Word Games & Tiny Twists #2: Word Stairs

For this game, all you need is a write-on whiteboard or visualiser.  Write up dashes across and down the board so that each successive line has an extra dash:

Pupils suggest words to fill in the dashes, each word being one letter longer than the previous word.  For a beginner’s class, that can be the only requirement, but very soon after starting, most classes can cope with an extra challenge.  I like to play it so that the last letter of the word becomes the first letter of the next word, as in the following examples in English, French & Spanish:

In practice, the activity doesn’t need any instructions, you just do it:  “Give me a word with two letters”.  The word is written up, and you immediately copy the last letter from the first line, writing it at the beginning of the second line.  “Now a word with three letters”.  If they don’t get it straight away, you can point to the first letter. “Beginning with (e)”.  And so on.

What language will they need?

(For me)

• Give me a (three)-letter word beginning with …
• That’s too long / short
• There are too many letters / there are not enough letters
• That’s a good / nice / interesting / useful word
• That’s a noun / verb / adjective / adverb / preposition
• How do you spell it?
• Like that?
• That doesn’t exist! / That’s not English / French / Spanish!

(For them)

• I suggest …
• No, I’ve made a mistake, it’s too long / short
• I can’t think!
• This is hard! / That’s easy!
• Alphabet & accents
• No, not (e), I meant (i)!

Tiny Twists

• Once this has been played as a whole-class game a couple of times, it can be played in pairs with scraps of paper, handed to pupils as they walk through the door.  In pairs, they compete with each other to finish first.  When everyone has finished, or you decided to call a halt to the game, or the kitchen pinger rings, you can resolve any arguments over words that any pairs had.
• You can also start the other way round, where the first word is the longest word, gradually working your way down to a two-letter word.
• You can write a 9-letter word vertically down the board, each letter becoming the first letter of a word to be guessed.
• You can brainstorm some suffixes, e.g., -ion, -ing, -ism, -ed, -ful, -ness, -ly (or the equivalents in the language you are teaching).  Pupils realise quite quickly that when they look for an 8-letter word, they may only really be looking for a 3- or 4-letter word which can be built up.
• Commenting on the words suggested (that’s a noun/verb/adjective, etc.) is a good way of drip-feeding grammatical terms you can make much of later.
• You can limit the range of words to one part of speech, or a topic, if you wish.

Running time: no more than 5 minutes maximum.

Word Games & Tiny Twists #1: Word Chains

This is a new series of posts looking at ways of kicking off a lesson.  I’ve always preferred getting going as soon as the first pupil arrives.  It gives value to the start of the lesson rather than allowing a couple of minutes of down-time from which I’ve then got to drum up some pace.  I think waiting for everyone to arrive before I begin gives permission to pupils to take their time arriving and it hands over the control of when the lesson starts to them.  Queues on the corridor don’t make for a calm environment – it might mean that pupils walk in to a quiet classroom, but the hustle and bustle on the corridor (especially if it appears not to have been built to accommodate a few hundred children moving in two directions) is something I prefer to avoid. From a pupil’s perspective, there is more reason to arrive on time if you feel like you are missing something than if you know that when you get there, you just join the back of a queue and there won’t be anything to do for a while.

So what can we do once we’re in?  If I start the “meat” of the lesson with just a handful of pupils, I can set up a situation where the majority won’t know what to do or how to do it.  Well, in this series of posts I’ll go through a number of activities I use which are a worthwhile use of pupils’ time, but which stand independently of the main part of the lesson.  They warm pupils up linguistically, blowing away the cobwebs of the mother tongue and allow us to get cracking.  By the time the activity is done, everyone is there, the time has been used well, we’re ready to start and a small, but useful contribution has already been made to their overall progress.

