearly, has an answer
to students’ questions, organises a variety
of classroom activities and helps students
to study independently.
Gathering the
students’ ideas in
class can be important
because it is one way
of making sure that
they come up with their
own ideas rather than
copying them from
other sources
All these words and expressions
imply that teachers have to play
multiple roles and possess a variety of
good qualities in order to match their
students’ expectations. Although this
type of research has revealed the
students’ needs, beliefs and awareness
about good teachers in general, what
constitutes, for example, a good writing
teacher from the point of view of the
students does not seem to have been
discussed in detail. I decided, therefore,
that rather than doing more research
into the general principles of good
teaching practice, I would go a little
deeper in order to explore what makes a
good teacher in the context of a specific
language course.
Identifying the students’
expectations of a writing
teacher
I conducted my research in my writing
classes at a private university in Taiwan.
The 51 students were all third-year
English majors who had received two
years of writing training, following a
compulsory curriculum. I set the topic
What is a good writing teacher? – asking
them first to brainstorm three good
aspects of a writing teacher, and then to
continue to develop their main ideas in
order to produce the first draft of an
essay in class. Gathering the students’
ideas in class can be important because
it is one way of making sure that they
come up with their own ideas rather
than copying them from other sources.
The students submitted their final essays
in computer-processed documents,
following the required format of an
English essay, ie with an introduction,
including a clear thesis statement, body
paragraphs and a conclusion.
I studied the data in two main
stages. First of all, I had to read these
essays in order to get a general picture Stage 2
of the students’ viewpoints. At this In order to avoid analysing the data
Frequent terms used to describe
stage, I noted down the three key ideas subjectively and only partially, I a good writing teacher
that the students put in their thesis employed the software Antconc3.2.1w,
Items Keyword Frequency
statements, using these to get a basic developed by Laurence Anthony, to
classification of the terms which were 1 write 79
explore the students’ responses further.
relevant to their descriptions of a good (This free program can be downloaded 2 more 76
writing teacher. Then, all the from the internet.) 3 ideas 60
information in the essays was processed I found it easy to analyse word 4 help 59
using the Antconc3.2.1w software frequencies using Antconc3.2.1w. First, 5 skills 50
program to produce a more thorough I had to place all 51 essays in a text file. 6 know 45
list of the characteristics of a good The title of each essay – What is a good
7 different 42
writing teacher. This two-phase writing teacher? – had to be removed to
approach made analysis of the 8 knowledge 42
avoid obtaining too many keywords
qualitative data easy, and ensured that from the title. Then I clicked on the 9 improve 26
the quantitative results were reliable. The ‘wordlist’ function in the software to 10 feedback 24
results of the two analyses are presented generate a list of words along with their 11 grammar 24
separately in the following section. frequency count. 12 patience 24
The table opposite presents the 13 patient 24
keywords which appeared over ten times
14 ability 23
The majority of the in frequency in the students’ essays.
15 better 23
These terms all contribute to the
responses showed descriptions of a good writing teacher. 16 clear 22
that the students Some small words, such as the and of, 17 problems 22
were removed from the table because 18 methods 21
believed a good they were not content words, or did not 19 topic 18
teacher should help convey meanings in the context. Some 20 encourage 17
other words, such as writing and
21 understand 17
them to write more teacher, were also removed because they
22 vocabulary 16
are not used to describe the nature of a
writing teacher. In the end, 50 keywords 23 interesting 14
Analysing the students’ were left, revealing the fact that being a 24 mistakes 14

responses good writing teacher is multi-faceted. 25 practice 14

Although the association of many 26 professional 14
Stage 1 of the terms listed in the table with the 27 specific 14
Several common terms were evident in characteristics of a good writing teacher
28 thinking 14
the thesis statements of the students’ are obvious, it should be noted that
29 content 13
essays. These included: patience, skills of with some words it may not be easy to
teaching writing, experience, knowledge, make sense of their meanings 30 develop 13
good lesson plan, good personality. Other immediately. Detailed explanations are 31 problem 13
frequent terms included: knowing as follows: 32 skill 13
students’ problems and giving feedback. 33 suggestions 13
● The word more (Item 2) has been
There were also a few extra terms used 34 difficulties 12
retained in the table because after
by some students to support the
checking this word in context, it was 35 kind 12
previous ones, including: giving time to
found that it normally occurred 36 motivation 12
revise, encouraging students to write,
together with the word write (Item 1). 37 organisation 12
motivating students, friendly, open-
In other words, the majority of the 38 inspire 11
minded, having passion, clear
responses showed that the students
explanation, interesting teaching and 39 structure 11
believed a good teacher should help
good interaction in class. 40 styles 11
them to write more.
Although this first stage of analysis 41 afraid 10
classified the students’ responses into ● The word know (Item 6) refers to a 42 best 10
several general categories without too very broad concept because it is used
43 correct 10
much fuss, it was not easy to obtain a to mean that a good teacher needs to
precise calculation of the frequency of know what the students have to know 44 elements 10
each term which was used by the about writing, what the students 45 experience 10
students. Moreover, manual analysis mean in their writings and what the 46 explain 10
based on one person’s judgement may students’ problems are during their 47 objective 10
carelessly exclude some other important writing process. In other words, know 48 parts 10
terms mentioned by the students. For is frequently used to refer a teacher’s 49 positive 10
this reason I used a second method of knowledge and understanding of the
50 sentence 10



analysing the data in this study. students (Item 8).

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 • 27

 Your wish is
my command



● Another word, different (Item 7),
frequently collocates with methods,
genres, skills and problems, so this
word has been kept – to represent the
idea that a good writing teacher has
to use different teaching techniques in
order to solve the students’ various
writing problems.
● The word afraid (Item 41) is listed in
the table because it shows the students’
affect or feeling in the process of
learning writing, and implies that a
good teacher is one who can
understand the students’ fears.
● The keyword objective (Item 47) was
often associated with another
keyword, feedback (Item 10), so it is
clear that the students find it
important to receive fair grades,
comments and correction from their
teachers.
● Finally, another two keywords,
elements (Item 44) and parts (Item
48), show that to write an essay has
to involve learning many aspects,
including the generation of ideas
(Item 3), grammar (Item 11),
vocabulary (Item 22), organisation
(Item 37), structure (Item 39) and
sentence (Item 50).
Apart from highlighting some key terms
that can be difficult to interpret, I
should also point out that the frequency
count in the table only reflects how often
the key terms were used by the students
and not how the terms were used. It is
perhaps not fair to jump to the
conclusion that a term that appears
earlier is more valuable than another
that appears later. For example, we can
see that terms like patience (Item 12)
and patient (Item 13) can be combined
as the same idea and then their total
frequency can be calculated as 48 times.
So, in this case, patience should be
regarded as a highly important quality
of a good writing teacher, with its
significance being similar to the words
know (Item 6) and knowledge (Item 8).
Similarly, problems (Item 17), which
occurs 22 times, can be combined with
Item 31 problem (13 times) and Item 34
difficulties (12 times).

28 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Overall, thanks to this classroom study,
I have reached a greater understanding
ENGLISH
of what makes a good writing teacher
according to my students’ opinions:
personality (patience, in particular) is an Tprofessional
EACHING
outstanding feature, along with
competence (the underlying specialist
knowledge) and performance (the This is your magazine.
observable skills). We want to hear from you!
It is interesting to note that
patient/patience turned out to be one of
the most frequently mentioned words.
This finding may be of some use in the
development of teacher education. So IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
often in teacher training programmes or Do you have ideas you’d like to share
ELT conference sessions, we are told a with colleagues around the world?
lot about the importance of having ELT Tips, techniques and activities;
knowledge and skills, but there are fewer simple or sophisticated; well-tried
sessions aimed at teaching or encouraging or innovative; something that has
us to learn how to be patient, how to
worked well for you? All published
develop good personality traits such as
contributions receive a prize!
friendliness, how to become passionate
Write to us or email:
about our subject and display this passion
to our students. Being patient is identified helena.gomm@pavpub.com
by Martin Cortazzi and Lixian Jin as an
important factor in being a good teacher
in contexts outside that of Taiwan where I
conducted my research. It would seem,
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concrete guidelines on developing this This is your magazine and we would
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characteristics of a good teacher is to
decide on what can be described as
‘ideal’. For example, a teacher can be Writing for ETp
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these issues seem to be very important always interested in new writers and
to my 51 Taiwanese university students,
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so we may well wonder how these
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our teaching careers. ETp
Cortazzi, M and Jin, L ‘Bridges to
Visit the
learning: metaphors of teaching, learning
and language’ In Cameron, L and Low, G
ETp website!
(Eds) Researching and Applying The ETp website is packed with practical
Metaphor CUP 1999 tips, advice, resources, information and
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Education 2007 or articles, renew your subscription
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 IN THE CLASSROOM

Spontaneous
teacher talk
Richard Gallen y first language is English verb form, but too fast for me to be able

highlights the language

he uses, as he uses it.
M and I live and teach
English in London. I also
study Spanish and I keep
a diary of my experiences of being a
student in these classes. I have lived in
to take it down. I’ll ask her to go back,
ask her what she’d said but she’ll have
lost it. Gone! Like gold. Lost in that
moment of communication.’

Often at the end of the first ten minutes

Spanish-speaking countries for about
of a lesson, blisters would already be
three years, on and off, and have
forming on my fingers from trying to
managed to stall at the Common
write down some of the language I was
European Framework B2 level.
hearing. I wanted to be able to speak
In my diary, I focus on many
like my teacher, and the fact that I
different aspects of learning a language
could understand so much of what she
in a classroom setting, but there are
said made me think that this wasn’t
themes that crop up again and again.
impossible. I knew all the words she was
One of these is teacher talk.
using (to a greater or lesser extent); it
I understand most of what my
was just the way she combined these
teachers say. However, there is a large
gap between what I understand and
what I can confidently produce. This is I understand most
a source of frustration.
The following extract describes a of what my Spanish
small class of seven students, including teachers say, but there
myself:
‘The class kicked off today talking about
is a large gap between
medical care because R missed the last what I understand
class because he had to have an x-ray
done. Everyone had something to say! and what I can
The teacher was quite worked up about
how bad GPs were in Spain. It’s not
confidently produce
often we see her so animated. I tried to
get down bits and pieces of what she words that I wanted to capture.
said because there was some great Unfortunately, I spent all my energy
language in there, but she was talking attempting to take notes and had none
too fast and I had to pay more attention left to be able to assimilate fully what she
because otherwise I’d miss what she had said and respond before the class
was trying to say.’ had moved on. If I asked my teacher to
slow down so I could take notes, the
Here is another example, which relates
conversation would lose all naturalness.
to a different class with a different teacher:
Having lived in L2 contexts, I was
‘She’ll say something very interesting. A better able to recognise and attend to a
lovely expression, often at the start of large amount of the language that my
an utterance, some sort of subjunctive teacher was using, but I am also aware

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 • 29

 Spontaneous
teacher talk



that language learners in general can
recognise a great deal, especially when
teachers subtly grade their language for
clarity. The problem is that, as a learner,
I can’t then organise these items into
meaningful stretches of speech. I
became upset at how unaware my
teachers were of the potential of their
own spontaneous output as an
opportunity for learning.
Conversational contexts
As a result, I started paying more
attention to what, in my own output,
could be useful for my students. The
more I thought about this, the more I
also became aware of the precious
spontaneity of what I was saying. This
was especially true in open-class
conversations and discussions, where I
became less of a teacher and more of a
participant in the conversation.
The moments in the class when I
was being the least ‘teacher-like’ were
the moments when I should most be
teaching! And this is perhaps the
language teacher’s paradox. We teach
language for communication, but this
real communication only takes place
when we are not teaching.
One aspect of a language teacher’s
role that is often overlooked is that of
simply highlighting what we say, of
being able to skilfully capture the
language we use as we interact with
students in the class. I would argue that
this is as least as important as the ways
in which we mould, clarify and correct
what our students have to say.
In this article I am going to focus on
how we can highlight the more naturally
recurring unplanned language that we use.
One aspect of our teacher talk is the
way we naturally respond in conversation.
Here is an extract from the beginning of a
conversation between me and a student
(probably around the CEF B1 level),
who spends most of his weekends
drinking in the pub and sleeping:
Juan I went to London Zoo at the
weekend.
Me The zoo? Juan, you don’t seem like
the type of person who likes zoos!
I have highlighted in bold the language
that I put up on the board just after I said
30 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
this. I didn’t focus on it at that moment, I
just put it up. A few students chipped in
and the conversation fizzled out and we
moved on. But the language remained. By
capturing our responses like this in their
natural habitat, we provide valuable
information on how the language is used.
For example, according to the Corpus
of Contemporary American English, a
significant number of the occurrences of
‘the type of person who’ are in questions
or negatives like the one above.
Before I put ‘You don’t seem like the
type of person who likes zoos’ on the
board, I asked the students if they
could recall what I had just said.
Whenever I do this, their recollections
are often slightly different from what I
actually said, often a preposition or
something is missing or different. With
the above example, one student heard
‘tyber person’, so taking a snapshot of
the language we use in this way can be a
useful method of raising awareness of
The moments in
the class when I was
being the least ‘teacher-
like’ were the moments
when I should most
be teaching
the features of connected speech. As
Richard Schmidt puts it, the students’
attention is drawn (on the spot) to the
gap between their own English and that
of a proficient speaker.
What I just described may seem like
a big clumsy intervention in what was
essentially just a brief chat at the
beginning of the class, but I use the
analogy of taking a snapshot of the
language because that is what it was. By
putting it up on the board and pointing
out a couple of features, we diverted from
the conversation for all of 30 seconds.
Here’s another example. A student
(from a different class, averaging closer
to a B2 on the CEF scale) tells me that
one of the things she likes to do on a
Sunday afternoon is to sit outside a café
in the park. It’s January so my response
is ‘Isn’t it a bit cold, though?’ In this
intonation unit, though isn’t stressed
and so is often missed by learners. It is,
however, an exceptionally common
discourse marker in British spoken
English. I repeated it and put it on the
Perhaps one of the
most useful purposes
we serve as language
teachers is being aware
of our own language in
‘spontaneous unfolding
conversation’
board. In capturing the language in this
way, I drew my students’ attention to
what would otherwise have been quite a
hidden feature. Holding the word up for
observation as I used it, we could see
that though as an adverb often appears
after an adjective as a negative
afterthought to something we have said
or as a response. There’s a pattern here
as well: a bit + adjective + though:
It was an enjoyable film, a bit long,
though.
A little later, my student goes on to
explain that she doesn’t mind the cold,
to which I reply ‘OK, fair enough’.
The Cambridge Advanced Learners
Dictionary defines fair enough as
‘something you say to show you understand
why someone has said something’, but this
misses the pragmatic sense that the word
can convey, which is often ‘OK, now I can
see it from your point of view, but perhaps
I didn’t before’. This would be quite a
slippery meaning to get across outside
the immediacies of a conversation, so it
seems that not only is it useful for the
students that we point out this
language, but that dealing with it like
this is actually the only way to ‘teach’ it.
Over the past 20 years, corpus data
has revealed that a great part of spoken
English is made up of recurrent strings
of words, often referred to as lexical
chunks or phrases. These phrases are
such a fundamental part of the
organisational patterns of spoken
language that, according to James
Nattinger and Jeanette DeCarrico, they
‘can only really be understood and
assimilated in spontaneously unfolding
conversation’.
So perhaps one of the most useful
purposes we serve as language teachers
is being aware of our own language in
‘spontaneous unfolding conversation’
and being able to capture it for our
students without interrupting the flow
of this conversation. I have observed
many classes, but I rarely see teachers
exploiting the language they use in this
way. The only time a teacher seems to
focus explicitly on a part of their output
is when a student actually asks for it. It
seems we need to get better at referring
to the language we use as we use it, and
one way of doing this is by getting
better at recording stretches of language
quickly and clearly on the board. This is
a skill we should be able to hone, being,
as we are, proficient speakers and
language teaching professionals.
Organisational contexts
In a 1994 study, Rod Ellis noticed that
some of the students acquired formulae
(lexical chunks) that ‘occur most in the
social and organizational contexts that
arise in the classroom environment’.
I have already focused on the
importance of highlighting the language
we use in conversational contexts, but
what about organisational contexts?
I have often noticed my Spanish
teachers using language that I struggle
to produce myself. Using the
subjunctive verb form, in particular, can
be quite a hurdle for intermediate
learners of Spanish. I have, however,
often heard these verb forms embedded
in fixed expressions my teachers use.
The following was something a teacher
said to me in a one-to-one class as she
was pointing out an exception to a rule:
‘Solamente para que sepas …’ (just
so that you know)
I noticed she would use the
subjunctive when she was giving me
something or saying what I needed.
Another area where I could be quite
inaccurate was putting the object pronoun
before the verb. So I noticed language like:
‘Te puedo dejar la fotocopia …’ (I
can leave you the photocopy)
I wrote in my diary:
‘It seems like this is where the class is
most useful for me: when I notice things
she says while she is explaining
language … not the actual language she
is explaining!’
Because of these experiences, I became
(more) aware that explanations are
sometimes not very useful, but I also
became aware of how it can often be
difficult for the teacher to really know
what language the student is noticing. If
we adopt an approach to teaching that
incorporates the highlighting of a wide
variety of teacher talk, there may be a
better chance of our focus coinciding
with that of our students.
One aspect of teacher talk whose
possibilities I became more aware of as
a result of the above two experiences
was the formulae I use as I manage a
class. Here are some examples:
What I’d like you to do is ...
I just want to have a quick look at ...
I’m going to have to stop you there ...
This organisational language is as
naturally recurring in a classroom as the
conversational aspects that I mentioned
before, and because of its ‘naturalness’
these phrases are there to be exploited in
all their functional and pragmatic glory.
The only time
a teacher seems to
focus explicitly on a
part of their output
is when a student
actually asks for it
I used an online corpus-producing
program and fed in 60,000 words’ worth
of transcripts from a political discussion
programme on BBC radio called Any
Questions, which comes as close to real
discussion language in a formal context
as I’m going to get without a
subscription to a bigger database.
It turns out that the most commonly
occurring phrase with have to is going to:
I’m afraid we’re going to have to make
some concessions.
Well, she’s going to have to wait.
I teach a lot of business students and
often the role of the business teacher
can be similar to that of a chairperson
in a meeting. As you can see from the
above examples, going to have to is often
used in negative contexts, as a warning:
to tell people about something they
probably don’t want to hear.
have + a + noun, as in I just want to
have a quick look at, has the function of
softening the language by making it
more informal and showing solidarity
with our interlocutor. Here are some
other examples:
have a try, have a chat with, have a word
with, have a read of this, have a walk,
have a go
I struggle with Spanish object pronoun
positions but, in a similar way, Spanish
learners of English have difficulties
producing di-transitive verb patterns like
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
want somebody to do something, so they
may notice (or it might be worth
pointing out) the grammar in what I’d
like you to do is …, even though they will
probably never need such an expression,
unless they are teachers themselves.
As you can see, there are grammar
patterns embedded within these
constantly recurring ‘teacher speak’
formulae that are definitely worth
expanding on.

