Tag Archives: Learner Training

Empowering your students: What makes me an effective learner?

By Fiona Deane

“I don’t get it!”. “That´s stupid!” “That´s impossible!” These student utterances may resonate with you and perhaps hound or hinder you in the classroom. The age of screenagers, google and instant gratification can lead to impatience, exasperated sighs and a holding of the teacher as responsible for classroom success or failure. Many students are not yet aware that they themselves magically hold the key to better learning and understanding.

As the first of a series of posts focusing on empowering our students, this post will:

explain students´ lack of faith in themselves
discuss theories to resolve this
give an activity to start empowering our learners to trust and develop themselves

Passivity

Harmer (2001) tells us “passivity… is the enemy of true learning”. The role of instant media plays its part in this passivity. Many students come to the classroom with a developed reliance on others or a search engine to give them quick answers. Problem-solving, critical thinking, brainstorming, deep reading can therefore be met with a rolling of eyes or infuriation since demands are made on the brain beyond lower-order thinking such as “copy” and “paste”, or “play”.

Scrivener (2012) argues that a certain type of passivity may be developed at home. Some teenagers may have experienced an education culture where obedience to authority is valued above thinking for yourself. In his book “Korea The Impossible Country”, Daniel Tudor writes that Confuciansim has created a culture where between “older and younger….the superior partner should act with a duty of responsibility and benevolence to the lower, who should respond in return with loyalty and obedience.” This older/younger relationship is easily transferred to the teacher/student relationship.

Lack of self-awareness

Many learners come to the classroom “not… aware of their individual cognitive or perceptual learning styles” (Lightbown & Spada, 2006). Indeed, they may not even be aware that such concepts as learning styles or multiple intelligences exist. Answering questions such as: “Am I open-minded to different points of view?”, “Am I a visual or kinesthetic learner?”, “Do I like solving puzzles?”, “Does stress affect my performance?”, “Can I think on my feet?” are crucial to establishing and prioritizing individual learner needs.

Meta-cognition & Reflection

According to Geoff Petty (1998), “reflection involves a systematic and objective evaluation of the student´s concrete experience”. Encouraging students to consider who they are as people and share this with their classmates is arguably the first piece of the learning puzzle. The cornerstone is their reflection on their innate strengths and weaknesses, which can then be followed up regularly with reflection on their progress on these points.

Taking responsibility

Petty (1998) suggests that reflection “may be largely undertaken by… the teacher at first, but the long-term aim should be to get the students to carry out the process by themselves”. Scharle and Szabó (2000) believe that responsible learners are “learners who accept the idea that their own efforts are crucial to progress in learning, and behave accordingly”. They go on to say that learners “need to realize and accept that success in learning depends as much on the student as on the teacher”. By asking your students to question their learning habits and identity, you are effectively turning them into responsible learners without them realizing.

The gateway to empowerment & self-belief

Crucially, we as teachers need to disengage from our “leader” role and encourage our students to get to know themselves, look at themselves in the mirror and know their strengths and weaknesses. At this moment, the student may first experience positive feelings of empowerment and trust and begin to understand that they hold the key to their learning.

Class activity: What skills and personal qualities make me an effective learner?

Class type: ELT Exam or General English groups at Intermediate to Advanced levels.

1) Learners are asked to discuss in pairs the question: “What skills and personal qualities do I need to be an effective language learner?”

2) After about ten to fifteen minutes of discussion, we share our ideas together on the board. It is always the students themselves (with little if any prompting from myself) who come up with such fantastic answers as these:

imaginative
open-minded
finding fun in the learning process
thinking outside the box
believing in myself
patient
outgoing
not afraid to get things wrong
hard-working/diligent
able to identify what I need to improve
reading frequently in English”

3) The students are asked to reflect in pairs on which of these attributes they already possess and which they might perhaps need to work on.

4) This is then fedback to the class as a whole to ensure that learners understand that all students have strengths and weaknesses and that these will be different for each of them.

5) Creators of their own advice: I take a picture of the ideas brainstormed on the whiteboard, print it out and put it on the pin-board in the classroom. Conveniently, as the course progresses these student created ideas can be referred to at times of struggle to encourage them on their journey. For example, if a student may resist trying out a new technique or activiity, I refer them back to the ideas that they came up with and ask them if open-minded was a good quality that was mentioned in order to be an effective learner.

