Tag: tefl

TEFL Tips #4: The accuracy/fluency dilemma

“You can’t let errors like that go uncorrected!”

“You can’t destroy students’ confidence by constantly interrupting them!”

I’ve got either one of these distressed voices bleating in my head at any given point during any given lesson. It’s a quandary.

One approach worth a look is creating a accuracy/fluency scale somewhere in the room, then positioning an arrow somewhere on that scale according to the task being attempted. A pendulum works, as does an approximation of a car speedo or even a straightforward slider drawn on a whiteboard. 

Quickly, groups will learn to look over at the slider before they attempt a communicative task; actively deciding where to put that arrow will become part of their thinking. Group discussions on how to balance accuracy/fluency for different scenarios are a fascinating gateway for intercultural communication topics. And there’s nothing stopping you explaining your dilemma as a teacher, and putting the power to determine the right balance of fluency and accuracy in the hands of your learners.

Try it.

TEFL Tips #3: Copy Eno’s Oblique Strategies

For me, lateral thinking has always been a term I half understood. Something to do with solving riddles right? It tended to crop up after the fact: Someone who had already determined a solution would implore you to ‘come on, do some lateral thinking’ until you thought what he or she thought. Hmmm. File with ‘thinking outside the box’ and do some proper work.

But a reappraisal is necessary, and in my case it was triggered by trying to work out how to teach English for Academic Purposes. With EAP more than any other specific purpose language teaching I’ve done, a learner’s capability to grasp the discourse of academic enquiry is utterly dependent on his/her ability to actually think in empirical terms. You just can’t bolt it on afterwards, because if you try to, you get bizarre paragraphs in which students dutifully avoid personal pronouns and deploy passives while being fundamentally unscientific in the way they develop and link ideas. OK, I suppose in an ideal world only students with a solid grasp of academic methodology would be grappling with EAP. Pffffft, as the steam escaping from a stoppered flask above a bunsen burner might say.

But it is in tackling this problem that I have come to enjoy a fascinating rediscovery of scientific method and discourse, always the dark side of the moon for a post-GCSE humanities graduate. Big Google sessions on formulating hypotheses, reasoning inductively and deductively and applying logic have provided great lesson material. And my students seem to be appreciating the knock-on effects of this back-to-basics approach on their other modules.

I should point out here that I teach students of international business. They are not scientists, but they do have to conduct an extended piece of academic research to get their Bachelor’s degree (they’d call it a dissertation in the UK). And clearly the German university system expects them to have somehow acquired the requisite skills to achieve this, despite the fact that these are simply not embedded in a curriculum explicitly geared towards the applied skills of accounting, business law, business maths and statistics.

So there’s a painful shortfall to be dealt with here, and it is cruelly exposed in our EAP lessons.

To come to the point and the title of this post: one Google session led me to lateral thinking and Edward de Bono, and that triggered a memory of an interview I’d read with Brian Eno about some sort of cards he used which displayed abstract messages designed to spur creativity in the various era-defining artists he’s worked with (and Coldplay). The details are all here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies and a quick read will instantly highlight for you the potential of creating your own set of cards for your learners. Just to get the gist, here are mine:

Is that it?
Where are the hidden gems?
Is this the start or the end?
Can you feel it?
Why so blurred?
Heart or head?
Better safe? Or better sorry?
Who’s not being honest?
Where is the love?
Is it a man thing?
What’s the point?
What aren’t we seeing?
Who is (really) in control?
Is this a con?
What would the parents think?
Why so serious?
Where’s the catch?
Where did it all go wrong?
What if it’s a trap?
Bit boring?
Should we just start again?
What’s taking so long?
Is this the time?
Why did we stop believing?
Smoke or fire?
Are there walls?
Who has the key?
Do words matter?
Would you touch it?
A dime or a dollar?
Whose round is it?
Why are the gates locked?

Now, I’m guessing this isn’t for everyone, but maybe it is sparking off ideas with some teachers. I printed off a few sets of cards, put one deck on each table, and just asked students to turn over a card whenever they felt they were getting stuck. At the very least, that moment of disassociation as your brain tries to make the question fit snaps the group out of a discursive dead end. In some cases the cards opened up whole new aspects which hadn’t been considered. And the cards are reusable and pretty flexible for use in stimulating discussions or analysis on a range of topics. They also seem to have a positive differentiating effect built in: More capable students will think farther in order to find meaning in the questions and this offers useful and in my experience relatively unforced modelling of abstract thinking patterns to students who may not be quite there yet. So, if you dig it then go create some cards, or feel free to use and amend mine.

Now, if only I had an oblique strategy for bringing these TEFL tips in at under 800 words …