Many of these are word games, but not all.  And the ‘tiny twists’?  These are little tweaks we can make to the activity which allow them to go from a whole-class activity into a pairwork game in order to increase how much comes out of the ‘average mouth’ in the room.  The first couple of times I do the activity I just do it as a whole-class task, and on another occasion I do it first as a whole-class thing (more quickly this time), then put them into pairs.  The tiny twists can also be small, almost cosmetic changes to how the activity looks which allow us to do it regularly without it feeling like the same thing all the time.  After all, the whole purpose is to get their enthusiasm going a bit, not to make them feel they’ve been here before.  Some of these activities are to get them thinking, others to get them talking, others, both.  A key factor is that they can be done with little or no preparation.  Some require a one-off printing and cutting session, but from then on you have the materials and you can pull them out of the drawer as and when required.  Sometimes I use them completely impromptu if a class comes in clearly miffed at something that has just happened in another lesson and I need to raise the mood a bit first in order to get a decent lesson out of them, or if it’s a windy day and they come in as high as the kites they could fly and I need to focus them.  If you’re trying any of these for the first time, I suggest you take one activity and use it all week with different classes and ages.  It gets slicker that way and you spot where the difficult bits that need more careful explanation are to be found.  If every class does the same activity at least a couple of times in a week, they get better at it, too.   So, here we go:

Word chains

You can do this on a whiteboard, but I prefer to use a visualiser so that I face the class throughout.  If you don’t use a visualiser and you can’t remember where they stored away the OHPs (they’d be great for this), where I talk about sheets of A4, think “whiteboard”.

In the top left-hand corner of the A4 sheet write a word and in the bottom right-hand corner, another word.  They can be any words, maybe words which have already been said in conversation as the first few pupils have come in, a word of the week, words from the current topic, words they find difficult to spell, synonyms, antonyms, homophones or just two pupils’ names.  The idea is that the class has to get from the first word to the last word by suggesting words which will connect them crossword-fashion across the page.  Here’s the example I gave one of my English classes:

and these were the instructions I showed them after I’d explained it to them, (remember, this is a class learning English – a French or Spanish class would have these instructions in those languages!):

 

A point worth noting is that the level of language in the written instructions is higher than the level I use to explain the activity verbally, and it is pitched at the top of what I think they can cope with.  Because they have understood my spoken instructions, it’s easier for them to understand my more difficult written instructions without freaking out.

In the activity itself, it’s hands-up to speak, and I write down the words they suggest if they fit.

What language will we need? (These need to be prepared in advance, ready to project/put on the wall at the moment they need them, and repeated as a whole class, preferably with a mime, at that point)

For me:

• What do you suggest?
• How do you spell …?
• Where do you want me to start? / Do you want me to start here? / Do you want me to start from the first –r or the second –r?
• Which letter should I start with?
• That’s a good/nice/difficult/useful word!

For the class:

• I suggest…
• What about…?
• The alphabet
• No, not “a”, I meant “e” (for when they get the letters wrong but I write down exactly what they say and they need to correct me).
• You have to start from the “n” of “green”

 Tiny twists

• The words can be related to each other in some way (more difficult) or unrelated, you choose.
• Set a kitchen-timer to ring after 1 ½ minutes.
• Establish a minimum number of words needed to connect the first and last words
• Establish a minimum number of letters per word
• Each letter has to be one letter longer than the previous word
• All the words have to come from the same part of speech (i.e., only adjectives, or only nouns, etc.)
• When playing in pairs, pupil 1 competes against pupil 2 – first one to finish wins.

If pupils have rough books for this sort of activity, it’s worth collecting them in in order so that it’s a job of 10 seconds to give them out.  It ruins the pace if you (or a volunteer pupil) has to wander backwards and forwards across the room giving out the right book to the right person.  Personally for this, I prefer scraps of rough paper which can be recycled at the end.

Total running time from start to finish: no more than 5 minutes, absolute maximum.