In my Spanish classes, I have no
problem being able to pay attention to
what my teachers are saying as well as
focusing on how they are saying it, but I
do have problems actually recording
this language. I wrote angrily at the end
of one of my classes:
‘It should be the teacher who has
blisters on her fingers at the end of the
class, not me!’
The examples I have given are from
different intermediate levels, but teachers
who are aware of all aspects of the
language they use in the classroom will
find that this approach works just as well
both at lower and higher levels. ETp
Nattinger, J R and DeCarrico, J Lexical
Phrases and Language Teaching OUP
1992
Ellis, R, Tanaka, Y and Yamazaki, A
‘Classroom interaction, comprehension
and the acquisition of L2 word meanings’
Language Learning 44 1994
Schmidt, R ‘The role of consciousness in
second language learning’ Applied
Linguistics 11 (2) 1990
Richard Gallen has
been teaching English
as a foreign language
for 12 years. He
currently teaches at
the London School of
English, a private
language school in
west London, UK.
richgallen@hotmail.com
TALKBACK!
Do you have something to say about
an article in the current issue of ETp?
This is your magazine and we would
really like to hear from you.
Write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
31
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Ecological
intelligence
Linda Ruas instigates education for sustainable development.
n his book Emotional Intelligence,
I Daniel Goleman developed the
argument that non-cognitive skills
can be as important in the
workplace as IQ. Next, he turned his
attention to social relationships and
published Social Intelligence. In his latest
book, Ecological Intelligence, Goleman
writes about how ‘radical transparency’
(the availability of complete information
about all aspects of a product’s history)
will help us all make better decisions in
consuming and business. Businesses
need this information to become as
sustainable, healthy and humane as
possible, and we all need it to make
informed choices about what we
consume and how we act. We need to
find a balance between our actions being
good for the environment, good for our
health and good for society, especially
in developing countries. We need to be
more aware of the short- and long-term
consequences of everything we do.
Ian McCallum, analytical
psychologist, wilderness guide and poet,
in his book on ecological intelligence,
has taken a different tack: he links
ecological intelligence to our psyche,
from a biological and poetical
perspective, arguing that we need to
We can choose
to discuss, read about
and focus on topics
which may, ultimately,
lead to the survival
of our species
34 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
develop this intelligence in order to
survive as a species. We need to know
more about and feel more the links
between ourselves and every aspect of
the natural world.
Ecological intelligence
and English teaching
So what is the link between this and
teaching English? I see three main ways
in which they are connected:
1 There is a general movement in this
direction all around us, which we
cannot ignore. We are in the middle of
the UNESCO decade of Education for
Sustainable Development; the UK
education standards agency Ofsted now
assesses sustainability as part of its
school and college inspection; and an
ever-increasing number of businesses
now have an environmental policy.
2 Unlike other subjects, such as
geography, physics and computer
programming, we have no prescribed
content for our teaching, so we are often
free to choose the content ourselves.
Just as CLIL is used to teach a school
subject through the medium of a second
language, we choose relevant, interesting
content to develop our learners’
language skills. We can choose to further
the media hype and analyse the latest
gossip about celebrities, send out blatant
messages about the wonders of
materialistic success by imagining what
we would buy if we won the lottery, and
incite jealousy and hopelessness by
reading about amazing new hotel
complexes in the Middle East. Or we
can choose to discuss, read about and
focus on the vocabulary and grammar of
topics which may, ultimately, lead to the
survival of our species.
3 Finally, teaching about sustainable
development is an excellent way of
getting away from worksheets and using
real, authentic materials, such as news
reports, podcasts and short videos, with
our learners to encourage them to
engage with language, opinions and
information that directly affect them.
Ecological intelligence
and the English
classroom
Warmers
As a warm-up for a lesson on
sustainable development, you could cut
up the following quotes into individual
words (or phrases for lower levels) and
get your learners to re-order them.
‘Education for sustainable development
enables people to develop the
knowledge, values and skills to
participate in decisions about the way
we do things, individually and
collectively, both locally and globally,
that will improve the quality of life now
without damaging the planet for the
future.’ (UNESCO)
‘In every deliberation, we must consider
the impact on the seventh generation ...
even if it requires having skin as thick as
the bark of a pine.’ (Iroquois Nations)
Alternatively, you could use the quotes
for a dictogloss (a quick dictation, with
the learners noting down the key words
and then reconstructing the text in small
groups). Then get them to discuss how
much they know about sustainability.
They will be sharing and developing
their ecological intelligence.
Next, if you’re lucky enough to have
access to the internet in your classroom,
play the one-minute video of The
Impossible Hamster
(www.impossiblehamster.org), asking the
learners to answer the focus questions
What is the problem? and What is the
solution? They can then discuss the
implications of what is happening to
our world.
Activities
Here are some ideas for using an
ecological intelligence approach to
replace standard classroom activities on
three popular topics.
1 Mobile phones
Standard practice: a lesson on
comparatives and superlatives, with
groups comparing their mobile phones
and reading and discussing authentic
material on the latest phone deals.
Ecological intelligence approach: a
staged reading lesson with an authentic
article about how mobile phone use could
be contributing to the disappearance of
bees, eg www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/
wildlife/7778401/Mobile-phones-
responsible-for-disappearance-of-honey-
bee.html; and how the mining of coltan,
used to make mobiles and other electronic
equipment, may be causing widespread
sexual violence, massacre and the possible
extinction of mountain gorillas in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, eg
www.globalpost.com/dispatch/kenya/
100118/congo-conflict-minerals-mining.
The productive stage of the lesson could
be groups writing to their local MP (in
the UK, via the www.writetothem.com
website), practising the language of
clear explanation and persuasion to get
something done about it.
2 Issues OUP 2004
Water
Standard practice: present and practise
present passives through study of the
precipitation–evaporation cycle of water.
Ecological intelligence approach: set
some viewing tasks for the ‘Story of
Stuff’ short video on bottled water
(www.storyofstuff.com). Discuss all the
issues involved and then extract the
processes. The productive phase here
could be a roleplay, with the learners
explaining the problems to the school
management and suggesting they only
stock One Water, an ethical bottled
water alternative.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
3 Clothes/fashion
Standard practice: feed in new terms
for an ever-changing world of clothes
and accessories and practise these by
describing pictures and each other.
Ecological intelligence approach:
investigate and play the interactive game
about the ‘labour behind the label’ in
the context of campaigning for a sweat-
shop-free Olympic Games:
www.labourbehindthelabel.org/campaigns/
itemlist/category/226-campaign-resources
Other ideas and
resources
● Lessons on energy supplies could
discuss peak oil and how we need to
find alternatives (www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Ulxe1ie-vEY).
● Lessons on food could discuss re-using
waste, food sovereignty, industrial
biofuels, supermarkets and organic
farming.
● The class could read/watch short
videos and discuss ideas such as those
in McDonough and Braungart’s
Cradle to Cradle and Ellen
MacArthur’s ‘circular economy’
(www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/
education/publications).
● We could practise first and second
conditionals with the UK
government’s online 2050 calculator
tool (http://my2050.decc.gov.uk/).
● We could plan listening
comprehension lessons with simple
‘What is the problem and what are the
solutions?’ focus tasks with video clips
from Ecotube (www.eco-tube.com).
● We could get our learners to prepare,
carry out and report on surveys on
sustainable practices and ecological
intelligence.
● We could get our learners to express
real, rather than invented, opinions
about issues that matter. For example,
they could find and promote an issue
they believe in on an activist website,
eg www.avaaz.org or http://38degrees.
org.uk/. (Avaaz means ‘voice’ and 38
degrees is the angle of slope needed
to start an avalanche.)
There are some published EFL and
ESOL materials which address these
areas, such as Macmillan’s Global series;
OUP’s Global Issues and Lancashire
Global Education Centre’s Global
Dimension Resource Pack
(www.globaldimension.org/resourcesearch
/details.aspx?id=1568). There are also
many materials-light, learner-centred
ways of exploring these issues in the
classroom, such as working in groups to
discuss and label a diagram of a tree
with causes (roots) and solutions
(branches) of a particular problem. See
the Reflect for ESOL Resource Pack
(www.skillsforlifenetwork.com/?atk=964).
There is an excellent short film called
Snapshots, which won a Silver Dolphin
prize at Cannes and has just been
approved by the Austrian government
for ESD use in secondary schools in
Austria (www.momentaufnahme.at). This
could be another good starting point
for developing our learners’ ecological
intelligence: dictate several key words
from the film beforehand and, while
watching, the learners can divide these
into ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’, and
then discuss the issues.

Our world is changing, especially with
the three inherently linked crises:
climate change, peak oil and food
shortages. Maybe, by improving our
learners’ ecological intelligence, we can
all move in the right direction. ETp
Goleman, D Emotional Intelligence: Why
It Can Matter More Than IQ Bantam 2006
Goleman, D Social Intelligence: The New
Science of Human Relationships Bantam
2007
Goleman, D Ecological Intelligence: The
Coming Age of Radical Transparency
Penguin 2010
McCallum, I Ecological Intelligence:
Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature
Fulcrum 2009
McDonough, W and Braungart, M Cradle
to Cradle North Point Press 2002
Sampedro, R and Hillyard, S Global
UNESCO ESD site with teaching and
learning strategies:
www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/
After teaching in Brazil
and Japan, Linda Ruas
is now working at GCC,
London, UK, as a CELTA
and DTLLS(ESOL)
trainer and ESOL
teacher. She is UCU
Environmental Rep and
her particular interest is
bringing topical issues
into the classroom.
lindaruas@hotmail.com
35
 CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT
In praise of improvising
Lisette Allen insists on the importance of being prepared – then being prepared to improvise.
ne of the essential things we
O learn as trainee teachers is the
importance of planning. Writing
a lesson plan with a series of scheduled
activities, each with its own estimated
timing and a clear measurable objective or
learning outcome, is a key step towards
becoming a fully-fledged language teacher.
As we gain more experience and
confidence, that carefully thought-out plan
may become a couple of hastily scribbled
bullet points, but we still think about how
to structure a class in order to get the best
from the time and materials available and,
therefore, from our students.
Planning is widely acknowledged to
be the key to success in the wider world
outside the language classroom, too.
Many of us will be familiar with the five
Ps: Perfect Planning Prevents Poor
Performance. However, while we would
never want our classes to descend into
shambolic chaos, neither is teaching a
mechanical process in which we cram the
heads of our students with endless lexis
and grammatical structures. We are
human beings, and it is natural to deviate
or head off on a tangent.
Digressions
As anyone who’s ever attended any
meeting will know, if there’s an agenda,
there’ll be someone in the room who will
do everything they can to stray from it.
And why not? The art of digression is a
recognised rhetorical technique as old as
the Ancient Greeks – and going off at a
tangent can be fun. If we want to attempt
to recreate as genuine a setting for
communication as possible, then surely
that means leaving space for students to
express feelings on topics we may not
have included in our pre-class brainstorm.
That said, successful classroom
management depends on dedicating an
appropriate amount of time to activities:
it is obvious to even the inexperienced
teacher that a lesson can flag if students
spend too long doing similar tasks.
Conversely, while having some time
pressure can be motivating and add a
dynamic energy to an activity, little
38 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
learning will take place if students are
rushed through something without
having a proper chance to absorb it.
Decisions
How long, then, is ‘too long’ for a task?
That depends on many factors: the level
of the students, their mood, whether the
class is before lunch or after, their interest
in that particular topic, their reasons for
learning English … In other words, it is
down to you as a teacher to decide how
much time to spend before moving on. A
good teacher will be capable of sticking to
the timings on their lesson plan; a great
one will be adept at modifying it to meet
the needs of the learners on the day.
However much preparation you do or
however much experience you have, there
will be times when something just doesn’t
work. Perhaps you’re feeling pleased with
yourself because you’ve thought of a
creative way of practising modals in your
observation class. You spend hours
ransacking your house for items for your
‘Guess the object’ activity. However, your
class of teenagers don’t want to play
along: they eagerly plunge their hands
into your sack of goodies and shout out
‘It’s a toothbrush!’ without using the
target structure. You try to rescue the
activity and make them start again – on
your lesson plan, this is supposed to take
15 minutes – but it seems forced. Your
DOS says you shouldn’t have tried to spin
things out. He’s right, of course, but you
were being observed so you attempted to
follow your lesson plan to the letter. What
else were you supposed to do?
Development
If something doesn’t work, the best answer
sometimes is ‘don’t fix it’. In some
circumstances it is best to abandon an
activity and move on. This is hard when
we have invested time and emotional
energy in preparing something we think
will be stimulating, but a vital part of our
professional development as teachers is
reflecting on what didn’t go so well and
learning from our failures. An observer
will be more impressed by a trainee who
responds appropriately to the actual
situation in the classroom – in other words,
who is capable of improvising – rather
than one who followed the lesson plan to
the letter even when it became blindingly
obvious that something wasn’t working.
There are other factors that may force
us to modify our carefully thought-out
lesson plans. Half the students may be
away on a team-building week, making
our planned meeting simulation a non-
starter. Coursebooks go missing;
photocopiers and printers break down.
It’s always useful to have a plan B, C
and D for when life’s little difficulties
inevitably crop up. Successful teachers
can come up with all kinds of creative
approaches when pushed outside their
comfort zone. It’s also worth having a list
of activities in your head that you can
do without any materials, just in case
inspiration is lacking when disaster strikes!