I have found this an invaluable activity on all the Cambridge CAE exam classes that I have taught. It lays the foundations for further reflections that take place throughout the course. Try it out and let me know how it goes!

Fiona

References & Recommended Reading

Harmer J The Practice of English Language Teaching (2001) Pearson Education Ltd

Lightbown P. & Spada N How Languages are learned (2006) Oxford

Oxford R Language Learning Strategies: An Update (1994) http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/oxford01.html

Petty G Teaching Today A Practical Guide (1998) Nelson Thornes

Pulverness, A. Just how low can you go? IATEFL Learner Independence PL Newsletter (2000) IATEFL

Scharle A & Szabó A Learner Autonomy, A guide to developing learner responsibility (2000) Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers

Scrivener J Classroom Management Techniques (2012) Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers

Tudor D Korea The Impossible Country (2012) Tuttle Publishing

Process Approach to Writing IELTS Task 2 Essays

By Emma Claydon

This post is about improving your students’ writing by considering:

attitudes to writing in class
two approaches – Process vs. Product
the concept of audience
collaborative writing
structuring
proof-reading and editing
giving feedback
classroom routines

Attitudes to writing in the ‘communicative’ classroom

Is writing often neglected in the EFL classroom? Perhaps some teachers don’t consider it to be a ‘communicative’ activity or a priority for their students, while others don’t enjoy teaching or marking it.

Having asked my colleagues about their attitudes towards teaching writing, it is clearly a priority for exam classes but not so in General English, as some feel it takes up too much class time so it can be set for homework. Consequently, they don’t see much of an improvement and it’s demotivating for everyone involved.

When students move into exam classes you may notice that their writing needs considerable work. I’ve always seen it as an important skill to work on, not only because it is used for assessment and consolidation purposes, but also involves different kinds of mental processes. So, I embrace writing and make sure that my students get the chance to do lots of it.

Students are required to think about a question and then they need time to formulate a response. However, I do not see it as a solitary activity just to get some peace and quiet in class. Indeed, it can be used to change the pace of a class, but for it to be effective it needs to be collaborative, creative and broken down into manageable stages.

My beliefs probably come from my own difficulties in writing. It can be a daunting task and I prefer to break the task down into pieces. In a three hour lesson devoted to writing, only half an hour is taken up with students actually writing in a solitary fashion or in pairs. The rest is used to prepare and review the writing which is usually conducted through speaking and reading activities with a variety of interaction.

Approaches: Product vs. Process

Until I started reading about teaching writing, I was unaware that I had been using a mix of both approaches. The ‘process approach’ considers writing to be a creative process which requires time and positive feedback at various stages and ultimately ends up with improved writing skills. Whereas the traditional ‘product approach’ analyses model texts and sees writing as a solitary act. For a comparison of the two approaches you can read more here: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/product-process-writing-a-comparison

Writing for IELTS: Essays

In the IELTS exam students have to produce two pieces of writing totalling 400 words on their own in sixty minutes. For part 2 they have to write a 250 word essay in under 40 minutes.

The process of analysing the question, brainstorming ideas, planning paragraphs and putting them together logically is something that students can train together so that they have the skills to go into the exam and perform on their own. But they need to be explicitly aware of this so that you can get them on board.

To ensure my IELTS students become better writers I actively help and encourage them through a series of prepared stages before I can expect them to produce a final text.

When they are more aware of this preparation process they become more autonomous and create good habits which hopefully they will use in the exam. The majority of my students are going onto university where they will need to develop an academic style of writing but essentially they are expected to convey ideas clearly.

Pre-writing and Audience

Not only do students struggle with writing in English because of their language skills, it is often a problem that they lack the ideas and content, so we see brainstorming and planning as essential part of the writing process.

We facilitate the generation of ideas through discussion or we use an interesting article related to the essay question as a starting point to get them thinking about the topic or question, but do we all introduce the concept of audience?

With a genre approach for FCE or CAE, this fits naturally into the writing process as, for example, you need to know to whom you are writing the letter and why. In IELTS task two students know they are writing for the examiner and they understand the assessment criteria but a sense of audience can be developed further by writing for each other or a student blog.