Carrot and Stick

Recently I received this question on the blog from Giulia:

Hi James, interesting views and good to have the updates. One of my teachers is having problems 
with discipline and classroom management with some boys that tend to be distracted and distract
 others around them. Could you give us any tips to overcome this in a positive kind of way so they
 feel rewarded when they need to be and on the other the look of the teachers is meaningful enough that they need to stop…. Are there strategies for this carrot and stick approach? Or maybe other more sophisticated methods? Many thanks Giulia

Good question!  And a difficult one, don’t you think?  Low-level disruption while you’re trying to engage a class can be every bit as damaging to learning as an outright confrontation from a pupil which calls a halt to the entire lesson.  Perhaps more so, because (depending on what things are like in your school), the low-level stuff happens much more often (some pupils wouldn’t dare to confront, but they feel somehow invisible or supported by their peers with the low-level disruption) and it may be more tolerated within the culture of the school.

I’ve taken a few days to think this over before replying.  Partly because it’s been a busy week, but partly because as I started to put suggestions down on paper I was reminded how complicated this apparently relatively simple issue actually is.  Everything we do and everything that happens takes place within a context and although the “presenting issue” may be the same, the different underlying contexts mean that we may handle it in any number of ways.  How successful any course of action is depends on many factors – what the school is generally like behaviour-wise, how  common misbehaviour is in our own classroom, how pupils see us, how we see the pupils, how supportive parents are, pupils’ expectations of what will happen if they ignore what we do and also if they actually do what we require.  How long we have been in the school, how long we have had the class, what was tolerated before.  I remember what a shock it was to me when I moved from one school to another some years ago.  Previously I had been able to keep teachers with their classes all the way through wherever possible, so I also had had classes from Year 7 all the way through to Year 11 and sometimes 13.  It was far from being an easy school, but relationships and ways of working were such that low-level misbehaviour were reasonably rare in the MFL department.  When I moved schools I didn’t have that “history” and I was starting again.  The culture of the school was very different and constant chatting and lateness (usually up to 15 mins) were acceptable, at least in practice if not in theory.  It took me almost a whole term with all of my classes from Year 8 upwards to establish that it was unacceptable to talk in English about any randomly occurring notion with any nearby pupil whenever I stopped to draw breath.  It was very tough fighting against what had been acceptable before and was still acceptable elsewhere in the school (from the pupils’ perspective), but I knew that unless I could win that battle, we weren’t going to get anywhere.  And, of course, you will never be thanked by the class for taking the initiative!

Other important factors determining whether behaviour measures will be successful are what the lesson is like in terms of its content, its sense of purpose, its appeal to learning styles and whether it takes place in English, the target language, or the target language except for when misbehaviour occurs!  The biggest factor is, I think, the relationships we have with pupils and who decides the basis for those relationships.  That’s not the subject of a blog post, but rather an entire book!

What follows, then, is not in the least bit authoritative – I don’t feel qualified – but the question feels very familiar to me, both in terms of supporting staff in my capacity as Subject Leader, and also as a class teacher myself.  I’ll set out my immediate thoughts of how I’d go about handling the situation, without the benefit of seeing it.  Being there, of course, might put a different complexion on things.  In another post, we’ll take a look at the issue of classroom management more widely.

First, a few comments on the question itself:

“Could you give us any tips to overcome this in a positive kind of way so they feel rewarded when they need to be”.  The only way to feel rewarded is to be rewarded.  It can be difficult when a pupil is frequently giving us grief of one sort or another to put that completely to one side and praise them sincerely when they do something right, especially if it’s starting to get under our skin.  Yet I think this is the most effective way for them to come to believe that our discipline is actually directed at their behaviour, not at them personally.  If one day they come in to school and without announcing it, decide that actually they’re a bit bored of mucking about and they feel like behaving themselves, and we don’t notice, that can be all the justification they need to reverse that decision!  Not everyone likes public praise, of course.  Knowing your own pupils, you can probably guess if this applies to them.  Here are some options:

• On a day-to-day level, if you run a team competition in your lessons you can give points not just for getting things perfectly right, but also for having a go.  I think it’s still worth giving more points when a pupil (whoever they are) gets something completely right, but if that’s the only way to get a point, some pupils will never get one.  I prefer to use points cards (thumbs-up cards) for points rather than just marking them on the board.  It’s something tangible, visible and individual.  It does mean I have to leg it around the room much more, and I could be setting up a situation I then have to deal with (mucking about with the cards or fighting over them).  If in doubt, don’t.
• A quiet word to say “well done” with some specifics, either on the way out or when pupils are working in pairs, said sincerely and with no hint of humour, can work wonders.
• Where appropriate, a very quick phone call home (clear it with whoever needs to know first – it could land you in hot water otherwise).  It can mean a lot to the parent and a lot more to the student who then realises you don’t only call home when things are bad.  When I’ve done it, the parents have appreciated the effort, and so does the pupil because they find out about it from their parents.  I’ve particularly used this where a pupil has been a pain for a while when it comes to doing some of the more basic things we expect (take part properly in the lesson, speak in the target language, do homework) but begins to show signs of wanting to sort themselves out.  However, I’ve learned that if I want to call home, time is of the essence – I’ve kicked myself several times where I’ve waited too long and they’ve got themselves into bother again before I’ve made the call!
• Some schools use departmental postcards to post home.  A good idea, perhaps, but if they’re sent out all the time by departments all over the school I think they can lose their novelty value.
• Email is the quickest way to communicate, but I think unwise – it’s not a great idea to set up a private, direct communication by email between a parent and the teacher.  It also gives them permission to contact you whenever they feel like it.  The communication might be positive this time, but another time…

“…and on the other the look of the teachers is meaningful enough that they need to stop” .  A glare from a teacher can be just what is needed to nip some low-level misbehaviour in the bud without turning it into a public confrontation.  Most of the class may be completely unaware that you dealt with anything at all, just the pupil concerned and maybe one or two around them.  This, I think, is the ideal situation.  I also think that Giulia’s question gets right to the point – the look needs to be meaningful.  It needs to represent something.  A look, all on its own, may appear to be enough in the first week or two in September if a class doesn’t know us and doesn’t know what might happen next, but it will very quickly lose any effectiveness if all we do is look!  It communicates that we have noticed the misbehaviour and that we are not going to do anything about it.  Control of the class passes to the misbehaving pupil.  Game over.

If that “look” is going to mean anything, it has to be linked not to what might happen next, as some sort of mystery, but at what has already happened in terms of the expectations we have set out with the class at the very beginning of the year and how consistently we enforce them when they are not met.  I think that is really the only way that a look can work.  If we set out our expectations in September but then let things go, or only follow them up inconsistently, we create a rod for our own backs.  The expectations I have always used insist that: There will be no calling out (except for when I give a particular visual signal, which is when the whole class is expected to join in together); respect and consideration will be shown to all members of the class at all times; every effort will be made to speak in French/Spanish to the teacher and to the other pupils.  There are four others as well (relating to homework, equipment, etc.), but these ones refer to how we communicate with each other.  Of course, if we are going to run a lesson entirely in the target language, we need to teach the class how to cope with that.  Not just how not to be overwhelmed by it, but also how to engage with it.  More on this in a post on Coping Strategies.  At the first point that an expectation is not met, it has to be addressed, otherwise they are meaningless.  If the teacher does not take the lead in the classroom, one of the pupils or worse, a group of them, will, and that’s a very hard nut to crack.  Similarly, where expectations are met, they need to be praised.  Where praise outweighs correction, it can be very motivating, foster good teacher-pupil relationships and it backs up the worth of the expectations.  Pupils benefit from clarity.  Positive reinforcement gives motivating recognition to pupils doing the right thing.  I know some teachers are of the view that we should ignore poor behaviour and only give recognition to good behaviour through praise and rewards.  I don’t share this view, but I do think the positive should outweigh the negative.  Ultimately, it’s the teacher who has the greatest impact on what the atmosphere in the room will be by making all sorts of choices to prevent and respond to what is allowed to happen.

The most useful book I have ever read on classroom management is Lee Canter’s Assertive Discipline.  It’s been through a number of revisions since it first appeared but you can pick up some earlier versions very cheaply on the internet.  The cover of the edition has a rather twee photo on it which may make you wonder whether it’s very realistic, but in my view, it’s outstanding.  You have to work out for yourself how you make some of it culturally appropriate – some of it felt very American and I was teaching in a British school – but then this is not teaching by numbers!  The principles are completely sound in my view.  In short, it’s the only book I’d recommend.