The art of improvisation isn’t just about
learning how to make the best of a bad
situation. Sometimes I come up with my
best ideas, not hunched over a desk in
the staffroom but while working with my
students: in other words, under the glare
of the spotlight. A different twist on a
tried-and-tested task might occur – ‘Why
don’t I get them to brainstorm words they
associate with these holiday destinations
before I show them the adverts?’ – or, every
now and again, I might even come up with
a completely new activity while ‘on stage’.
Teachers shouldn’t be afraid to experiment
and to both follow and develop their own
instincts. In this way, they can help make
the language classroom an enjoyable
place to be while, at the same time,
maximising the potential for the learning
and growth of their students. ETp
Lisette Allen has taught
in the UK, France and
the Czech Republic. She
is currently based in
Prague, where she is a
lecturer in Academic
English at Charles
University.
lisette_allen@hotmail.com
 LANGUAGE LOG

Mixed and mixed-up conditionals

John Potts charts the intricacies and idiosyncrasies,
the contradictions and complications that make
the English language so fascinating for teachers and teaching.
In this issue, he mixes it up with conditionals.

f you would only take me back again, Things would be But now let’s look at a typical native-speaker example

‘I so different then’ sang The Hollies in their 1969 hit

‘Sorry, Suzanne’, thereby perhaps confusing long-ago
language learners with that conditional clause, as
generations have learnt that ‘if and would is no good’. And
usually it isn’t. But sometimes it is, as here – so, why?
where the if + would combination is decidedly not good –
at least, to (most) British ears:

‘Terry Trippler, American author of the Airline Rules Guide,

Here are some more examples of good if + would
combinations, along with if + will:
● ‘I would be grateful if you would postpone the interview
until I have had the chance to meet my adviser.’
(advicenow.org.uk)
● ‘I would be grateful if you would keep my CV on file for
any future possibilities.’ (careers.guardian.co.uk)
● ‘I will show you the way, Mr Hubbard, if you will kindly
follow me. Or perhaps you had better go in front.’
(Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray)
● ‘If you will just listen to me, then you’ll understand, Nurse
Bolan. Why? Why won’t you listen to me?’ (Risky
Business, 1983)
As these examples show, would and will are being used to
ask for someone’s willingness to do something – the would
examples being more ‘distant’ and, therefore, more polite,
while the will examples are more immediate. Indeed, in the
fourth example, the will is insistent – we often say things
like ‘If you will just/only let me/listen/calm down, etc ...’
when we’re trying (rather desperately) to get someone to do
something against their wishes.
The will/would being employed here is a modal verb that
expresses the grammatical subject’s volition – their wishes,
willingness, etc – and when will/would are used as modals
of volition, then the combinations if + will and if + would
are perfectly correct. We could class such sentences as
examples of ‘mixed conditionals’ – that is, conditional
sentences that don’t adhere to the basic pattern of tense
forms found in the classic ‘first, second and third
conditionals’ seen in almost every coursebook and
grammar practice book.
said: “If we’d have told people that travelling by air was going
to entail what it does today, they’d have said ‘no way’.”’
(BBC news, August 2006)
This is parallelled by a similar construction using wish:
‘As I look back on things that I wished we would have done
differently when I was at Apple ...’ (ex-Apple CEO John
Sculley)
Both examples are from North Americans, and the extra
would is seen as acceptable by some American English
speakers, especially in spoken English. Whether this is still
regarded as non-standard is controversial. Some British
English speakers follow the American pattern, too, but I
think it is fair to say that this is usually regarded as non-
standard (for example, in a Cambridge FCE exam). On the
other hand, you’ll find lots of examples in British 19th-
century novels, such as those of Charles Dickens and
Elizabeth Gaskell, in dialogue spoken by working-class
characters. There, the use of non-standard forms was
clearly an expression of both their sociolect and dialect.
Interestingly, I haven’t come across any media examples of
native speakers forming conditionals with an intrusive will –
although lots of language learners do form such sentences!
However, I’ve noticed a growing tendency for native
speakers to get their verb forms in a twist when talking
about the hypothetical or counterfactual past, properly the
domain of the third conditional and its variants.
In the summer of 2011, much of the UK was gripped by the
phone-hacking scandal involving the now defunct News of the
World newspaper, owned by News International. A very senior
NI executive, James Murdoch, made this statement as he
gave evidence to a House of Commons committee of enquiry:

40 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 LANGUAGE LOG Mixed and mixed-up conditionals

‘... but if I knew then what we know now we would have ● ‘In my view, the time was right to remove him in January
taken more action around that and moved faster to get to – trophies could have been won if that action was taken.’
the bottom of these allegations.’ (transcript of proceedings, (UK football pundit)
The Guardian, 21 July 2011)

His line of defence was that he didn’t know then but he

In contrast, mix-ups sometimes occur with present
does know now; however, he got his conditionals mixed up
hypothetical/counterfactual sentences, such as this one
– he should have said ‘... but if I had known then’ (= but I
from The Guardian: ‘If Mrs Beeton had been alive today,
didn’t). He’s not alone in this confusion: Harriet Harman,
she would be in trouble for plagiarism on a shocking scale,
then a Cabinet Minister and Labour’s Deputy Leader said
The Guardian Hay festival heard yesterday.’ Plenty of food
almost the same on 25 June 2007: ‘I’ve said that if I knew
for thought there – especially since Mrs Beeton is best
then what I know now, I wouldn’t have voted for it.’ And
known in the UK for her recipe book, published in 1861.
The Independent newspaper even ran a front-page lead in
2004 saying ‘If MPs knew then what they know now, they
wouldn’t have voted for the war’.
So, crumbs of comfort (to continue the metaphor) for
learners and teachers: native speakers sometimes find
conditionals – especially counterfactual ones – just as
And it’s not only in the political sphere. Here are some
tricky to form correctly. And if I knew why those extra
examples in other contexts:
woulds have become more prevalent in American English,
● ‘Said Trooper Gary Dunick, “If I wasn’t there, I wouldn’t I’d be happy!
have believed it.”’ (US police officer)
● ‘He said: “We had no idea. If we did know, we would not
have let him go.”’ (UK police spokesman) John Potts is a teacher and teacher trainer
based in Zürich, Switzerland. He has written
● ‘“It was a non-event at the time, but absolutely poignant and co-written several adult coursebooks, and
is a CELTA assessor. He is also a presenter for
now – what if we didn’t get the car to start,” he told Cambridge ESOL Examinations.
reporters.’ (neighbour of UK murder victim)
● ‘“Asbos are fine, if they were brought in about 10 to 15
johnpotts@swissonline.ch
years ago,” he told the BBC.’ (UK NGO leader)

COMPETITION RESULTS
17 15 9 11 12 13 1 9 13 26 15 1 18 14 Congratulations to all those readers who successfully completed our
A R C H I T E C T U R E O F
7 15 24 26 15 19 20 18 Prize Crossword 49. The winners, who will each receive a copy of the
B R W U R X N O Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, are:
12 1 2 18 18 25 18 5 16 10 1 15
I E Z O O L O G Y P E R
25 1 17 8 1 10 25 1 17 22 1 13
Kurt Baumann, Kappel, Switzerland
L E A V E P L E A S E T Kate Howcroft, Skipton, UK
12 13 1 20 23 15 23 21 13 26
I T E N D R D K T U Abbiraam Indran, Northwood, UK
13 1 1 20 18 12 14 10 12
T E E N O I F P I Rebecca Mannion-Walshe, Cádiz, Spain
16 18 10 13 13 18 25 1 15 17 20 13
Y O P T T O L E R A N T
Manuela Matz, Dürrlauingen, Germany
3 17 4 17 17 18 18 Evadne Moraliss, Alberta, Canada
J A M A A O O
22 6 17 15 17 20 13 13 11 15 26 Peter Perkins, Milan, Italy
S Q A R A N T T H R U
13 15 26 13 11 13 13 1 12 22
Alison Salm, Plymouth, UK
T R U T H T T E I S Ian Stanwich, Liverpool, UK
18 17 18 20 10 15 1 23 12 9 13
O A O N P R E D I C T Linda Wood, Glasgow, UK
10 16 18 26 15 15 20 18 1 25
P Y O U R R N O E L
12 25 12 21 1 24 18 15 21 12 9 17 20
I L I K E W O R K I C A N
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 22 12 13 17 20 23 25 18 18 21 17 13 12 13
E Z J M G Q B V C P H I T S I T A N D L O O K A T I T
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 14 18 15 11 18 26 15 22
F R Y A O X N K S D W L U F O R H O U R S Jerome K Jerome

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 • 41

 IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
More tested lessons, suggestions, tips and
techniques which have all worked for ETp
readers. Try them out for yourself – and
then send us your own contribution. Don’t
forget to include your postal address.
All the contributors to It Works in
Practice in this issue of ETp were
participants in this year’s annual congress
of the association of language schools of
Andalucia (ACEIA – www.aceia.es) in
Spain (thanks to Julie Hetherington for
her help in coordinating this). They will
receive a set of the Macmillan Writing
Series by Dorothy Zemack et al. Macmillan
have kindly agreed to be sponsors of It
Works in Practice for this year.

You say melón and I say melon Tuning in to listening

In the famous song ‘Let’s call the whole thing off’, the singer compares lots We all know the challenges our students face
of words which are spelt the same in American and British English but when doing listening activities, but how can
pronounced differently, such as tomato: /tP÷meâtPŸ/ (American English); we help them be more successful? Here are a
/tP÷mG*tPŸ/ (British English). Working on a similar principle, this game couple of useful activities I’ve used in class.
focuses on stress patterns of English words and implicitly contrasts them with Tune in to the speakers
cognate equivalents in the learners’ own language – in the case of my If you’re using an interview or chat involving
students, Spanish. two or more speakers, ask the students to listen
The game is a maze, and the learners must find a path from the in arrow at to a short snippet first and discuss which
the top left to the out arrow at the bottom right. They may pass through a speaker they find easier to understand. This
hexagon only if the word in it has the stress pattern Oo (in other words, simple activity has many positive spin-offs as it
stress on the first of the two syllables). helps the students ‘tune in’ to voices, eg speed,
loudness and accent: L2 listeners are often
The correct route is: melon – coffee – salad – lemon – menu – artist – colour
thrown by spoken characteristics of a speaker,
– airport – nation – April – minute – insect – model – problem – sofa. and this can derail understanding.
The maze shown here is designed to meet the needs of Spanish students, but Tune in to the script
you could adapt it to use words with cognate equivalents in your learners’ L1. Choose a short snippet of the audio script and
Mark Hancock highlight particular features to show that
Madrid, Spain difficulty in understanding might reside in the
text itself. Set a simple task for the students to
do as they read and listen. For example:
melon hotel July April minute receipt ● Blank out key/new vocabulary. Ask the
students to use the language on either side to
guess the word or its general meaning.
coffee surprise nation advice insect ● Colour-code pronouns and get the students to
guess or identify what they refer to.
● Use sub-script to illustrate a couple of places
dessert salad design airport machine model where a speaker uses a low key (eg when they
use fillers like you know, or repeat or
introduce a rephrasing). Ask the students to
predict where there might be other instances.
lemon guitar colour report problem Point out that anything said in a low key
probably isn’t going to contribute much to the
content of the text, and that they could use
this time to reflect on what they’ve heard, or
alarm menu artist cartoon event sofa
to predict what might come next.
Annie McDonald
Madrid, Spain

42 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 Primary colours
Many language teachers shy away from using experiments in
their young learner classrooms, deeming them messy and
time-consuming, with little opportunity for language learning.
I hope to prove otherwise with this simple ‘rainbow colours’
experiment, which requires very few resources and almost no
preparation. It is also a great source of emergent language.
You will need:
● a small bowl
● some full-fat milk
● washing-up liquid
● red, blue and yellow liquid food colouring
You can use this experiment to demonstrate how primary
colours form secondary colours. Here are some ideas on how
to do so:
1 Ask the children what their favourite colour is.
Can they think of anything that is usually that colour?
(eg blue – the sea, the sky)
2 Ask them if they have ever seen a rainbow. What colours
did it have?
3 Tell them that they are going to do an experiment to
form the colours of the rainbow.
Show them the three bottles of food colouring. Explain
that these three colours make all the other colours. Ask
them what colour will appear if we mix red and yellow.
Do the same for the other colours.
4 Show them the materials you have brought in. Explain
the stages of the experiment:
a) Pour one cup of milk into the bowl.
b) Add three drops of red food colouring at one ‘side’ of
the bowl.
c) Add three drops of blue and three drops of yellow on
other sides. The colours should not be touching.
d) Add a drop of washing-up liquid in the centre of the
bowl.
5 Ask the children what they think will happen:
● Will the colours meet?
● Will they make a pattern?
● Will there be other colours?
You can ask the children to draw what they think they
will see. They can later compare this with what they
actually saw.
6 Do the experiment, following the stages in 4.
This experiment is very easy to administer and is great fun.
Repeat it as many times as you like – because the results will
be different each time!
Michelle Worgan
Jerez de la Frontera, Spain
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
Child’s play
The mention of writing can often raise a groan from a
class of young learners, but this needn’t be the case.
There are many playful ways to engage your young
students, develop their skills and motivate them to write.
Pre-writing skills are important. Children need
practice in holding writing tools, colouring in a controlled
manner, moving their hand from left to right, and tracing
and copying gradually finer shapes. Writing on mini-
whiteboards and air-, back- and hand-tracing are great
ways to get children practising gross to fine shapes and
sequences of shapes. Remember to air-trace letters in
reverse if you are facing the class because they will mirror
you.
At word level, children enjoy making words with letter
tiles. Word snakes and word soups become writing
activities when children create their own or write the
words they find. Useful class warmers – such as making
words from the letters in a longer word or getting the
children to complete the end or beginning of a word in as
many ways as they can (eg fa_____ or _____st) – are
great writing practice as well as good for recycling
vocabulary.
At sentence level, word ordering, correcting errors
and completing sentence stems are all challenging but
fun writing activities. Children are engaged even more if
they are writing about things that interest them. Create
colourful posters with individual sentences about
characters they know, such as Geronimo Stilton or
Spiderman, written on coloured strips of paper. The
children can also write their guesses down in guessing
games and have silent dialogues, in pairs, writing
questions and answers for each other.
At paragraph level, ‘study and change’ activities give
confidence, with the children adapting a model to make it
their own. Encourage them to decorate their writing with
images and coloured, animated text.
With freer writing, a diary is an obvious way to
practise writing in the past. Create a monthly schedule for
extending the language they should use (eg in October,
five sentences in the past; in November, adding linkers
and time expressions, etc). If the children lack ideas,
encourage them to write in the voice of a famous person.
There are many ways to make writing a positive
experience for children. So find out what activities they
enjoy and see how you can adapt them to provide viable
writing practice.
Roisin O’Farrell
Seville, Spain
43
 Over
the
wall ... Alan Maley
gets away from it all.
he history of humankind is the
T history of migration. It seems we
have always had itchy feet. But
the idea of travelling just for the
sake of it really seems to have taken off
in Europe in the 18th century. As the
affable Laurence Sterne says, ‘Nothing is
so perfectly amusing as a total change of
mind’. And in a society addicted to
vicarious amusement, what could be
better than to sit comfortably at home
and read about the discomforts and
adventures endured by others?
For the reader of
travel writing, the
pleasure and interest
of discovering the
writer is perhaps
equal to that of the
journey itself
iStockphoto.com / © Steven Robertson
But there are always two journeys for
the travel writer. One is external: the
discovery of new lands and people. The
other is internal: the discovery of oneself.
And for the reader of travel writing, the
pleasure and interest of discovering the
writer is perhaps equal to that of the
journey itself. Travel writers tell us a lot
46 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
about themselves through their reactions
to the landscapes, the events and the
people they describe.
Travels with a Donkey
in the Cévennes
In Travels with a Donkey, Robert Louis
Stevenson shows himself to be the most
good-humoured and genial kind of
traveller. His journey takes him across
some of the wildest and most inhospitable
landscapes in France. He sets off alone on
foot with his faithful, though sometimes
wayward donkey, Modestine. He sleeps
rough some nights, glorying in lying under
the stars. Other nights he spends in the
discomfort of wayside inns, often sharing
with other travellers. He encounters
misfortune (as when his saddle pack
goes full circle and ends up under
Modestine’s belly), gets lost and meets
hostile peasants, but nothing affects his
optimistic take on life and his enthusiasm
for the road and the sense of utter
freedom it gives him. He stays in a
Trappist monastery, Notre Dame des
Neiges, which leads to extended
discussion of religious and other spiritual
concerns. He also describes the great
revolt of the protestant Camisards, which
had raged across this part of the
Cévennes in the previous century, and
which adds poignancy to the places he
passes through. In 1964, Richard Holmes
re-traced Stevenson’s steps, and his
account of this in Footsteps adds to our
appreciation and understanding of
Stevenson’s journey, which was
undertaken partly to clear his mind about
his love affair with the married woman
who was later to become his wife. The
inner journey is sharpened by the external
one. Stevenson would have been a
congenial companion, I feel.
Between the Woods
and the Water
Patrick Leigh Fermor must have been an
absolute charmer. In 1934, at the age of
19, he turned his back on university or
Sandhurst, and breezily set off to walk
from London to Istanbul, the place he
continued to call Constantinople. Between
the Woods and the Water is the second
volume of an intended trilogy (he never
completed the third part). It covers his
journey from Esztergom on the Slovak-
Hungarian border, through the great plains
of Hungary, over the Carpathians into
Romania and down to the Iron Gates on
the Danube. He seems to have had a
good nose for free bed and board, no
doubt aided by his silver-tongued charm,
enthusiasm and gift for languages. For
the most part, he travelled from one
comfortable country mansion to the next,
passed along by recommendation. The
book is a fascinating glimpse into a world
which has disappeared for ever – a world
of horse-drawn transport, manual
agriculture, wild landscapes and a society
rich in linguistic and ethnic diversity and
steeped in myth and history, where
memories of the Habsburg and Ottoman
empires were still fresh in people’s minds.
All this lay in the shadow of impending war
and occupation, first by the Nazis, then by
the Soviets. His enthusiasm for everything
along the way seems boundless:
languages, history, architecture, folklore,
dress, landscapes, birds, animals, trees
and flowers, food and drink, sounds,
tastes and smells ... all are documented in
enormous detail. Here are ‘cloud events at
sunset that are dangerous to describe:
levitated armies in deadlock, and riderless
squadrons descending in slow motion to
smouldering and sulphurous lagoons
where barbicans gradually collapse …’.
For some readers, this torrent of verbal
description may be off-putting. His style
is sometimes reminiscent of eating
sugar plums in clotted cream, and some
of his historical and cultural digressions
may seem over-detailed. But for sheer,
youthful enthusiasm, he is hard to beat.
For all my reservations, I found myself
surrendering to his vision of this lost
world and to the poetry of the
descriptions. And I left this charming and
impetuous traveller with regret.
Golden Earth: Travels
in Burma
The voice of Norman Lewis conveys an
amused, self-deprecating detachment,
full of human warmth towards the Alice-
in-Wonderland world he describes in
Golden Earth. This is Burma in 1952, a
confused patchwork of warring political
and ethnic struggle and bandit-infested
jungles, still reeling from the Japanese
occupation. It is a dangerous and
uncertain place, where every journey,
even of a few miles out of the capital, is
fraught with danger. Yet Lewis makes
light of the dangers, and somehow
manages to travel, by ship and riverboat,
by air, by road and even by rail, from the
south to the extreme north along the
Chinese border and back with
imperturbable aplomb. His sympathy for
the peoples of Burma is patent, and his
observations and descriptions sharp and
humorous: ‘… a shop licensed to sell
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
beer ... the customers went in under the
eye of the kind of people who gather
when an accident has happened.’ His
description of chewing betel for the first
time: ‘The taste was at first sweet and
sharp, and afterwards slightly soapy, with
a faint childhood recollection of the taste
of bathwater on a sponge.’ Lewis is a
delightful travel companion, with astute
insights on every page, expressed in an
engaging style.
The journey, whether
it is overseas or
simply a walk in the
countryside, can
form the basis
for students’
own writing
In Patagonia
With Bruce Chatwin, we are in a very
different world: that of a writer with a more
withering eye. In Patagonia recounts the
journey he undertook in 1974 to the
southern provinces of Argentina and Chile.
Ostensibly, it was sparked by his wish to
hunt down the source of a piece of skin
with hair attached of a mylodon (giant
sloth) found in his grandmother’s glass
cabinet in England. The overwhelming
impression he leaves of the lands he
passes through is of bleak despair. The
landscapes are drab and the climate
inclement. The people he meets have the
desperate hopelessness of people
uprooted from their homes in faraway
Wales, England, Italy or Russia … and
flung down at random in these desolate
settlements. ‘Today, their farms are on the
verge of bankruptcy but are still smartly
painted up. And you can find, nestling
behind windbreaks, herbaceous borders,
fruit cages, conservatories, cucumber
sandwiches, bound sets of “Country Life”,
and perhaps, the visiting archdeacon.’ He
has a caustic eye for the revealing detail:
‘… the waiter wore white gloves and
served a lump of burnt lamb that bounced
on the plate.’ ‘In the British Club at Río
Gallegos there was chipped white paint
and not a word of English was spoken.’
And he has a whimsical take on the bizarre
nature of whoever he encounters. ‘“No,”
Mrs Davies said, “Euan hasn’t married
yet, but he sings instead.”’ He weaves
narratives of the past into his present
wanderings: the fate of the Indians,
Butch Cassidy, the earliest explorers like
John Davies and the socialist workers’
uprisings and massacres, His departure is
characteristically bleak, yet surreal: ‘As we
eased out of port, a Chilean businessman
played “La Mer” on a white piano missing
many of its keys.’ Chatwin succeeds in
capturing these unkind places with
uncanny skill. You cannot fail to be
saddened by it, but there is always a
grim smile hovering.