Writing Collaboratively

I have used group compositions with some success, but as students know they won’t have people to ‘help’ them in the exam they can at first be reluctant to do this. I have approached group compositions another way where students write two main body paragraphs and then swap so that they have to focus on meaning by reading and understanding someone else’s writing and then write their introduction and conclusion to see if they have understood the opinions and the flow of their partner’s writing. They then sit together and discuss what was clear or confusing about each other’s writing. Then they rewrite their main body and write their own introduction and conclusion.

Structuring

Once they have produced a paragraph plan the students write their essay. I set a time limit of 30 minutes, which is the time they have in the exam after they have analysed the question and spent time planning. My rationale for this is that I want them to finish a piece of writing in class and to get used to writing under pressure.

As we’ve done so much ground work in preparing to write they cope reasonably well and I have seen my students produce more words and a better quality of writing within that time frame over a few months. However, to add variation to my writing lesson, I get students to write out ideas with supporting evidence and examples on pieces of paper or large post-it notes and work out an order rather than committing their ideas to A4 paper which can still be limiting at this stage.

Proof-reading and Editing

Having finished their first draft, they proof-read it and look for their typical mistakes. I often organise peer reviews, but they aren’t always effective because some students feel unable to find any errors in a classmate’s work or are unwilling to give feedback through lack of training and confidence, so again this takes time and training for students to be able to do this well. Others embrace it and enjoy reading their peers’ work. I find it most effective when they work in pairs looking at one piece of writing at a time. I encourage them to use a pencil and first we focus on meaning buy putting prompts on the board e.g.

Is there a clear main idea in each paragraph?
What is the supporting information?
Have they included examples?
Are the examples clear?
What is the writer’s opinion?
Is it well structured and easy to follow?

They write some comments at the bottom giving the writer some advice. Then they read it a second time and focus on the language and I put the correction code on the board. After peer-correction, the students then rewrite their essay on the IELTS exam paper and hand it in.

Giving Feedback

Giving feedback is an essential part of writing and many of us use correction codes to encourage students to notice their problem areas, fix them and perhaps log them in a learner diary so they build up a log of their typical mistakes.

It is important to work on the grammar and vocabulary that distort meaning, but in IELTS students can gain so many marks for answering the question in a well organised and coherent way that this is an area that needs so much more attention. White and Arntd (1991) state that writing will improve by focusing on the message the students are trying to convey instead of concentrating on the language errors.

If I find it very difficult to follow a student’s essay, I feel the correction code is somewhat redundant; instead I respond with a brief letter asking for clarification of their points and requesting a rewrite. I don’t give any feedback about language at this point and usually the rewrite is clearer so I can then give feedback on the language too. I also find it helpful to reformulate sections of their writing to make it clearer for them.

Classroom Routines

I do fortnightly writing workshops like this which follow on from the biweekly mock test. Under exam conditions I use the IELTS assessment criteria; giving them marks for Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource and Grammar. The following week after the workshop and I mark the rewrite using the 4 criteria above so we will all see which areas have benefited from the rewrite and help students see the value in the workshops.

I find it helpful to integrate the product approach into writing lessons where we analyse other students work or model answers, but prefer to do this after they have written their own response to the task. I make it clear that it is just one way to answer the question. We use it to see what makes it a good answer, why it is easy to follow and we examine the kinds of cohesive devices used. Together we use the assessment criteria and grade it together. This helps the students to think like the examiner.

By setting up writing workshops and training students to use a process approach, they are more capable of expressing their ideas in writing and I have become more of a reader and less of a marker so that the critical stage of focusing on the message is not lost.

References

White, R. & Arndt, V. (1991) Process Writing. Longman

Vanessa Steele. (2004). Product and process writing: A comparison. Available: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/product-process-writing-a-comparison. Last accessed 23rd May 2014.

Recommended Reading:

Badger, R. & White, G. (2000). A process genre approach to teaching writing. ELT Journal, 54(2), 153-160.

Burgess, S. & Head, K. (2005). How to Teach for Exams. Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd.

Hedge, T. (2005). Writing (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hess, N. (2001) Teaching Large Multi-level Classes. Cambridge CUP.

Nunan, D. (1995) Language Teaching Methodology. Phoenix

Rao, Z. (2007) Training in brainstorming and writing skills. ELT Journal 61 (2): 100-106

Scharle, A. & Szabo, A . (2000) Learner Autonomy : A guide to developing learner responsibility. Cambridge CUP.

Scrivener, J. (2005) Learning Teaching. Oxford: MacMillan Heinemann.

Ur, P. (1996) A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge CUP.