So, some tips.

Four things I wouldn’t do:

1. Make idle threats.  “If you don’t sort yourself out, I’ll put you in detention for a week.”  I won’t.  They won’t turn up because it feels out of proportion.  I’ll look silly when they call my bluff and then other members of staff will end up dragged in to sorting out something I’ve made worse.
2. Give three warnings.  I think this is excessive and if it’s a class where this is an issue, it’s easy to lose track of who has had 2 warnings, who has already had 3… it’s messy.  It often leads teachers to writing names on the board, which I think just gives bravado points.  It sometimes leads to a bargaining situation where if a pupil improves the name is rubbed off, then written up again later…  Aaagghhh!  Far too messy, and it keeps the focus on (mis)behaviour rather than on learning.  Make the expectations clear at the start and 3 warnings aren’t necessary.  Once should be enough for them to know what is required of them.
3. Say what another member of staff will do.  It’s never good to use another member of staff (Subject Leader, Year Leader, Senior Manager) as a weapon.  If appropriate, I would definitely call on them for support, but I wouldn’t second-guess what their response will be.  After all, they may disagree with my initial take on the issue, and they may well be right to do so.
4. Ignore the issue.  Never.

What would I do?

1. What do you want the outcome to be?  I’d keep this question in mind throughout – it helps me focus on the right things.
2. Have a seating plan, always.  They sit where I choose, not where they choose.  I move everyone around every half term.  If an unfortunate combination arises:
3. Split them up.  I have my classroom set out in horseshoe formation, one smaller horseshoe inside a larger one.  I’d put the offending pupils at opposite ends of the same long line of tables.  It’s harder for them to  see each other, and if they try, I can easily see what they are doing.
4. Talk to them.  I use 3-4 pairwork activities in each lesson, some of them very quick, some of them take longer.  Once the class is engaged in an activity, I can sidle over without getting everyone else’s attention and speak quietly to the pupil(s).  I make it clear that I can see what’s going on, that it has to stop immediately and I expect to see them take part fully in what they have been given to do.  My tone is neutral.  Not angry, not trying to persuade.  Just clear.  Then I walk away but I keep an eye on what they do.  If they do well, I go back to them as soon as possible and praise them.  If they choose not to do as I say:
5. I speak to them again.  Neutral tone again.  I remind them that they had the chance to put it right but they have made the choice not to.  I tell them to remain behind at the end and we will arrange a time to discuss this further.  My priority is to the majority who are behaving themselves, so I continue with my lesson.  That also gives me time to think clearly about how I will handle it, when I can talk to them (there is little worse than arranging to see a pupil and then forgetting – they turn up but I don’t).  Depending on whether this is a recurring problem or a one-off, I would either handle it myself, speak to them with the Subject Leader (if I was not the Subject Leader!), possibly the Year Leader (subject to how the school is organised), or speak to parents.  The key thing is, it has to stop, and they have to engage with the lesson, allowing the teacher to teach and the others to learn.  I wouldn’t engage in any discussion about how others are treated, whether X did the same the other day but got away with it or anything like that.  The discussion would relate tightly to the expectations that they know about and chose not to respect.  At all times in the conversation, I think it’s important to keep the focus on their behaviour and not to allow the pupil to misconstrue it as an attack on them personally.
6. Give them a way out.  In the conversation, it’s useful to tell them how they can put it right.  It’s not just about teaching them a language, nor just about sorting out misbehaviour.  It’s also about teaching them how to put right their mistakes.  Home life for them may be one long slanging match where the one who shouts loudest wins, and the defeated are just… defeated.  School may be their only hope of learning how to get it wrong and then get it right without being injured in the process.
7. Forgive them.  Once they’ve put it right, they can move on.  Every day is a new beginning.

Best of luck…!