Besides supplying texts which are
interesting and thought-provoking in
themselves, travel writing is something
students relate to readily. As Stevenson
says in his dedication, ‘… we are all
travellers in … the wilderness of this
world’. Our students learn a language
partly as an aid to their own travel, and
we as language teachers often travel,
and often settle elsewhere, too. In fact,
the learning of another language is a kind
of voyage of discovery in itself. More
practically, the journey, whether it is
overseas or simply a walk in the
countryside, can form the basis for
students’ own writing. Some of the best
student writing I have seen is in the form
of haibun* – a blend of prose and short
poems based on a walk. Try it. And if I
have not reviewed your personal
favourite here – Jack Kerouac, Eric
Newby, Paul Theroux, Wilfred Thesiger, or
whoever – I apologise. ETp
Chatwin, B In Patagonia Picador 1977
Holmes, R Footsteps Penguin 1986
Leigh Fermor, P Between the Woods and
the Water Penguin 1988
Lewis, N Golden Earth: Travels in Burma
Eland Books 1983
Stevenson, R L Travels with a Donkey in
the Cévennes (accessed from
www.gutenberg.org/catalog/readfile?fk
=1442746)
* For details of haibun, see
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haibun.
Alan Maley has worked in
the area of ELT for over
40 years in Yugoslavia,
Ghana, Italy, France,
China, India, the UK,
Singapore and Thailand.
Since 2003 he has been
a freelance writer and
consultant. He has
published over 30 books
and numerous articles,
and was, until recently,
Series Editor of the
Oxford Resource Books
for Teachers.
yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
47
B USINESS E NGLISH professional
Balancing
content and
language
Phil Wade analyses four specific types of business student.
usiness English in the UK
B seems to be going from
strength to strength as more
students from overseas are
opting to take business degrees (for
example in Marketing and Finance) at
British universities. The introduction of
foundation and pre-MBA courses has
also started a trend towards one-year
preparation courses to address both
English and business needs. Such courses,
commonly found in English-speaking
countries, are now becoming increasingly
available in the students’ own countries,
too. Another option for students, and
one which is also increasing, is to take
one of the business degrees or diplomas
offered by institutions other than
universities. So, for instance, it is now
possible to find very specialised business
courses (such as Business Law or Direct
Marketing) in a language school.
With this increased demand,
opportunities for business English
teachers have grown and we now have a
wide range of classes to teach and to
learn from. Whether the generic
business English class will disappear is
unclear, but it is certainly true to say
that students are becoming more
specific in their needs. The push towards
business degrees means that more
students want business content in their
English courses as well as language,
which is, of course, still needed. In my
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
experience, students’ needs can generally
be plotted somewhere on this axis:
More
business
content
More language
Less
business
content
Less language
The types of students in my own
business English classes have changed
greatly over the years along with the
change and development in courses.
However, I can identify four overall types:
● Student 1 is a high-school graduate
who is going to study a non-business
subject at university but would like
some basic business English
knowledge for jobs later on.
● Student 2 is a foundation- or pre-
MA-level student who is going to
study a business degree next year and
who wants business content in classes
and help to pass the IELTS exam
with a score of 5.5–6.5.
● Student 3 is a business graduate who
wants to learn about the subject in
English in order to apply for a job in
a foreign company or take an MBA.
● Student 4 may already have a
business degree and has practical
experience but wants better English
for career advancement and/or to
benefit an employer.
This article primarily looks at the
horizontal axis and the problem of
creating and adapting courses to make
them more or less business-focused. The
vertical axis can easily be addressed
simply by providing more or less
language input but, from my own
experience, this works better when the
language is contextualised into a
content-based, mixed-skills lesson. I have
occasionally taught intensive business
English grammar and vocabulary classes,
but they still worked best when the
focus was on a theme. Some students
who are given intensive language input
without a context never activate or
apply it, so it just remains passive and
only fit for gap-fill exercises or tests.
Student 1
The question here is how we can make
business English accessible and relevant
to a general student. This student
probably does not want in-depth work
on business topics, just basic language
and skills such as interviews, admin, etc,
so going through full chapters of a
business coursebook does not seem
appropriate. Selecting practical and
‘general’ areas with speaking and useful
language would be better, personalising
the material as much as possible to make
it relevant. Choosing a suitable book is
important. It should have general



49
 B USINESS E NGLISH professional
Balancing
content and
language



themes which the student can relate to
and then you can adapt activities to fit a
slightly more business context. For
instance, work on asking and answering
personal questions could be based on a
first job interview, with some help given
on writing a basic CV and cover letter.
Student 2
This student’s dual aims are to learn
business basics for later studies and also
to pass an English test in order to gain
access to those studies. As a result,
schools may offer intensive ‘test-prep’
classes alongside regular classes.
The more ‘businessy’ approach
requires a content-based course. Many
teachers of such courses are actually
university business teachers, who may
or may not have ELT backgrounds. For
the average ELT teacher it may thus be
a little challenging. Thankfully, the
publishers have been catching up and
you will find a range of ‘English for ...’
books. However, you should also have a
look at mainstream books, such as those
for UK high school exams, such as A-
level or even GCSE. These can often be
adapted – as can authentic articles from
The Economist or even TV programmes,
which also have the advantage of giving
students up-to-date knowledge. It is
always best to draft a general curriculum
which follows the main themes of the
topic as found in most textbooks. This
will probably mean you need to learn
the topic with the students. Unless the
students request otherwise, it may also
be beneficial to keep any language work
on-topic and part of the discussion,
rather than reverting to a typical ELT
language lesson.
To deliver these lessons, you may
find it practical to use PowerPoint so
you can show videos and websites; it
also looks more professional. Reading
texts and case studies are also essential.
As these students will soon be attending
university lectures and seminars, you
can adopt this methodology by giving
short presentations or asking the
students to give them and then having
50 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
discussions on the content. Obligatory
homework and online activities can also
be added to make the course more akin
to university.
Student 3
This student is probably very motivated
and eager and, although possessed of a
lot of information, may not have much
(or any) work experience. This type of
student represents a valuable resource for
the class and should be encouraged to
input ideas and materials. They probably
have a clear idea of what they want to
study, which will probably be linguistic.
Delivering lengthy language-based
lessons on specific business topics may
not be for everyone and so providing
access to more language input for self-
study is important. Devoting classroom
time to activating this student’s
knowledge, fine-tuning it and using it in
discussions, roleplays and simulations
will be very useful, as will writing work.
Student 4
The last type of student could be older
and more experienced than you and
many of the other students in the class
and, thus, presents a challenge. The
good news, and the reason why these
students are always my favourites, is
that their experience can be drawn on in
every lesson and applied to every
activity. For example, in one marketing
course I had a marketing professor who
volunteered to give presentations, which
he prepared and worked on with my
help. He then managed group
discussions between the other students.
This reflects a shift from our role as
teacher to facilitator, as I supported his
language constructions and then later
discussed his work with him and set
language and presentation skill
objectives for homework.
When you have a whole class of
Student 4s, they can get quite loud as they
have so much knowledge – especially in
negotiations, where they can become
very competitive. They may also have
quite fixed opinions on some issues, but
this provides material for countless
discussions. In general, having a more
open approach to lessons will work well
so that there are ample opportunities for
the students to discuss and share their
reactions and opinions about a reading,
listening or video, relating it to their own
experience. This means that a reading text
can provide a stimulus for the students
to write their own versions or present
examples from their own companies.
Supplementing with recent business news
or events from English-speaking countries
can also be useful and motivating.
Of all the students I have had, I
would say that these have taught me the
most about teaching and business
English. They probably won’t be afraid to
give you feedback on lessons and may
speak to you as an equal. I find this very
positive; it helps create a more humanistic
class, with me acting as a guide and the
students offering ideas and suggestions,
and asking for help when needed.
Moving away from a traditional
teacher-dominated methodology will
probably be helpful and it is a good idea
to base the course around the students’
requests, needs and interests. (This is
where DOGME suits business English
perfectly: just one of those students
probably knows more than is in the
entire coursebook but needs your help
and guidance to use that knowledge in
English.)

Whatever the context in which you teach
and the type of student you have, the
course you create should be the product
of both you and the students. With all
these diverse types of learners, who may
be in one class, it is vital to have a syllabus
and course which suits everyone. ETp
Phil Wade has a Business
degree, a PGCE, the
CELTA, MA TESOL and
DELTA Module 3. He has
managed an MA business
English course and has
taught corporate,
foundation, undergraduate
and pre-MBA courses. He
is a Cambridge examiner,
materials writer and
regular contributor to
TESOL France and
BESIG journals.
philawade@gmail.com
TALKBACK!
Do you have something to say about
an article in the current issue of ETp?
This is your magazine and we would
really like to hear from you.
Write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
Reviews
Essential Teacher Knowledge
by Jeremy Harmer
Pearson Education 2012
978-1-4082-6804-9
Jeremy Harmer’s new book is about to hit
the bookshops, and the author provides
his own clear overview of it on the
Pearson website (www.pearsonelt.com/
professionaldevelopment/videocasts/),
where he claims that it is ‘a new kind of
methodology book … in which we’ve
tried to explain basic concepts about
English language teaching in the most
accessible and straightforward way’.
So does Essential Teacher
Knowledge live up to his claims? Of
course, the proof is in the eating, but
what a great-looking book this is! It’s
colourful, well-organised, easy to read,
provides a wealth of cross-references for
key ideas – and the icing on the cake is a
DVD with a large number of videos which
bring life to ideas and methods explained
in the book.
The book covers core modules of the
Cambridge ESOL Teaching Knowledge Test
(TKT), such as background to language
learning, classroom management, teaching
skills and assessment, as well as the
specialist modules like CLIL, teaching
young learners and language awareness.
But it is likely to be useful for any teachers
who want to refresh their knowledge of
the basics and have access to clear
teaching models. It also has some useful
appendices: a cross-referenced glossary,
useful classroom language and clear
example lesson plans.
Here are some of the highlights:
● The wide range of topics with
interesting, usable, exciting suggestions
for teachers to emulate.
● The attention to detail in key areas like
planning and classroom management.
● The range of nationalities of the
teachers interviewed in the videos. This
was a stroke of genius. It brings the
topics to life and provides direct access
to solutions and ideas for teachers.
● The two-page unit spreads, which
might actually seem achievable for busy
teachers.
● The way the texts in Section A illustrate
key language points for teachers, who can
then follow up clearly-marked references
and explore them in more detail in other
52 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Winner
011
o the 2
f
a rren
Ben W
P riz e !
units. In my experience, a lot of
beginner teachers feel very insecure about
their knowledge of grammar. The grammar
units are pleasingly gentle examples of
how we can use context to illustrate
parts of speech. Colour coding of
grammar words helps you see at a
glance what is covered in the unit.
● Explanation of difficult concepts. Take
the section on assessment, for example.
It’s often difficult to explain concepts like
validity and reliability in a simple way, but
the units on assessment make a valiant
attempt. And more importantly, it
encourages good test-writing practice –
such as producing a list of test
specifications for classroom tests.
And here are a few qualms:
● The follow-up reading list provides
useful references for some of the topics,
but misses out a few areas like ICT and
assessment, which are also given a lot of
importance in the book. However, the
indications are that the accompanying
website will have further reading
suggestions.
● Sometimes the glossary seems
simplistic. For example, a concordance is
‘a programme which allows you to get
information about words’. That makes it
sound like a dictionary. And a phoneme is
not ‘an individual unique sound’ as the
glossary states. It’s a range of phonetic
sounds which constitute the smallest
meaningful unit of sound. The problem
here, of course, is that a more correct
definition is immediately more
complicated.
In sum – and I write from the
perspective of a teacher trainer who
works in many different countries – I think
this book makes a brilliant attempt at
living up to its claims and should be a
treasure trove to many beginning
teachers around the world.
Jeff Stanford
Berlin, Germany
Techniques & Principles
in Language Teaching
by Diane Larsen-Freeman
and Marti Anderson
OUP 2011
978-0-19-442360-1
In the introduction to this third edition of
their book, the authors state that ‘unless
you become clear about your beliefs, you
will continue to make decisions that are
conditioned rather than conscious’. With
this in mind, I turned to two new chapters
on content-based and task-based
language learning because these looked
as if they might describe what I do in the
classroom. They did indeed describe
much of the philosophy and the methods
that I have adopted, not always
consciously, in my Academic English
classroom and gave me understanding of
the ‘why’ behind the method. In addition,
I gained a few new techniques that I can
beneficially add to my classroom practice.
The authors have also provided an
expanded section on the participatory
approach as well as eight other methods
or approaches, including the direct
method, silent way and communicative
language teaching. The appeal of the
book lies in the fact that theory is
translated into practice. After a brief
introduction to the method or approach,
the reader is allowed to enter a classroom
and ‘watch’ a lesson in progress. The
lesson is then analysed in tabulated form
under the headings ‘Observations’ and
‘Principles’. The principles are then
reviewed, using the same ten questions
for each method. The techniques implicit
in the method are listed and reviewed.
This enables teachers who want to use
the method to see concrete ways of
implementing it. It also enables someone
who perhaps does not like a particular
method in its entirety to use some of the
techniques associated with it. So, for
Reviews
example, the grammar translation method
is presented and in the list of techniques
associated with it one finds that students
are encouraged to find antonyms and
synonyms – a vocabulary-building tool
that could be incorporated in an eclectic
method classroom.
There is a helpful new chapter on the
use of technology in language learning,
and in the concluding chapter there is a
helpful summary, presented in tabulated
form. There is a critique of the table and
a useful discussion on how teachers
learn to teach: we are encouraged to
identify our beliefs concerning teaching,
construct theories and then develop our
teaching practice to fit our individual
understanding and the needs of our
students in changing contexts.
This is a useful book that I would love
to have had on my shelf when I was
taking a course in methodology. It will
become a foundation book for my own
teacher training methodology courses.
Sandy Willcox
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Working in Russia
and Eastern Europe
by Isobel Williams and Stuart Amor
Cornelson 2011
978-3-06-520229-9
‘Always be prepared to be surprised’ – a
statement from the recorded dialogue of
two Europeans working with Russian
partners – could be a motto for this book.
The image of Russians (and other
Slavs such as Serbs or Poles) created by
Hollywood and European filmmakers is
primarily a negative one and, as a result,
Europeans are still quite suspicious about
doing business in these countries.
Reminders of the Communist past are
often an obstacle to mutual understanding,
as is the behaviour of present-day Russian
and Eastern European politicians and
some strange and often obscure business
rules. Thus potential users of this textbook
might be wary of doing business with
people from former Socialist countries.
But the book leads step by step to
greater understanding: Russians and
Eastern Europeans, though they differ
from many Europeans in their habits and
in the expression of their emotions, are
just normal businesspeople who send
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
emails, engage in small-talk, make
serious decisions, develop their
businesses and – moreover – their
countries’ economies, and gradually
integrate into the European economy.
However, the practical benefit of this
book goes beyond a simple rehabilitation
of potential business partners from Eastern
Europe. The essence of its innovative
character lies in the
combination of three
approaches – business,
cultural and linguistic –
which defines its
structure. Every chapter
consists of three
focuses, providing
students with practical
material on business,
culture and business-
oriented language for
everyday use. The
attached CD contains
recordings of
dialogues featuring
different accents,
which helps to
immerse students in
the atmosphere of
an international company.
Although many books on business
English are well designed, Working in
Russia and Eastern Europe has as its
advantage a smaller format and an
attractive layout. The book is very easy to
use and pleasant to read. Energetic red
boxes with the figure of a chess king draw
our attention to key ideas (eg ‘People are
different. Stay flexible and tolerant at all
times’ and the translated Russian saying
‘Life is work, work, work – but there
comes a time when you must celebrate’ –
a version of ‘business before pleasure’).
Aside from traditional exercises for
pairs or groups of students and
vocabulary practice, there are texts on
business projects, famous politicians and
tycoons and everyday life in the chosen
countries. There are also short, but at the
same time in-depth, descriptions of
business cultures, etiquette and protocol
in the appendix. It is interesting to learn
from the country information files that
‘Bulgarian business decisions are often
heavily influenced by personal
sentiments’ while Czechs ‘prefer an
unhurried, methodical approach to
analyzing proposals
and figures’. The
much-talked-about
Russians ‘are tough
and like to indulge in a
fair amount of theatre if
necessary’ and it is
necessary to plan
ahead in Belarus since
‘bureaucracy is still
cumbersome’ there.
The book is very
stimulating, and students
will definitely feel
comfortable with their
real-life partners from
Eastern Europe after taking classes based
on this textbook. Step by step, they will
learn to tolerate and not to react negatively
at first sight to incomprehensible things,
in addition to learning to speak English in
a business environment. The recorded
dialogues of native speakers (British and
American) avoid the notorious ‘Globish’,
while the various other accents included
create diversity and depict a pluralist and
multicultural world.
A second motto for the textbook
could be summed up as ‘The golden rule
is don’t generalise’. This sound advice
should prevent students from believing in
stereotypes or being prejudiced against
their future colleagues from Russia and
other Eastern European countries.
Speaking of working abroad, the
authors advise: ‘Try to think of it all as a
thrilling adventure – a wonderful
opportunity to grow and learn.’ The appeal
of this textbook is that it convinces us to
study intercultural business English and,
with it, to grow and learn.
Elena Yushkova
Vologda, Russia
53
 IN THE CLASSROOM
Ongoing
engagement
Ramanujam Meganathan promotes learning through project work.
anguage learning involves the
L learners becoming engaged
with the language. We know
that exposure to language
through visual and oral media in
textbooks and audio materials (including
listening to the teacher) is essential.
However, this exposure alone is not
sufficient. We need to give our students
opportunities to work with language.
They should be encouraged to read,
think about the ideas in a text, find the
meaning of the words, associate them
with ideas and other words, notice the
form of the structures, etc, while being
exposed to the language and working
with it on their own. This engagement
with language makes them internalise
the meaning of words and structures.
Project work can be used as an
effective strategy to promote collaborative
ways of language learning. Students work
together in groups over a period of time
to do an activity or a task on a particular
topic or theme. They collect information
and ideas, observe language being used,
use language in real-life situations,
exchange opinions, write reports, edit
their writing and present the result in a
suitable form. In India, stress is placed on
student–student interaction and moving
beyond the textbook to connect the
classroom with the world outside in order
to maximise learning. Projects can be
instrumental in realising this aim. They
can help students to formulate ideas
and make critical judgements in order
to arrive at a conclusion. More
importantly, the students learn to use
language in realistic contexts. This
article demonstrates how projects can
be designed and carried out in schools.
54 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Designing and managing
projects
The major aim of a project is to
encourage the students to read books and
newspapers, listen to the radio, watch TV,
consult websites, talk to people, observe
events and proceedings, and then interpret
and report their findings. This clearly
involves independent work with language
in meaningful contexts. The students may
also seek information and help from
parents and teachers: it is important that
projects should not overburden them.
Interdisciplinary projects are
particularly useful; they promote better
understanding of the subject (eg social
science, biology, etc) as well as providing
language learning. They do, however,
require cooperation between teachers of
various subjects.
A project can be carried out in many
ways. Here are some suggested steps:
Selecting a topic
The first step is to decide on a topic.
The students can be encouraged to
suggest their own ideas or the teacher
may offer a list of possible topics. The
students can work in small groups, with
different topics allocated to different
groups, or the project can involve the
whole class working together.
Planning and language
generation
Having chosen a topic for the project,
the students work together to decide how
to proceed and what kind of language
they need. The teacher has to direct this
stage very carefully as the students will
need plenty of guidance and support.
Some of the initial discussions may take
place in the classroom, paving the way
for activities done inside and outside the
school. The work can also be divided
among the students.
Collecting information
The students gather information from a
number of sources. They can consult
encyclopaedias, read books, interview
people, collect pictures and illustrations,
record audio and/or video, search the
internet, watch TV, etc. They will need
to write notes as they collect the data.
Drafting and editing
When the students have collected the
necessary data, it is time to organise the
information, interpret it and plan and
write the first draft. Depending on the
nature of the project, they might be
producing a written report or creative
work such as a play, a song or an essay.
Editing is very important, and the
students should be made aware of the
process approach to writing, which
involves various editing stages before
the final draft is produced.
Presenting the result
The goal of the whole project is reached
when the students, working together,
produce a finished piece of work or do
an activity as intended. Whether the
final product is a written report, a play,
a collection of songs, a roleplay or a
poster, the students now have to submit
their work to the teacher and present it
to the whole class. In the case of plays,
songs, etc, they might also present their
work to the whole school during an
assembly or on a special occasion.
Following up
The teacher can work with the students
who carried out the project to think of
possible follow-up activities that will
enable them to use the language in
further contexts. For example, a project
involving producing a class newspaper
could be extended with further editions
being produced by the same group or a
different group.
Teaching and assessing
projects
The teacher is the facilitator throughout
the project, acting as a catalyst and
being available whenever the students
need help. Consultations with the
English teacher (and other subject
teachers if needed) give immense
support to the students and are
necessary for them to accomplish the
task. In the initial classroom discussions
over the project, the teacher needs to
develop a schedule of activities for each
group and establish the number of
consultations that they can have with
the teacher while doing the project.
Teachers will usually have a good idea
of each student’s strengths and areas of
interest and should, therefore, be able to
suggest activities and topics that will
match each particular group of
students.
It is important to ensure that each
student in the group takes an active part
in the work and contributes towards the
successful completion of the task. It is
also very important to check that each
student is engaging with the language
and using it in various ways while doing
the project. It can be useful to keep a
checklist or a chart to record who does
what and how. Asking each student in
the group to write a diary showing their
work plan, how the information was
collected and interpreted, the problems
faced and the way the final product was
put together will help the teacher to
assess individual contributions. At the
same time, the teacher has to observe
and record the performance of each
group as a whole. Again, a checklist
may be developed to record each
group’s progress.
Promoting
multilingualism
Multilingualism – making use of all the
languages known to the children – is an
important part of India’s education
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
policy. Project work can be a useful
instrument for promoting this. Some of
the projects suggested at the end of this
article can be used in this way. For
example, in one project, the students
have to watch a popular television serial
in their home language and write a
summary in English of each episode.
This promotes language development in
both languages. The project is
particularly interesting if the students
within the group have different home
languages and watch the serial in more
than one language. The teacher should
allow time for the students to explore
cultural and social issues in the local
context and to discuss the problems
they faced while writing the summary in
English.
A short-term project:
a tourist brochure
Level: Elementary and secondary
(12–16 years)
Time: One to two weeks
General aim: To produce a brochure
and/or poster for tourists and visitors to
our town/village.
Language aims:
● To develop the four language skills
and strategic competence by using
interviewing techniques, collection of
information about people, places and
economic indicators.
● To learn to use appropriate
vocabulary and structures specific to
a brochure/poster.
● To learn to put together a
brochure/poster using the collected
information.
Procedure:
The teacher has a brainstorming
discussion with the class about the idea.
The class is divided into groups and the
teacher asks the students to map out a
plan of action for the project.
The students plan and allocate work
to each member of the group and
collect the required information.
They work together to design a
brochure and/or poster based on the
collected data. They scrutinise
information from various sources
(interviews, photos of monuments, facts
and figures, etc) and shape it into an
attractive poster or brochure to present
to visitors, using coloured ink and
crayons. The groups present their final
products to the class.
A long-term project:
a class newspaper
Level: Elementary and secondary
(12–16 years)
Time: Around three months
General aim: To produce a class or
school newspaper.
Language learning aim: To develop all
four language skills by using various
techniques, such as interviewing, writing
news reports, etc.
Procedure:
The students are briefed about the aim
of the project and the desired outcome.
They discuss the various features and
contents of a newspaper by analysing
published newspapers and decide on a
plan for creating their own.
The students allocate work among
themselves and decide, for example, who
will do interviews, who will report on
events like festivals, accidents, etc, who will
write the draft news items, who will do the
editing and who will do the final writing
(either by hand or on the computer).
They work on collecting data and
developing the newspaper within the
given time frame. Then the newspaper is
published with illustrations, photos, etc.
Possible follow-up activities can also
be devised.

When our students leave school, they
will need to use English to function in
professional, academic and social
settings, and this requires higher-order
language and thinking skills. The nature
of the classroom has to change to meet
this demand and teachers have to
explore ways and means of enabling
their students to engage with English
both inside and out of the classroom.
Tasks, activities and assignments need
to help the students to notice the form
and meaning of the language by using it
in real-life tasks. Project work is one
way of achieving this. ETp
Ramanujam Meganathan
is an Assistant Professor
in the Department of
Languages, National
Council of Educational
Research and Training
(NCERT), New Delhi,
India. He has taught
English at secondary and
senior secondary level
for a decade. He has
also published a poetry
collection entitled
Sounds of Silence.
rama_meganathan@yahoo.com



55




Ongoing engagement • Topic suggestions for projects
1 A biographical profile of a
person in your area
Students in groups arrange to meet the
chosen personality and conduct an
interview, in order to develop a profile
of the person and write a report.
2 Autobiographies
Each member of the group writes their
own autobiography and these are
compiled for presentation to the class.
3 Quotable quotes
The students consult books, magazines
and newspapers to collect quotes from
famous people and assemble them by
theme or in alphabetical order.
4 Movie reviews
The students watch movies over a
period of time and write reviews of
them. They can also compare their
reviews with ones published in
newspapers.
5 Book reviews
The students read books of their choice
and write reviews of them. They can
look at newspapers and magazines to
see how reviews are written and
presented.
6 Analysing newspaper reports
The students are asked to read three or
four newspapers, looking at the way
one particular story is reported (or a
series of stories). They analyse the
news stories and comment on them.
7 Opinions on a particular issue
The students choose a current issue or
problem, ask people for their opinions
about it and produce an illustrated
report.
8 Writing articles for
newspapers or magazines
The students write articles for
newspapers or magazines on a current
problem or issue. This could be done
as an individual or group activity. The
teacher will have to guide them well –
from thinking about the idea to getting
the article published.
56 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
9 Writing a ‘letter to the editor’
A group of students are encouraged to
write letters to the editor of a newspaper
in response to an article published in the
newspaper.
10 A quiz
The students work in groups to develop
questions for a quiz to be held in the
school or class. They decide how to
conduct the quiz, collect information and
ideas for quiz questions, design
‘question and answer’ cards for all the
questions, and then hold the quiz. The
process from the beginning to the end is
then written up in a report.
11 A collection of folk songs
The students collect folk songs from their
area and categorise them by various
themes (children, nature, romance,
poverty, etc). They then attempt to write
a summary of each folk song. They can
also find connections between the folk
songs and the history of the area. Their
findings are presented in a report.
12 Translating a folk song
The students work in groups to collect
songs in their mother tongue and translate
them into English. This requires a lot of
work from both students and teachers.
There may be many songs from a variety
of languages. The students can compare
their translations with any published
ones which are available. The final
product can be put in the school library.
13 A TV serial
The students watch a TV serial in their
home language for a week or a month
and write a summary of each episode in
English. They can put their summaries in
a final report with an introduction and a
conclusion, commenting on the themes,
acting, characterisation and other
aspects of the serial.
14 Greetings cards
This project may be done as a group or
individual activity. The students design
greetings cards for an occasion, such as
Diwali, Pongal, New Year, Christmas,
etc, using locally available resources and
display them for sale in school.
15 Surveys
The students develop a questionnaire
and contact people to collect
information. This could be on such
things as eating habits, pocket
money, sleeping habits, play routines,
study habits, etc. They write a report
based on the data collected. The
whole process from developing the
questionnaire is included in the report.
16 Advertisements
The students collect advertisements
from various sources, such as
billboards, posters, pamphlets, flyers,
newspapers, etc, and analyse how
language is used in them.
Advertisements in many languages
can also be used.
17 A blog
The students develop a blog, and
design and develop materials to
include in it: text, visuals, songs, etc.
They ask other students to post
comments on the blog.
18 A school website
With the help of the computer science
teacher, the students design and
develop a website for the school.
They collect information from the
principal, teachers and alumni of the
school and post it on the website.
19 Holidays and festivals
The students do a project about the
festivals of the local area and report
on how people celebrate, the food
eaten during the festival, dresses,
rituals, the purpose and reason for the
festivals, etc.
20 A radio programme
The students work in groups to
develop a radio programme
consisting of songs, speeches and
interviews of people from the local
area. This can be multilingual or
bilingual. The students plan, write
scripts, develop questionnaires,
practise delivering the material and
then record it. The final product is
presented to the class or at a school
assembly.
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT

Under
With such a succinct definition, one
might assume that the days when
admitting to stress implied that
something was amiss with the individual
and was, therefore, a confession of
failure on their part were long gone. It

pressure?
is true that today we have – compared
to 20 years ago – a plethora of articles,
books, websites and policy documents
now dedicated to the causes of stress and
its symptoms and remedies. As such, one
could surmise that incidences of work-
related stress would be decreasing or
minimal; yet the data that is available
reveals that it is, in fact, increasing.
Nick Fletcher hen considering an opening

suggests your solution to W to this article, I recalled the

stress starts with yourself.
following exchange between
Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in the film
Devil’s Advocate:
Pacino: It’s just the other thing I wonder
about.
Reeves: What thing?
Pacino: Pressure. It changes everything,
pressure. Some people, you
squeeze them, they focus.
Others fold. Can you summon
your talent at will? Can you
deliver on a deadline? Can you
sleep at night?
Stress in TESOL
Pacino is referring in this scene to the
context of lawyers in the courtroom, yet
what he says is highly applicable to
teachers, lecturers, course leaders and
directors of studies in our profession.
As TESOL practitioners, we are often
presented with scenarios that induce
stress – from covering classes at short
notice to the seemingly random questions
that learners suddenly pose on snippets,
chunks or items of language they have
encountered and seek clarification on –
and which get the heart pumping and
the mind racing. These two instances of
‘summoning and focusing one’s talent’
add to the pressure of teaching, and
most of us, I would presume, thrive on
it – even if secretly. The initial flight-or-
fight response is usually a one-off, it is
only when the pressure is continual that
it turns into stress.
The Health and Safety Executive in
the UK (HSE) defines stress as ‘the
adverse reaction people have to excessive
pressure or other types of demand placed
on them’.
Teachers and stress
As with other ‘helping professions’, the
relationship teachers have with their
learners can have a tendency to be non-
reciprocal. It is not my intention to list
all the numerous sources of teacher
stress that have been identified and
referenced in the current literature.
However, having taught English in
private language institutions in the UK
and in other countries, and currently
working in a higher-education
environment, here are some factors that
I am aware of and which I would divide
into three categories:
1 Integral to our profession
Administrative and welfare duties; class
dynamics and discipline; learner
motivation, expectations and experience;
ongoing professional development;
course design/lesson planning and
material design/selection; adult and
junior vacation groups; group leaders;
salary and (short-notice!) teaching cover.
2 Institutional
Higher-education provider versus private
language group versus private language
school; education authority inspections;
UKBA/government regulations; British
Council accreditation and inspections;
redundancies; position within and
structure of organisation; relationship
with line managers, peers and other staff.
(A friend who teaches in a UK
secondary school recently reported that
their institution had experienced a 43
percent increase in English as an
Additional Language (EAL) learners,
resulting in the need for the teachers to
become more ‘linguistically’ aware when
teaching their own subject specialism.)