Planning for spontaneity

In this post, I want to look at how we can review the last term to see how pupils are using classroom language and how to use that to plan for this term and next September.  This is more about how pupils are interacting than how they are advancing in their content, or topic, language.  My goal is for pupils to become increasingly independent in making their own sentences as they interact, more fluent in their ability to transfer structures accurately across contexts and situations. Developing their classroom language or, as I prefer to refer to it, pupil-pupil language, is my methodological weapon of choice for getting towards that goal.  Put more bluntly, whatever their grade they come out with at the end, I want them to be able to speak the language they studied at school!

I’ll set out here how I go about it myself and then you can decide whether it’s an approach you want to use yourself.  If you’re reasonably new to using target-language teaching, hopefully it will be useful to you, even if only as a starting point for developing your own strategy.

As I look back over a the term for any one class, I ask myself three pretty straightforward questions:

1. What can they do?
2. What were the initial goals?
3. How do I account for the difference between the answers to those first two questions?

So, what exactly do I mean by this?

1. What can they do? What can they say spontaneously?  Which of the routines that we have been using have “taken root”?  Which phrases are pupils using without prompting from me?  And which ones will they use if I do prompt them a bit, either by mimes, starting off the sentence for them or just pausing to see if they fill in the communicative gap?  Which structures or phrases are pupils trying to transfer from one routine or situation to another on their own initiative, even if in doing so, they make some grammatical mistakes?  Are there any communicative patterns emerging?  For example, pupils are asking for things and spotting which bit of the sentence changes each time.  Pupils are asking you to do things, and they notice which bit changes, and they get it right.  Are there any linguistic patterns?  For example, they are using lots of questions which begin with the same interrogative: Comment? or Qu’est-ce que …?  There will of course be quite a bit of difference across the class as to who can say what.  That’s not a problem, although it’s important that I get a clear and accurate picture in my own mind about this – my own particular weakness as I think about how a class is doing is to home in on a handful of pupils who have really got their heads round the whole interaction thing, taking risks, enjoying the “game” of banter … and then to project that onto the rest of the class, ignoring the fact that a few pupils may not be much further on than they were half a term ago.  So, honesty is not only the best, it’s also definitely the most useful policy!
   One way I like to do this is to make a three-column list of my answer to the questions I’ve just set out.  One column is for phrases that pretty much everybody in the class uses, another for ones that most pupils use, and the last for phrases that just a few use.  This helps me with my perspective.  It’s important that I have an idea of what is happening, but also to what extent.  If I keep that list and update it at the end of each term (or half-term), it gives me a much clearer idea of progress than levels do.  Unfortunately the obsession in recent years of reducing everything (or everyone!) to a mere number in order to evaluate it and set it targets tends to obscure what is most useful to me as the class teacher.
2. What were the initial goals?  That’s easy to do if I wrote them down at the beginning of term!  If you’re new to using classroom routines and target-language teaching, your goals may have been no more specific than just to try it and see how it goes.  Personally, I think that’s justified.  It’s very difficult to set specific goals for something you’ve not tried before.  But, assuming you’ve done this before, what did you want to see or hear in this term?  Let’s not rush too quickly into evaluating whether these goals were fulfilled, that’s coming up, but not yet.  What did you want to see in pairwork activities, setting up activities, reviewing them, providing feedback, register routines, winning or losing games, pupils asking for things or for explanations?