58 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
3 Perceptions
The public as a whole and the teaching
profession’s opinion of the TESOL
profession.
Quite clearly, some of these overlap and
the list is far from exhaustive. It is
probably worth noting at this point that
we may all have experienced stress
ourselves and seen it in our colleagues.
From a personal perspective, it is unwise
to attempt to use our own tolerance as a
basis for deciding how much pressure or
stress is acceptable to others. We should
also be aware that some teachers do feel
genuinely stressed but fear to mention it
or use support mechanisms that are
already in place to cope with it; and
there are, unfortunately, a small
minority who claim they are stressed as
a way of attempting to disguise their
deficiencies as teachers. It would also be
unwise to class all TESOL practitioners
together. Mousavi, in one of the few
papers dedicated to researching stress in
non-native (NNT) and native teachers of
EFL/TESOL, states that an additional
area of stress that NNTs believe they
face is anxiety over their own linguistic
proficiency.
Learners and stress
It is all too easy for some to forget that
whilst teachers experience varying
degrees of stress so, too, do our
learners. For instance, many
international learners coming to the UK
to study experience what Ward et al
label as ‘culture shock’. For many of
these learners, it is quite often their first
time away from home and on their own.
Features of daily life that we often take
for granted, such as social etiquette,
turn-taking, face-saving, resolving
conflict, bodily contact and attempting
to maintain or even adapt to a new
cultural identity, in tandem with social
integration, cuisine and studying in a
language that is not their mother
tongue, can greatly increase the amount
of pressure and, in turn, stress that
international learners face. We all, no
doubt, believe we have the necessary
support mechanisms in place, but are
these regularly reviewed, amended and
used by our learners ? If not, why not?
With regards to learners, Ward et al
devote a whole chapter to Stress, coping
and adjustment in relation to culture
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
shock; they claim that stress levels due
to culture shock ‘take into account life
changes, pre- and post-migration stressors,
cognitive appraisals of change, personality
and social support’. As with research into
TESOL teachers and stress, the amount
of actual research conducted on coping
with stress by international learners is
distinctly limited. Ward et al cite the
most detailed of these, Chataway and
Berry’s investigation through the use of
a ‘coping scale’. This entailed their
assessment of a number of discrete
items: problem solving, wishful thinking,
detachment, social support, positive
thinking, self-blame, tension reduction
and withdrawal responses. The results,
based on a group of Chinese learners,
were that those who embraced a more
positive mental approach gained a
The simple answer
to the question of
how to deal with stress
would be: whatever
works best for you,
through trial and error
greater sense of satisfaction and showed
better coping ability than those who were
wishful thinkers and withdrawn. I am
quite sure that teachers in the UK can all
identify learners who have set specific
goals, are highly motivated, embrace the
opportunities the new culture/
environment affords them and attempt
to ingrate – all with a positive mindset –
and, as such, have a tendency to fare
much better both in settling in the
country and with their studies.
Addressing stress
The simple answer to the question of
how to deal with stress would be:
whatever works best for you, through
trial and error. When consulting printed
and electronic media for this article, I
found numerous coping mechanisms for
dealing with stress listed: the use of
yoga, acupuncture, aromatherapy,
regular exercise, dietary changes – the
list goes on. However, most of these
appear to be aimed at assisting someone
outside the working environment. So,
that leads me to ask, what about dealing
with stress while at work? Besides the
use of stress balls or toys, is there a
dedicated policy or procedure in place?
Who is the person you can turn to when
you feel things are getting on top of
you? The educational establishment I
work in at the moment has a clearly
defined policy document that mirrors
the HSE’s guidelines. Does this apply to
private institutions? Mentors may be
assigned to us when we take up a new
position, and induction programmes are
completed, but who can or do we turn
to when the pressure mounts?
Like King Canute*, we should all be
aware of our limitations. Nonetheless,
in an age when the demands placed on
us are constantly changing and we are
pulled in numerous directions, the
ability and luxury to say no to situations
that are stressful and therefore
detrimental to our health are limited.
Working longer hours and taking work
home with us also affects those around
us and can often go unacknowledged by
the powers that be. Helping ourselves
might seem rather callous but, without
a support mechanism or someone to
turn to, it is only by identifying our own
levels of stress and our strategies for
dealing with it that we can hope to help
our colleagues and learners. ETp
* A wise English king who demonstrated to his
foolish courtiers that the power of a monarch is
limited by setting his throne by the seashore
and commanding the advancing tide to turn
back and not to wet his feet and robes.
HSE ‘Managing the cause of work-
related stress’ www.hse.gov.uk/stress/
standards/ (accessed 8/3/11)
Mousavi, E S ‘Exploring “teacher stress”
in non-native and native teachers of EFL’
English Language Teacher Education and
Development 10 2007
Ward, C, Bocher, S and Furnham, A The
Psychology of Culture Shock Routledge
2001
Nick Fletcher holds an
MA TESOL from the
University of Brighton,
UK, and is a conference
presenter and visiting
university lecturer. His
interests include teacher
education, error
correction, materials
design and materials-
light teaching – as well
as improving his Korean.
splitter153@hotmail.com
59
 TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
The teacher as juggler
Ana Lía Passarotto addresses the work-life balance.
ay back in Issue 10 of ETp,
W Alan Maley expressed anxiety
about our survival not only as
teachers but also as human beings. His
article was called ‘Surviving the 20th
century’ and was written in 1999. We are
now 12 years into the 21st century and,
although it may sound a bit dramatic, I
believe that many of his concerns have
not been addressed and that the situation
now is even more desperate. My own
impression is that of being on a roller
coaster which moves at an ever-increasing
speed. In many countries we run from
job to job and from school to school in
order to make a living and, to top it all,
we go from teaching to learning without
a break. That’s right: many of us are, or
have recently been, back at university.
Our dear old teaching degree is no longer
enough. We must get another one, the
sooner the better – and at our own cost,
of course. A postgraduate degree is
needed if we want to keep on teaching;
we must add some letters to our names:
MA, PhD ... whatever, however.
Maley reminds us that, as Lewis
Carroll’s Red Queen put it, ‘it takes all
the running you can do to keep in the
same place. If you want to get somewhere
else, you must run at least twice as fast
as that’.
The English teacher is, at present, a
victim of the de-humanising pressures
most workers are subject to, but even
more so. We may have to do two or
three different jobs at the same time (in
many cases, teaching at different levels –
primary, secondary and tertiary); we are
constantly attending meetings, filling in
forms and completing reports; we take
work home at night and keep on
marking papers or planning lessons on
weekends and holidays.
The University of Manchester
Institute of Science and Technology has
rated teaching among the most stressful
occupations. In their research it came
16th out of 100 jobs, with a stress grade
of 6.2 on a ten-point scale. And that was
in the UK. In many other countries,
teaching would have ranked among the
top five, with a stress rate of 8 or 9.
60 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
We are under permanent pressure to
demonstrate through overwork how
good we are at teaching and to prove
that we deserve our positions. We are
egged on by demands for efficiency,
novelty, speed, precision and results, all
of which contribute to a sense of
devastation and despair. The effects on
morale, professional effectiveness, family
life, social relationships and health are
only too clear for many educators. As
we all know, some of the most common
effects of being under constant pressure
include physical symptoms such as
headaches, indigestion and back pain, as
well as irritability, anxiety, burnout and
the nagging feeling that we have lost the
capacity to steer our own lives.
In this situation, it is very difficult
to stop and think, let alone take action.
Work and life
As most of us know, it is easy to detect
the things or situations that cause stress,
but not so easy to see how we can do
anything about them. We simply cannot
stop working or put our family and
friends on the back burner. We have to
juggle work and family life. So, how on
earth do we do it?
If I were able to provide an answer, I
would move from teaching to counselling
and probably become a millionaire.
Unfortunately, as I am sure you have
already found out, there is no one right
answer. We all love our family and
friends and would really enjoy spending
more time with them. Who doesn’t enjoy
a cuddle and a good laugh? Who doesn’t
relish a well-prepared meal shared with
those we love? Much to our students’
disbelief, we are, after all, human. But the
sad fact is that, more often than not, we
scarcely have any time for ourselves.
Have you ever realised how long eating,
washing and sleeping take us? Perhaps if
we cut down on our sleeping hours, we
could ... Forget it!
Life and work
Consider this instead: we can’t control
what happens to us, but we can control
how we react to it. The only thing we
can do is to equip ourselves with the
best possible tools to deal with stressful
situations.
One of the best techniques is learning
to say no. If you are already extremely
busy yet asked to do something else,
practise some assertiveness and just say
no, politely but firmly. They will surely
find someone else to do the job.
Sort out your priorities and, once
you have identified what really needs to
be done, do it as soon as possible. Do
your very best to be the finest of
professionals, but don’t overdo things.
Then reward yourself with something
you really enjoy doing and find
relaxing, be it playing with your kids,
working in the garden, hanging out with
friends, curling up with a good book or
taking the dog for a walk. After all,
doctors advise that having a good laugh
and physical exercise are among the best
stressbusters.
Finally, as Jane Revell says, ‘Make
sure you do enough of what you enjoy,
and then enjoy what you do’.

We all love this profession. At times it
may seem life-consuming but, all things
considered, we would not change it for
any other. So, do your best to juggle
your career and your personal life. Not
everybody is lucky enough to have a job
they like or to love the work they do,
and that’s precisely why we teachers can
count ourselves lucky after all! ETp
Maley, A ‘Surviving the 20th century’
ETp 10 1999
Revell, J ‘Stresslessness’ ETp 14 2000
Ana Lía Passarotto
currently provides private
tuition for students
preparing to take
international examinations
and support lessons for
aspiring teachers who
need extra coaching. She
also lectures and writes
articles for specialist
magazines on education
and contributions to books
on the same subject, in
both English and Spanish.
ana-cab@fibertel.com.ar
SCRAPBOOK Gems, titbits, puzzles, foibles, quirks, bits & pieces,
quotations, snippets, odds & ends,
what you will

As time Nothing points to the passage of time quite as strongly

as the advent of a New Year. Those in delicate states of

goes by age can no longer pretend that time is standing still –

and, in extreme cases, it can seem to be going
‘Time, time’, said Old King Tut, backwards. Our perception of time passing is further
exacerbated when a new decade comes into sight or
‘is something I ain’t got anything but’ even a new millennium. Anyway, here we are in the early
Don Marquis Archy and Mehitabel stages of 2012, with a few thoughts on time.

© Gerhard Seybert – Fotolia.com

Time for some In the zone
Shakespeare Because the ligh t fro
pro
m
gre
the
ss
sun
around
24 hours. The sometim
nature of this line can
es arbitrary
give rise to
a sta tel y the Pacific
Here are some quotations from William makes
nti nually even odder situations:
ea rth an d is co ti used to have
Shakespeare, which refer to time. Can you the
du sk) to Ocean state of Kiriba
ng ing da wn (an d g thr ough its
match them to the correct plays? For extra bri
net at any the Date Line runnin
points, can you identify the speakers? somewhere on our pla centre, thus causi ng the country’s
ve a system
1 ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
given moment, we ha two sections to dif fer by one day
of time zones. ! Th is wa s rectified
creeps in this petty pace from day to see a and two hours
Normally, this would when they de cid ed to mo ve the
day ...’ m east to
logical progression fro whole Lin e to inc lud e the entire
a) Hamlet b) Macbeth c) Julius Caesar ea st be ing ah ea d in
west, with the side of it.
d) Cymbeline is at lea st one country on the same
we ver , the re moa
time. Ho
s: Japan is At the end of 2011, Sa
exc ep tio n to thi lf in line with
2 ‘Ay me! Sad hours seem long.’ curious decided to bring itse
to the ea st of Ru ssi a, but ala nd by
a) Romeo and Juliet b) As You Like It well
ans’ peculiar Australia and New Ze
c) Love’s Labours Lost d) The Comedy of because of the Russi shifting its time zone
forward by 24
e zon e co nve nti on , Japan is ce mb er 30th was
Errors tim hours. Friday De
hind
actually two hours be simply wiped off the ca lendar.
3 ‘I wasted time, and now doth time waste stern end
Vladivostock (at the ea Samoans chee red , sire ns wailed
me.’ Japan)!
of Russia, but west of and fireworks exp lod ed in the skies
a) Timon of Athens b) Richard II er of pla ce s
There are a nu mb day December
c) Two Gentlemen of Verona d) King Lear the re are tw o as midnight on Thurs
in the world wh ere day 31st
at the sam e 29th gave way to Satur
different tim e zon es on was rather
4 ‘Quiet! Count how many times the clock
vel led an hour December. This reacti
longitud e. I on ce tra that reported
chimes.’
n Ca nyo n to the more favourable than
and a ha lf fro m Zio ange from the
a) Julius Caesar b) Richard III
Un ites States, in Britain when the ch
Gran d Ca nyo n in the the Gregorian
c) A Midsummer Night’s Dream
e longitude, to Julian Calendar to
exa ctl y the sam t an entire 11
d) Much Ado About Nothing on
on called Calendar wiped ou
For even more points, can you identify the find a local phenomen days in Septemb er 17 52 . Many
ur’s
problem with this quotation? Mountain Time – an ho history books co nta in ac counts of
me pla ce s the y
difference. In so streets with
to sho w the people rioting in the
display two clo cks ck our
very the slogan ‘Give us ba
time in both zones – , the only
anachronism as such things didn’t exist in ancient Rome.)
4 a (Brutus. The reference to a chiming clock is an eleven da ys! ’ Ho we ver
confusing! are a
before he is killed)
ca nn ot sources for these riots
Obvio usl y, tim e painting by
satirical journal and a
3 b (King Richard II, reflecting on his life in prison just
before he meets Juliet)
tua lly ad van ce the further s is likely to
2 a (Romeo, pining for Rosaline, the woman he loves perpe
Int ernational William Hogarth, so thi
east yo u go , an d the
a myth.
1 b (Macbeth, on learning of the death of his wife)
‘fold you back’ be
Date Line is there to
Answers