3.  How do I account for the difference between the answers to those first two questions?  As important as the need for honesty is the need to approach this review with absolutely no sense of guilt!  Sometimes I can look at my review and realise that one class has made lots of progress whilst another has made very little, mainly because I have put all my energy and effort into a group that is really with me, and not been so thorough with a group where it’s a little hard-going and, frankly, it’s less motivating for me.  Or I find I have been less than realistic about what all of my groups could achieve in the time.  It’s easy not to take account of how heavily loaded a particular half-term will be where there is exam-marking or report-writing to be done in a few weeks’ time.  This is bound to affect how much we can prepare, plan and be creative in those weeks, at least to some extent (unless we sacrifice our family and friends – never, ever a good option).  Like most teachers, I’ve been through the guilts, but the reality is that a sense of guilt is a very poor motivator for pretty much anything, especially making progress in teaching.  I think it is much better to approach this from a practical point of view.  If the review shows up some gaps, then it has done an important half of its job.  (The other half is what I do about it!).  Remember the 3-column list?  If I separate each termly (or half-termly update with a horizontal line to make a grid, I find it useful at the beginning of the same term the following year to see at a glance how much is possible for me and the class with everything else and every other class that there is to juggle.  It may be that I choose to do a little less with one class in order to give myself the time to give a bit more attention to another which was lacking it, to even things up a bit.  This is part of what I understand by pacing myself. Sometimes my initial goals are not fulfilled because the class is set to take itself off on a tangent and I judge that it’s worth pursuing.  There have been some routines (most notably a register routine of some years ago, detailed in Something to Say, by James Burch et al, CiLT 2001) where the classroom interaction has developed in ways which are very different from what I had planned.  I had planned to have the class speculate on how long it would take to do the register, make some predictions and then compare the actual time it took with the predictions of individuals in the class.  In the event (over quite a few lessons), one particular class decided that what really got them going was speculating on why various individuals who they knew to be in school were late, or why others were absent (to be handled with care, that one). The reasons given were always totally outlandish and they were judged in terms of how possible or probable they were, and they used the present tense and related constructions (e.g., en train de + infinitive) in much more meaningful ways than any amount of gap-fills I could come up with.  Such digressions are worth it, if you feel you can handle them or you are prepared to have a go and see where they take you.  You can always call a halt to it when you need to, if you can see that it needs a bit more thought before it goes any further, and then let it run in a later lesson.It may be of course that my initial goals werefulfilled!  That gets easier as the years go past and the more we get used to using routines and classroom language and our initial goals become more realistic.  We can develop a feel for what is possible within a term, or how we can develop structures by building more complex patterns into sentences pupils are already using.  Those grids I’ve mentioned for reviewing the term have really helped me to do that.  When I refer to goals being realistic, I’m not suggesting that we reduce the challenge of them.  They can still be adventurous, but they are realistic in the sense that they take account of all the demands I need to deal with.One last point on the review grids.  I’ve used them for years, and I still do.  When I was a Subject Leader, I used to do this with my departments and we would, where possible, dedicate a meeting per term to thinking through all of our classes in this way.  (There were a couple of extra columns in the grid for other things we were working on, but that’s for another day).  I felt it was important to give people time to do this because it was intended to have a direct effect on planning, teaching and learning, and doing it in meeting time meant that time could be blocked off for it.  Speaking personally, I would probably have put it off and eventually not done it, with everything else there was to do if time hadn’t been allocated for it.  This made it a regular feature.  The other thing is that I didn’t ask to see what teachers in my department had written.  It’s less likely to be a guilt-free exercise if you know no-one else is going to see it!  I was more interested in the fact that everyone in the department was reviewing what was happening in their classes and responding to that, trying to respect their professional judgement, than being too invasive.  The only exception to that was with NQTs in the first couple of terms who benefited from a bit of guidance, but that was to help them to think it through, not to judge what they had written.  Accountability is important, but there can be too much of it.  We had these sheets bound into our planners so we’d got them for the next term – if there’s a loose piece of paper, I’ll lose it.