62 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

 A measure of time
Why not test your knowledge of the ways in which time
Country clock ung TV
rd Whiteley was a yo
has been measured through the ages? Years ago, when Richa r on the
to interview a far me
1 A strong candidate for the first event in history to be linked to
reporter, he was sent rth of En gland.
nsleydale in the no
wilder uplands of We ha rds hip s of
an actual date is the battle between the Medes and the Lydians ich was about the
After the interview, wh d the
on May 28th, 585 BC. How can we be sure of the date? nscious of the time an
a) The Medes kept accurate written records of events. hill farming, he was co However,
w off for their lunch.
b) The Lydians invented the first calendar. c) There was a solar need to get the film cre that day,
sn’t wearing a watch
eclipse on that day. d) May 28th was a sacred day for both the for some reason he wa time.
r if he could tell him the
Medes and the Lydians. so he asked the farme the e.’
mer, ‘Ah’ll tell
‘Aye, lad,’ said the far myard
2 Who gave us the system of measuring time based on the
be side the cow in the far
He crouched down an d
number 12 with 24-hour days, 60-minute hours and 60-second ed
rny hand, strengthen
minutes? and, with his great ho ud der very
l, lifted the co w’s
a) the Babylonians b) the Greeks c) the Romans d) the Chinese pitted with years of toi
said.
gently. ‘Ten to one,’ he time
3 The ‘celestial clock’ method of telling the time is based on the
Whiteley wa s am aze d. ‘How can you tell the
apparent movement of which heavenly body against a der?’ he marvelled .
by feeling a cow’s ud
background of fixed stars? show thee,’ replied the
‘Come here, lad, ah’ll
a) the sun b) Polaris c) Venus d) the moon ‘If you
down again, he said,
farmer. And stooping you can
4 Apart from sunlight, what other factor is important for the use and lift up the udder,
crouch down like this
of a sundial? ck across the valley.’
just see the church clo
a) altitude b) longitude c) latitude d) air pressure
5 Mechanical clocks with gears were invented in the Middle
Ages. One 13th-century mechanical clock is thought to be the
oldest still in working order. Where in the UK is it? Car clocks
a) Salisbury Cathedral b) York Minster c) Canterbury Cathedral ‘The best headline I eve
r wrote,’ the legendary
d) St Paul’s Cathedral copywriter David Ogilvy
once recalled, ‘containe
words: At Sixty Miles d 18
6 Who built the first pendulum clock (in 1656)? an Hour, the Loudest
New Rolls Royce Come Noise in the
a) Galileo Galilei b) Léon Foucault c) John Harrison s from the Electric Clo
the chief engineer at the ck. When
d) Christiaan Huygens Rolls Royce factory rea
he shook his head sad d this,
ly and said, “It’s time
7 In the early 18th century it became increasingly important to something about that we did
damned clock.”’
have an accurate sea-going clock to enable precise navigation.
Offered a custom-desig
Why weren’t pendulum clocks used? ned Bentley as a gift for
Golden Jubilee, Queen her
a) Sailors thought they were tools of the devil. b) No one thought Elizabeth II had only a
simple requests: ‘room few
of it. c) The motion of the ship would interfere with the for two in the back, a
radio, air conditioning simple
movement of the pendulum. d) The metal pendulums were and a pretty clock.’
affected by the salty atmosphere.
8 Which English clockmaker thought he had found a solution to
the sea-going clock problem in the 1720s?
a) John Harrison b) Arnold Rigby c) Christopher Pelham Only a matter
d) Thomas Campion
9 What mechanism replaced the pendulum in the first sea-going
of time
om, of
given, I forget by wh
clock? A method was once night. (This
in the middle of the
a) a spring-loaded lever and fulcrum b) a quartz oscillator finding out the time aring
the days of clock-be
c) a series of linked balances, driven by springs d) a telescope was obviously before
n compute rs. )
10 Who measured out his life with coffee spoons? mobile phones and eve
it
et (the ability to play
a) J Edgar Hoover b) J Arthur Rank c) J Alfred Prufrock All you need is a trump
d) J C Penney sirable).
at all well is very unde
en window
nt, lean out of your op
At the desired mome w into the
crowded city) and blo
(this works best in a
10 c (In T S Eliot’s poem The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock.)
en their
later, someone will op
longer wound.); 6 d (Galileo designed one, but never actually built it.); 7 c; 8 a; 9 c;
movement and so the scale on the dial.); 5 a (The clock still works though it is no instrument. Sooner or kin g tha t
ho’s that idiot ma
window and shout ‘W
either side of 585.); 2 a; 3 d; 4 c (North–south orientation changes the scale of

morning?’
date. No other solar eclipse would have been visible in the region for many years
armies. The eclipse can only have been the one observable in the area on that racket at 3.30 in the
Answers 1 c (The battle was called off when the sudden eclipse frightened both

Scrapbook compiled by Ian Waring Green

• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 • 63

 T E C H N O L O G Y
Email
projects
Olga Lomakina and Tatiana Gustomyasova
consider the sociolinguistic benefits of telecollaboration.
ociolinguistics, the study of
S language as it affects and is
affected by social relations,
encompasses a broad range of
concerns, including bilingualism and the
ways in which language use is
influenced by contact among people of
different language communities (eg
speakers of German, French, Italian
and Romansch in Switzerland).
Sociolinguists also examine different
dialects, accents and levels of diction in
light of social distinctions among people.
Although ‘accent’ refers strictly to
pronunciation, in practice a dialect can
usually be identified by the accent of its
speakers as well as by distinctive words,
usages, idioms and grammatical features.
Dialects reflect and may reinforce class,
ethnic or regional differences among
speakers of the same language.
Sociolinguistic
competence
Sociolinguistic competence is the ability to
use language appropriately in different
contexts. It overlaps significantly with
discourse competence because it has to
do with expressing, interpreting and
negotiating meaning according to
culturally-derived norms and expectations.
Lack of sociolinguistic competence
is most obvious to us when the
conventions governing language use are
somehow violated, as, for example, when
a child innocently uses a taboo word or
64 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
when the expectations present in one
culture are unsuccessfully translated in
another. It is our sociolinguistic
competence that allows us to be polite
according to the situation we are in and
to be able to infer the intentions of
others. In our daily lives, we vary the
kind of language we use according to
levels of formality and familiarity, and
we use language to express solidarity in
groups to which we belong or wish to
belong. In situations where we may
eventually have solidarity with the
others present, but don’t yet know them
well (for example at an international
meeting of scholars in the same field),
we express deference. In situations where
there is an obvious status difference
between participants, we are careful to
show the right amount of respect.
However, although the teaching of
sociolinguistic competence would seem
vital to ensure the appropriate use of
language, it seems to be neglected in the
foreign language curriculum. The
fascination that the development of
sociolinguistic competence holds for L2
researchers does not appear to be
translated into the actual classroom
teaching of an understanding of the
social context in which language is used,
the roles of the participants, the
information they share and the function
of the interaction, all of which, as
Ming-Chung Yu points out, are
necessary for the avoidance of cross-
cultural misunderstandings.
Given the great importance of
sociolinguistic competence, we suggest
using email projects to address the issue.
Telecollaboration
We live in a society that increasingly
depends upon technology, and
educators today are using distance
education and internet-based learning
more and more as methods for
delivering courses. Research shows that
by using computers, students become
better problem solvers and better
communicators. Networking
electronically can help students create
and analyse information more easily
and efficiently and, by using email and
sharing files, they have the chance to
work together with other classmates,
peers and teachers. Increased electronic
access to the world around them also
enhances the students’ social awareness
and builds their confidence.
‘Telecollaboration’ is when students
are linked to each other electronically
and collaborate on a project or share
ideas in order to find solutions to
problems. This is good training because,
in order to succeed in the real world,
students need to know how to work
with people from different backgrounds.
Various benefits of telecollaboration
in the classroom for teachers and
students alike have been outlined by
several researchers, including Ron
Belisle, Lesta Burgess, and Moti Frank
and Abigail Barzilai:
● It accommodates different learning
styles and the empowerment of
learners, regardless of any physical
challenges or social/cultural
differences.
● It increases self-esteem by empowering
both the teacher and the student.
● It encourages and motivates students
to become involved in authentic
projects and to write for a real
audience of their peers, instead of
merely composing for the teacher.
● It makes learning relevant by teaching
students when and where the skills
they have learnt are appropriate and
useful.
● It has been found that learners are
more interested in email and bulletin
boards than they are in instructional
materials developed for them in an
educational programme.
● It increases critical thinking because
students move from being passive
learners to participants and
collaborators in the creation of
knowledge and meaning.
● For teachers, it can reduce the feelings
of isolation by linking them with the
global community, by increasing the
knowledge base and by creating a
student-centred learning environment
which changes the focus from the
teacher as purveyor of information to
the teacher as collaborator.
Email projects
By using email in the writing class,
students become familiar with a
communication tool that is vital to their
survival in the 21st century. A planned
and monitored email project between
two schools is an excellent way of
increasing the students’ skills in this
important area.
However, some ground rules need to
be established:
● The students should understand that
the language in emails should be
appropriate for a general audience.
Email is not a private medium and
can be used for both one-to-one and
one-to-many messages.
● Names or pen names must be
included, and email should be
addressed to a specific recipient –
either an individual or a whole class.
Any restrictions on the time when
email can be written or sent should be
made explicit. Email may be checked
at random or at set times.
● Messages will be removed from the
host server when accessed. Whether
messages (and any attachments)
should be printed out or stored
electronically will have to be decided.
● Rules and sanctions should be put in
place to protect and support people in
both schools.
All the students should be involved in
receiving, creating and sending email
during the project. Groups or
individuals will need time to collect
email, reflect on it, create a response
and send it.
The teacher will have to
accommodate different speeds of
working and different content, and will
also need to consider whether exchanges
beyond the project can be used.
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
Four possible projects
Here are four suggestions for email
projects:
1 Keypals
Keypal activities are similar to penpal
activities but use email. A partner class
is contacted and messages are written
and sent via email to the partner school.
These messages can be focused on a
pre-arranged topic or can just be
friendly letters of introduction.
2 Data collection
This involves the organisation of data
from multiple websites, which is then
combined for analysis and database
creation. An example might involve the
students researching the different
salaries for occupations in their area.
They then share this information with
other students by posting it online in
the appropriate folder. Other students in
different areas research either the same
or different occupations and post their
information in the same folder. This
information can then be used in a
variety of academic disciplines – for
example, maths classes (for comparison
and contrast), computer classes (for
creating databases) and reading classes
(for interpreting and creating graphs).
3 Electronic chatting
This involves having two individuals
communicating with each other online
at the same time. The topic of their chat
should be pre-selected by the learners
and instructors of partner classes in
collaboration. The learners can think of
questions on a topic and send these to the
partner class. Topics can be anything that
is normally discussed in class, such as
cultural differences, shopping, information
about the local area, state or country.
4 Electronic publishing
This is the creation of a common
document, such as a cookbook or a
storybook. Stories, recipes and histories
can be collected online from students at
various sites and compiled in a book,
which is subsequently published. This
could develop into a multi-ethnic school
archive.
Set-up and success
Setting up keypals requires relatively
little preparation, collaboration and
follow-through time. Electronic
chatting, data collection and electronic
publishing require rather more
preparation and collaboration time than
traditional teaching.
In order to set up a successful email
project, you need to outline from the
start your goals and how you intend to
achieve them. Successful collaborative
international email projects have a
number of features in common:
● The teachers have clear expectations. It
is important to discuss in depth when
the project will start and finish, what
its aims and outcomes are, which
language will be used, and how to deal
with matters such as delays between
receiving and responding to emails.
● The projects are supported from the
start by the management, teaching
and technical staff, students and
parents.
● The projects are co-ordinated by one
person.
● There is a close match of abilities
between partner groups. In language
projects, in particular, the students’
ages and proficiency should be
matched carefully.
● Participants recognise and are
sensitive to cultural differences
between countries, from different
holiday dates, school working days
and times of access to email to
approaches to innovation and
working outside the school day.
Evaluation and
motivation
When projects are supported by self-
evaluation, the students’ motivation to
reach their goals and enhance their own
performance is increased. On page 66
are two checklists that can be used to
encourage individuals within a group
and each group as a whole to evaluate
their contributions to a project and
assess their performance.

In comparison with traditional learning,
telecollaboration helps students to
improve their abilities as problem solvers
and communicators, building skills in
researching and critical thinking.
Telecollaboration also enhances the
students’ confidence and social
awareness and contributes to the
development of elements of
sociolinguistic competence, including



65
 Email Individual appraisal
Work individually. Consider the way you are doing your project work.

projects Use the following key to indicate how often the following statements apply to you:
4 = often 3 = sometimes 2 = occasionally 1 = seldom/never
When doing project work, I ...

appropriate language use in given 1 try to relate new information to what I have learnt.
situations, appreciation of rules of
2 write to native speakers/my classmates as much as possible.
speech and etiquette (including correct
levels of formality), consideration of 3 keep on trying, even if a task seems difficult.
language choice with regard to the
status, age, profession, education, gender 4 use new words and structures as much as possible in my writing.
and nationality of the participants and 5 make an effort to find opportunities to practise the language.
knowledge of the abbreviations
commonly used in electronic mail. 6 contribute new ideas to my partners.
Finally, it enhances the students’
7 take an active part in solving problems.
language proficiency, encouraging and
motivating them to become involved in 8 find new resources.
authentic projects and to write for a real
9 keep a diary of my project work.
audience of their peers instead of
merely producing written assignments 10 help my partners during project work.
for the teacher. ETp

Belisle, R ‘E-mail activities in the ESL Group appraisal

writing class’ The Internet TESL Journal 2 Work in your project group. Consider the way you are doing your project work.
(12) 1996
Use the following key to indicate how often the following statements apply to you:
Burgess, L A ‘WebCT as an e-learning
4 = often 3 = sometimes 2 = occasionally 1 = seldom/never
tool; a study of technology students’
perceptions’ Journal of Technology
Education 15 (1) 2003 Evaluation points Group 1 Group 2 Group 3
Frank, M and Barzilai, A ‘Project-based 1 Our work was on an appropriate
technology: instructional strategy for and motivational topic, developed
developing technological literacy’ Journal
of Technology Education 18 (1) 2006 with sufficient reasons, examples
and details.
Yu, M-C ‘On the teaching and learning of
L2 sociolinguistic competence in 2 We included an effective
classroom settings’ Asian EFL Journal 8
introduction.
(2) 2006
3 We used a conversational manner
Olga Lomakina has where appropriate.
two doctorates and is
Professor and Head of 4 We paid attention to non-verbal
the Foreign Language
Department at Volgograd behaviour (gestures, body
University, Russia. Her language, eye contact, etc).
current interests are ELT
methodology, intercultural 5 We made use of effective
communication, course
design, law mediation illustrations, tables and diagrams.
and conflict resolution.
She is the author of 6 Our work showed a logical
220 monographs,
coursebooks and articles. development of ideas.
lolga1177@gmail.com 7 The flow of the discussion was
appropriate (at the right speed,
Tatiana Gustomyasova
has a PhD and is an without long pauses between
Associate Professor in speakers, etc).
the Foreign Language
Department at
Volgograd University.
8 We successfully kept to the
Her current interests time limit.
are ELT methodology,
sociolinguistic 9 We provided an effective
competence and the
use of information conclusion to our work.
technology in teaching
ESP. 10 We found a creative solution
to a problem.
tmargus@yandex.ru