Next steps

In considering Question 1, we tried to work out if there were any patterns emerging linguistically or communicatively in what pupils were saying.  Now it would be worth looking for patterns in what pupils want to say but can’t yet.  I often find that difficult to work out when I’m in a meeting and not actually in the class with them!  I like to keep a pad of Post-Its handy in the lesson, and if someone comes up with something (usually preceded by Comment dit-on … en français?) I jot it down later at a convenient moment in the lesson before I forget it.  This is particularly the case if it reminds me that others in the class have also recently asked for the same or similar language.  The Post-It can go straight into my planner or diary and then later the same day I can do something about it (make a visual, think through a routine, look for how the situation/language can develop) before I see them again.  It was in a situation like this once that I realised I hadn’t taught pupils how to ask permission to leave the room for a music lesson.  Dealing with that also dealt with a number of similar situations which used the same language (i.e., leaving for music lessons, reading practice, the toilet, the nurse, and any number of other excuses for legging it out of my lesson).  It also gave us the opportunity to learn the vocabulary of a few musical instruments as I repeatedly guessed wrongly the music lesson the pupil was leaving for.  More importantly, in French it opened up the opportunity to point up the fact (and return to it frequently) that jouer takes de for instruments instead of the à they were more used to for sports, and in Spanish that jugar was for sports whereas in this context they needed tocar.  This led to some mirth in discovering that the no toques they had been using to control each other (I do like it when classroom control is a shared responsibility) when I gave out cards for a pairwork activity (to mean “don’t touch”) could also be used to say “don’t play” for a musical instrument.  This was particularly applied to the proudly less musical amongst the class.

If you’re wondering about some specific structures you could use to develop classroom language further, take a look at this quick, reasonably basic list.  If you find any that pupils aren’t using yet, or you haven’t introduced, I would start here.  It will help to keep more of the lesson in the target language:

• What’s the difference between …. and …..?
• Correction:  That’s right / that’s wrong / the correct version is …
• How do you say …? / How do you spell …? / How do you pronounce …?
• That was …+ adjectives (easy / difficult / OK / too [easy, etc.] / great / boring / interesting / fast / slow)
• Ready, steady, go! / I’ve finished / I haven’t finished / Have you finished?
• Could you repeat that / explain that / give me …
• Can I have … ? go …?
• Do we have to …? write / stick / copy / fill in / say
• Formal forms (Vous / Usted)
• Negative pattern: Je ne sais pas / Je ne vois pas / Je ne peux pas (I don’t usually teach Je ne comprends pas – it’s too easy a get-out!  I’d rather teach Can you say that again / explain it differently?)

Have fun!

Happy New Term!

Happy New Year!  ¡Feliz Año Nuevo!  Bonne Année !

Thank you for joining me again in a new term.  When I started writing this blog in February 2011, it was mainly as a way of forcing myself to be specific in my thinking about what I am trying to do with my classes as well as responding in some depth to some of the very varied questions that come up during consultancy visits to schools or in conferences.  I’ve always been a convinced target-language teacher and I’ve always been interested in the “Yes, but how?” perspective, but I had no idea how much interest there would be from others or how far afield it would stretch.  It has been a real encouragement, therefore, to welcome on board during the course of this last year readers of a whole range of experience, from PGCE students to NQTs, teachers with a couple of years behind them to Subject Leaders, senior managers, Heads and advisors.  WordPress tells me that readers of this blog are joining us from 21 countries, most of them from the UK, USA and Spain, but also from Ireland, France, Canada, Mexico, Antigua, Honduras, Brazil, Russia, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, China, Australia, New Zealand, Angola, Nigeria and Libya.  Thank you very much indeed for your interest and for the kind words I have received.

As we are at the beginning of a new year, it’s all about beginnings on this blog, too.  Next week, we’ll take a trip back to the start of the academic year and look at how an NQT or someone who is relatively new to target-language teaching might take stock of the autumn term with the benefit of hindsight and use that to plan for the spring term.  We’ll also think about how next September might be approached slightly differently based on what actually happened this year.  We’ll also be taking a look at some lesson beginnings, activities to blow away the cobwebs of English and focus pupils on communicating in the target language right from the beginning of the lesson.

2012 looks like a busy year ahead (is there any other sort?!).  This year sees the publication of two new DVD resources which have been 18 months in the making, one in the summer, a detailed guide to techniques for getting going with target-language teaching, and then another in the autumn, a step-by-step approach to teaching advanced grammar, which builds on the Teaching Grammar Through The Target Language: Mission Impossible? series released last year.  Also, once I have the nod from the organisations concerned, I’ll post information here about the public events coming up in London in which I will be providing a session or a day’s training.

So, batteries all re-charged?  Happy New Term!