66 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •

Webwatcher
Web
odcasting is the ability to record audio files that can then
P be listened to and downloaded by others. Sometimes we
talk about ‘vodcasts’, where video is also used, but in
most cases podcasts are just audio. They use ‘push’ technology,
which means that someone can subscribe to a podcast, and
each time a new one is created, that person automatically
receives it as a download on a computer or a smartphone. The
great thing for a podcast producer is that all this is done for you.
You simply need to make the recordings. Amongst my favourite
tools is Audioboo, which I have written about before but which
has been updated and improved a lot.
Podcasts have amazing potential in language teaching
because they can be used by both teacher and students.
Podcasts and teachers
The teacher can use them to create listening content; this could be
material the students have to listen to before the lesson or after
it. For example, a teacher I know in Spain has used Audioboo to
create a collection of interviews with his friends and family for his
students to listen to. Each month he uploads a new interview and
the students can access it either by visiting the Audioboo website
and listening to it there, or by subscribing to the podcasts and
then receiving them on a variety of different devices.
The possibilities are endless. You could, if you wanted,
create a series of mini-grammar lessons or summaries of your
lessons using Audioboo. You might, for example, want to record
a story but leave the ending unfinished. The students then have
to listen to it for homework and complete it, either by writing or
recording their own ending.
Podcasts and students
Students can use podcasting in all sorts of ways. One idea is to
get them to keep a podcast diary, where they talk about the most
interesting things they have done that week or that month. For
higher levels and those studying for exams, it might be a reflective
journal where they talk about their progress: what they have learnt,
what they are finding difficult, what they need to revise, etc. If you
are going to get your students to do this, I suggest you provide
some concrete questions for them to address. The examples below
are for students on a Cambridge ESOL First Certificate course.
The teacher wants to find out how they are feeling about the oral
exam which they have been working on over the last month:
1 What things have you covered in the last month?
2 What things from the last month have you found difficult to
understand?
3 Can you explain what you need to do in the oral part of the exam?
4 What do you think is the hardest part of the oral exam, and why?
5 Can you suggest useful ways of revising and practising for the
oral exam?
Each month the students can be given different questions to
answer, and this helps the teacher to chart their progress and to
get an indication of what they are having difficulty with.
Students can use podcasts for lots of other things, too. You
might give them simple texts to read aloud and record. You
might ask them to record themselves talking about different
topics each month (their best friend, their room, their house, a
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
Russell Stannard
promotes podcasting.
hobby or interest, a person who has influenced their lives, etc)
and these can be the basis of a portfolio of recordings and a
record of their progress. The topics and the amount of guidance
you provide will depend on the level of the students. In many
cases, it is a good idea to practise and work with the ideas in
class but get the students to do the actual recordings at home.
Podcasts are great for exam practice. Say, for example, the
students have to describe a picture or compare two pictures as
part of the oral exam. In the lesson, you can go through the
format and perhaps do some practice. For homework, you
provide the students with pictures and ask them to record
themselves describing them.
It is easy to access your students’ recordings simply by
subscribing to their podcasts. Alternatively, you could create a
class account with a shared password and have all the students
keep their podcasts in one place.
I normally listen to my students’ podcasts and take notes,
which I send or give to them. Of course, you could also provide
feedback by sending the students another podcast.
Getting started
The free account at Audioboo (Audioboo.fm) is limited to
recordings of five minutes, but that is plenty of time for most types
of activities. They are also introducing an Audioboo Professional
account which teachers will have to pay for, but I am told it will be
quite cheap. You can also download free apps from the site that
let you create podcasts onto a smartphone, and these can be
really useful if you want to do recordings in the class or make a
podcast while on the move. So, for example, you could record
your students in class and then upload the recordings in the
staffroom. Don’t forget your students can download these apps,
too, so that they can make recordings in class. This can be great
for recording group conversations.
Audioboo is very simple to use. All you need to do is click
on the ‘my profile’ tab and then click on ‘new recording or file
upload’. You can then make a recording or upload a file that you
have already recorded. There are many interesting recordings on
the site to listen to and you might decide you want to subscribe
to some of these, too.
Students can easily access your recordings, by creating their
own Audioboo accounts and subscribing to your podcasts.
You can also embed your podcasts in a blog or web page.
Watch the help videos I have created to find out more. ETp
Follow me on Audioboo: http://audioboo.fm/russell1955
Help videos for Audioboo: www.teachertrainingvideos.com/
audioboo/index.html
Russell Stannard is a Principal Lecturer in ICT at the
University of Warwick, UK, where he teaches on the
MA in ELT. He won the Times Higher Education
Award for Outstanding Initiatives in Information and
Communications Technology in 2008, TEFLnet Site
of the Year in 2009 and a 2010 British Council ELTon
award, all for his popular website
www.teachertrainingvideos.com.
Keep sending your favourite sites to Russell:
russellstannard@btinternet.com
67
 T E C H N O L O G Y
RSS
Five things you always
wanted to know about
(but were afraid to ask)
1 RSS? Another technology
acronym? What does this one
stand for?
Yes, technology does indeed have its fair
share of acronyms (as we saw in ETp Issue
62). This one stands for ‘Really Simple
Syndication’. RSS is basically a way of
aggregating (or pulling together) content
from around the web into one place.
2 What sort of content? Can you
give me an example?
Imagine that you like to read six ELT-
related blogs regularly. Let’s call them
Blog A, Blog B, etc. Every morning, you
log on to the internet over a cup of coffee
and go along to Blog A to see if there is
anything new. If there is, you read the
new blog post. Then you go along to
Blog B, but once you are there, you see
there is nothing new. So then you visit
Blog C. There is a new post on Blog C,
but after reading a few lines, you realise
you’re not that interested in the topic,
and stop reading. Then you go along to
Blogs D, E and F ... but there is no new
post on any of these. How much time
have you spent so far doing this?
Probably a good 15 to 20 minutes.
Now imagine you could do all of
those steps at once, by simply opening
up a ‘reader’ or aggregator, which pulls in
all of the titles of new blog posts from
Blogs A–F into one nice tidy list for you. If
one of the new blog post titles looks
interesting, clicking on it will show you
just the first few lines of the entry in the
reader. You can then decide whether you
want to read the whole thing or not. How
long would it take you now to see what’s
new in Blogs A–F? You could certainly
check your six blogs in under a minute.
3 So how do I start using an RSS
reader?
One of the best-known RSS readers is
Google Reader (www.google.com/reader/).
You first need to sign up for an account,
although if you already use Gmail, or any
other Google services, you should be able
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
In this series, Nicky Hockly explains
aspects of technology which some
people may be embarrassed to confess
that they don’t really understand. In this
article, she examines a tool to help you
keep up with blogs and podcasts.
to use the same account information. The
next step is to subscribe to your six blogs
via their respective RSS ‘feeds’. Think of
this feed as a special web address that
you add to your reader. You will find a
blog’s feed on the blog page itself, often
in the right-hand column at the top or
bottom of the blog home page. It’s often
a distinctive square orange icon:
Clicking on a blog’s RSS icon will
either give you the blog’s feed address
(you will recognise a feed address
because it ends in .rss or .xml) or it will
allow you to subscribe automatically with
one click if you use a common
aggregator like Google Reader. Once you
have subscribed to all of your blogs, the
next time you open up your reader, it will
automatically show you any new blog
post titles from each blog, in a list. Click
on any title that looks interesting to read
the post. Really simple (syndication)!
4 Which is the best RSS reader
for me?
There are a number of RSS readers
which aggregate text from blogs or news
sites, such as Netvibes, Newsgator,
Pageflakes, Protopage, Bloglines, My
Yahoo! and more. All of these are web-
based readers, which means you can
access them from any computer with an
internet connection. Some RSS readers
you can download and install on your
own computer (eg Sharp Reader, from
www.sharpreader.net/). The disadvantage
of a reader that you install on one
computer is that you can’t access it from
other computers or devices. A web-based
reader is accessible from any desktop
computer or mobile device. Another big
difference between readers is the
interface. The interface of Google Reader
is extremely dense and unattractive (in my
opinion), whereas a reader like Protopage
or Pageflakes looks a lot nicer and is
easier to navigate. However, Google
Reader is compatible with a number of
mobile devices (eg Mobile RSS for iOS or
Android smartphone and tablets) – a big
plus if you use several devices. You could
try out a couple of readers and see which
one works best for you.
5 What about subscribing to
other media, such as audio or
video?
Many aggregators (including Google
Reader) allow you to subscribe not just to
text, but also to audio and video podcasts.
Another option is to use a different
program to aggregate audio and video –
and iTunes is the software of choice for
many people when it comes to subscribing
to audio and video. You don’t need to
have a Mac or iPhone to download and
use iTunes; it works perfectly on a PC.
However, the disadvantage with iTunes is
that it sits on one computer, so if you want
to access your podcasts from another
computer which doesn’t have your iTunes
account installed on it, you won’t be able
to. At the end of the day, it probably makes
sense to start out with a common web-
based reader that allows for text and
audio/video aggregation.
I suggest you start with Google
Reader, Bloglines, Pageflakes or
Netvibes. Set up an account, subscribe
to around five to ten ELT blogs (you
could choose a few blogs from here:
http://chiewpang.blogspot.com/), and see
how you get on. Good luck! ETp
Nicky Hockly is Director of
Pedagogy of The Consultants-E,
an online teacher training and
development consultancy. She
is co-author of How to Teach
English with Technology,
Learning English as a Foreign
Language for Dummies and
Teaching Online. She is
currently working on a new
book on digital literacies, and
also on an e-book – Webinars
(http://the-round.com/labs).
She maintains a blog at
www.emoderationskills.com.
Contact Nicky at nicky.hockly@theconsultants-e.com and
let her know of any other ICT areas you’d like her to
explore in this series.
69
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 In this column
class management strategies are effective, and identifies specific issues that can assist
all language teachers in improving the quality of their teaching.
Teacher anxiety
t is widely acknowledged that learning to
I speak a foreign or second language is a
nerve-wracking business. Many students
feel so awkward and embarrassed when
required to interact with their peers in English
during lessons that they either say as little as
possible, speak English in a jokey, mother-
tongue-influenced way or lapse into
interacting with their friends in their shared
language. Being required to speak in front of
the whole class is potentially even more ego-
threatening, since there is the ever-present
risk of making errors, appearing
foolish and being laughed at by A key challenge for more teacher-fronted ways.
everyone in the room. Language
all beginner teachers
classrooms, then, are places
where individuals can feel highly is speaking in front
exposed and vulnerable. of an audience
What is the situation for
language teachers? Are they any better off?
In this article I describe some of the causes
of teacher anxiety and suggest ways in
which they can reduce their stress levels.
A key challenge for all beginner teachers
is speaking in front of an audience – and
giving the impression of being confident
when they don’t feel confident at all. The
nature of teaching means that all teachers
are routinely required to face new classes on
a regular basis: classes that appear initially
as the proverbial ‘sea of faces’, since they
contain students whose names, personalities
and behaviour are as yet unknown. Beginner
teachers must quickly learn how best to
relate to and manage each new class in the
most appropriate way, while at the same time
developing and refining their teaching skills
with classes containing students who may or
may not be prepared to behave in compliant,
receptive and learning-oriented ways.
The global rush to learn English – and to
start teaching it to students at a younger age
– has led to the recruitment of large numbers
of locally-trained teachers to teach English
in primary and secondary schools. Such
teachers, who more often than not have
learnt English as a foreign language through
traditional methods, are likely to have an
adequate knowledge of English grammar
and vocabulary, but may have restricted
levels of oral proficiency. Implementing the
• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 79 March 2012 •
Rose Senior explains why certain teaching techniques and
communicative approach by giving students
the opportunity to interact in pairs or small
groups in class can be a risky business. Apart
from the ever-present possibility that the
students will abuse their freedom by behaving
in an unruly manner, teachers who seek to
teach in more open-ended ways run the risk
of having their linguistic limitations exposed,
since they must monitor student interaction
and provide remediation or additional
linguistic input on the spot. Not surprisingly,
many teachers in this category prefer to play
safe and continue to teach in
At the other end of the
spectrum, we find increasing
numbers of native English-
speaking teachers with
preparatory certificates in
language teaching working in the widest
possible variety of institutions, ranging from
private language schools to university
departments. Although they have the benefit
of fluency, native English-speaking teachers
frequently find that their knowledge of
grammar is limited because they did little
formal study of English grammar when they
themselves were at school. Many such
teachers regularly report experiencing high
levels of anxiety when asked questions about
the structure of English that
they cannot readily answer. Teaching is at all responsive and learning-oriented. Once
Aware that they do not have times a challenging teachers sense that their classes are
the level of expertise that
their students expect, some
endeavour
teachers describe feeling like frauds at the
start of their English teaching careers. Some
engage in intensive study to make good this
deficiency, while others do their best to avoid
teaching grammar whenever possible.
How can teachers, regardless of their
levels of teaching and linguistic expertise,
reduce their stress levels and, as a result,
teach more effectively? My first
recommendation is that they exude an air of
self-assurance and professionalism as they
walk into their classes at the start of lessons.
This involves being as prepared as possible,
not only in terms of teaching materials but also who runs workshops and presents at
mentally. Teachers who stick closely to a
coursebook should familiarise themselves
thoroughly with the content of the next
section; teachers who routinely replace or
supplement the coursebook with authentic
or customised materials (downloaded from
the internet, photocopied from authentic
texts or resource books or created by
themselves or by colleagues) should have a
plan (written down or in their heads) of how
best to sequence and exploit the materials;
while teachers who use their students’
interests and/or learning needs as a basis
for lessons should be mentally alert as they
walk into the room, ready to go in
whichever learning direction it appears most
beneficial for the class to go. Teachers who
are required to teach lessons at short notice
should have ready an emergency pack of three
or four activities, tasks or readings around
which they know they can build a lesson.
Emergency packs such as these – commonly
known as ‘safety blankets’ – help build teacher
confidence and reduce anxiety levels.
A further important way that language
teachers can reduce their levels of anxiety is
by seeking to develop a positive relationship
with every class that they teach. As soon as
teachers start to think of themselves and the
students in their classes as ‘us’, rather than
conceptualising a ‘me versus them’ situation,
interpersonal dynamics change and classes
tend to become collectively more
‘with’ rather than ‘against’ them,
teaching becomes less of a struggle
and they feel more relaxed and confident.
In sum, teaching is at all times a
challenging endeavour – and despite our
best efforts, no teaching situation is ever
entirely stress-free. However, this may be
no bad thing, since a certain level of
anxiety gets the adrenaline flowing, helping
us to lift our performance and teach in
more dynamic ways. ETp
Rose Senior is a language teacher educator
conferences around the world.
rsenior@iinet.net.au
71
 Prize crossword 52
ETp presents the fifty-second in our To solve the puzzle, find which letter each number represents. You can keep a record
series of prize crosswords. Send your in the boxes below. The definitions of the words in the puzzle are given, but not in the
entry (completed crossword grid and right order. When you have finished, you will be able to read the quotation.
quotation), not forgetting to include your
VERY FREQUENT WORDS ** The things (especially unpleasant ones)
full name, postal address and telephone number, to Prize *** No one that happen to someone
crossword 52, ENGLISH TEACHING professional, Pavilion *** A bright colour FAIRLY FREQUENT WORDS
Publishing (Brighton) Ltd, PO Box 100, Chichester, *** A particular subject or type of activity * Something worn on the foot
West Sussex, PO18 8HD, UK. Ten correct entries will *** The way in which a set of things is * Not completely good, safe or honest
be drawn from a hat on 10 May 2012 and the senders arranged * To surprise someone very much
will each receive a copy of the second edition of the *** Indefinite article LESS FREQUENT WORDS
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, *** ‘____ one teach one.’ (African saying) – Very rude, offensive or unpleasant
applauded for its unique red star system showing the *** Quickly and without warning – Used when giving an example
*** The part of a train that pulls the carriages – A playing card which can be either the
frequency of the 7,500 most common words in English
*** To go into a place highest or lowest in a suit
(www.macmillandictionary.com). *** The day after today – Animals often used to pull carts or
*** Unhealthy plough fields
8 6 26 8 11 9 8 3 19 19 10 3 9 2 *** ‘A stitch ___ time saves nine.’ (English – American English for the impressive
S proverb) features of something
5 8 26 19 8 22 15 17 5 *** A drink made by pouring boiling water on – To sleep for a short time, particularly
2 3 6 9 8 3 19 16 9 16 16 18
leaves during the day
*** The final part of something – Used to describe something that could
14 8 26 9 23 18 26 8 17 *** ‘An army marches ____ its stomach.’ or should have been avoided
(English saying) – A type of poisonous snake
5 14 2 19 21 18 13 14 26 1 18 21 14
*** ‘___ as I say, not as I ___.’ (English saying) – A sea creature with eight arms like an
20 8 3 13 26 8 2 8 *** Something you can experience when you octopus but with two tentacles as well
are asleep – To send documents from a computer to
14 25 2 18 21 18 11 9 13 14
*** ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds ___.’ a large system using the internet
26 7 2 8 24 14 22 14 8 8 (English saying) – No longer excited by things, especially
*** The whole of something when disappointed by frequent
25 5 18 24 14 14 23 14 26 2 8 5 *** A car whose driver is paid to take you experience of them
9 2 26 9 9 5
somewhere – To eat grass
*** ‘Love ___ when I least deserve it, because – An abbreviation for the head of a
26 14 14 2 16 14 19 17 16 14 26 2 8 5 that’s when I really need it.’ (Swedish proverb) business
*** A substance that is neither a solid nor a – An old-fashioned word meaning to make
14 26 2 20 18 15 14 14 4 14
liquid someone ill or unhappy
21 21 22 18 5 14 18 25 14 *** ‘If God had meant ___ to fly, he’d have – Part of a fishing rod that makes the line
given ___ wings.’ (English saying) longer or shorter
14 14 12 9 17 16 18 9 16
*** ‘Hopeful, ___ are halfway to where ___ – A liquid used for dissolving solid
2 5 14 18 13 26 14 14 2 16 14 19 19 want to go; hopeless, ___ are lost forever.’ substances
(Chinese proverb) – A large primate with no tail
*** ‘A miss ___ as good as a mile.’ (English – A large animal from Central Asia with
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 proverb) long hair and horns
14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
*** The outer layer of the body – The part of a flower that produces pollen
S FREQUENT WORDS – A dark chemical put on cuts to prevent
** A very thin metal object used infection
9 26 19 17 9 21 14 8 1 21 12 14 22 8 for sewing – Someone who sells something, but not
19 21 8 1 16 9 23 9 26 25 9 21 19 19
** Part of the body between the in a shop
waist and the thighs – To put a cloth over or around something
21 9 16 16 17 8 17 3 16 18 5
Kathy Norris ** A small vehicle for carrying – A member of a group of people who live
goods with no windows at the side in the Arctic regions

72 • Issue 79 March 2012 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •