Deeprhythms.com

Another waaay off-topic post, but I just wanted to share this site with anyone who might be interested. If you like House music, then this site definitely has to be in your bookmarks. It focuses on Deep, underground House music with a really nice balance of spacey, ethereal, soulful sounds and darker, techier tracks. There are probably a total of 60 hours of mixes on the site, with some real gems in there.

The site is run on a not-for-profit basis, although you can contribute via Paypal as a ‘thankyou’, and it’s clear from the site and the mixes that these guys just love House music. Give them a listen – you won’t regret it.

Well then. I haven’t posted in more than two months. I have no excuse, really – I was having too much fun before and during the Christmas period, and I’ve just been insanely busy since then with a massive assignment and planning and assessment related to my work based experience. However, that assignment is now (largely) finished, and I can now share some of the fruits of the work. So, please read, and feed back

The assessment document is attached in ODT format. If your PC can’t read it, SHAME ON YOU! Go get OpenOffice 2!

The Assessment Tool

Family vocabulary – assessment tool

Overview

This assessment tool is a formative assessment tool (Harmer, 2004ⁱ) designed to test learners’ understanding of a series of vocabulary items related to family membership. It is indirect and discrete in that it is not an assessment of communicative ability, but rather an “[attempt to get] at what lies beneath their receptive and productive skills” (Harmer, 2007ⁱⁱ). Some of the vocabulary assessed was already known to the learners as basic vocabulary – mother, father, wife, etc… – that a Pre-entry / Entry 1 learner might be expected to know previous to the session. This assumption was borne out by the introductory activity, which elicited some basic family vocabulary present in the assessment tool. However, the outcome of the session was aimed more at family vocabulary that, while certainly useful, occurs somewhat less frequently than certain ‘core’ terms. Other objectives of the session were to review possessive forms – my, his, her, ~’s, etc…, and to review previous sessions’ objectives where we had looked at dates and the readings of years – implementing some minimum core numeracy objectives.

The tool itself consists of the target vocabulary – understanding of which I indicated to the learners was the criteria they were being assessed on – and a series of descriptions which fit the vocabulary:

“1. A male child is someone’s _______.”

Given that this is a vocabulary assessment, I elected to use a format somewhat similar to the gapfill activity described by Harmer (Harmer, 2007ⁱⁱⁱ). However, the activity described by Harmer is intended for the teaching of vocabulary, whereas this is an assessment activity. This lead to several important differences in approach. Primarily, I avoided prompting students as much as possible. Also included in the teaching phase of the session was a whiteboard diagram of a family tree, which included the terms included in the assessment in a visual format. I removed the text from the diagram, leaving only the pictures of the family members. There was, therefore, no external support, apart from myself, for the learners as they completed the activity.

Analysis

Implementing the assessment tool was not without its problems. The biggest issue with the tool was related to the low level of the students in the class. The Pre-entry class where I implemented this assessment is, I feel, my most challenging by a good margin – differentiation is a constant issue with the students, who range from very low pre-entry to high Entry 1/Entry 2. Several of the students have literacy issues, with one learner having received no formal education whatsoever. Consequently it was very difficult for her to complete the activity in the allotted time. Indeed, it was very difficult for her to comprehend the questions. To respond to this, I had to intervene to help her to understand the questions, and, despite my desire to avoid it, it was necessary for me to prompt her verbally and provide a great deal of support in the task. In place of a formal written assessment for her, I reasoned that it would be more appropriate for her to practise her writing skills, with verbal feedback and encouragement. She was capable of understanding and producing the vocabulary verbally, but I felt that it would be unfair and demotivating for her to be formally assessed on a task that was not suitable for her level.

A criticism that I would level at the tool I designed is that the questions themselves were a little convoluted. For example, question 4 asks learners to identify the name for “My father’s sister’s daughter”. Many students completed this question adequately, but others, who hadn’t fully acquired the rule governing the possessive “s”, struggled with this question. On reflection, I feel I made the mistake of “assessment by stealth”, where I was unwittingly also assessing something that I had not intended to.

A final point that I will take into account in later sessions is the difficulties that learners had with questions 5 and 6. Both these questions were guilty of redundancy – particularly question 5.

“5. My son’s grandfather is either my ___________ or my ___________”.

Perhaps half of the learners had trouble with this question. This indicates to me that there was an issue with the phrasing of the question, which ought to be crystal clear:

“In practice, reliability is enhanced by making the test instructions absolutely clear, restricting the scope for variety in the answers…” (Harmer, 2007^iv)

This is again an issue in question 6, which has two possible answers, yet no indication is given as to which answer is appropriate or expected – the assessment criteria were simply not clear enough in these two questions. In the future, I shall attempt to design more appropriate assessment materials that more accurately reflect the varying needs and abilities of my students, as I feel these questions unfairly penalised the less advanced learners. As I stated above, it was my desire to keep interventions to a minimum. The fact that it was necessary for me to intervene with some of the students to clarify exactly what was being asked for is a significant event that will be addressed in my reflection and action planning for the future.

With the more advanced Pre-entry / Entry 1 learners, the assessment was more capable of being just that. It did effectively assess which of the learners had established the correct meanings, and allowed me to see clearly which of the terms the learners had problems with, and which of the learners I need to consider more when designing and implementing lessons.

It is at the very least interesting, and I suggest important, to note that the learners who performed well on the assessment tended to have better pronunciation skills and could concomitantly speak faster than those whose success was more limited. Short-term memory, or working memory, seems to play an important role in learners ability to retain information over longer periods – learners who can remember longer utterances in an L2, and speak more quickly seem to remember language items better (Cook, 2001^v). This is illuminating, as perhaps the learners who performed less well in the assessment would have benefited from a planned drill in the session which focused on accuracy and speed of reproduction in all the terms included in the assessment.

Action Points for Future Assessment, Planning and Practice

• Be absolutely clear on what is being assessed.

• Pay greater attention to the structuring of the questions.

• Reflect on possible assessment methods that are more inclusive and suitable for a wider range of learners.

• Make sure that the assessment criteria are maintained and transparent to the learners.

• Focus more on drilling to better enable less fluent learners to retain and reproduce the items being assessed.

• Consider assessment format more closely – would this assessment have been more comprehensible as a diagram to be labelled?

References
i) Harmer, J – The Practice of English Language Teaching, 4^th Edition, Ch. 22, Pg. 379, Para. 2

ii) Harmer, J – The Practice of English Language Teaching, 4^th Edition, Ch. 22, B1, Pg.381/382

iii) Harmer, J – The Practice of English Language Teaching, 4^th Edition, Ch. 14, Pg. 240 – Fig. 2

iv) Harmer, J – The Practice of English Language Teaching, 4^th Edition, Ch. 22, Pg. 381 – Reliability

v) Cook, V – Second Language Learning and Language Teaching, 3^rd Edition, Ch. 4, Pg. 86 – The Importance of Pronunciation

I started my WBE today. In true British fashion, I didn’t know I was starting (I was told that a prospective placement provider “wanted to meet me”), and the teachers who are going to fulfil the mentor roles for my fellow student and I didn’t know we were coming until 10 AM.

Anyway, those are mere trifles, and I’m really happy with my placement – the college received an “outstanding” rating in every area from OFSTED in its last inspection, and has a well-resourced ESOL department, with a broad ability range of students.

Initially, it was intimidating going to the college, but once I got into my first observation, I settled down and became much more comfortable. One of the primary reasons for my nervousness was simply not knowing quite what to expect from the observations, but I felt much better when the class started and I realised that I understood what the instructor was doing. This started me thinking about what I hope to achieve in terms of professional development – it was apparent to me that the activities I was seeing were activities that I understood, and would even use myself.

After some thought on the subject, I have come to the conclusion that my primary motivation for being here is not simply to learn teaching “techniques”, although I naturally expect the course to influence my technique (an important distinction). There are thousands of different activities and so many different approaches to learning that I could bury myself in activities and copies and handouts and flashcards and still not improve as a teacher. It struck me that since I understood what the teacher was doing in those classes, I should probably focus on what the learners are doing, since this is what must ultimately inform a teacher’s choices – both in the classroom and in the staffroom – when they are preparing their lessons and delivering them. I realised that there’s a significant difference between understanding the whats and understanding the whys of teaching, and that I want to learn to think more from the students’ perspective when I’m planning and delivering lessons.

I also saw an interesting technique for managing students’ Individual Learning Plans. At the end of each session, the teacher handed out each student’s ILP, and had them note down the lesson objectives and some brief examples of the target language – this meant that the students have a concrete record of what they studied in the lesson, and can relate that to their plans. In that respect, it seemed useful. This started me thinking about planning. I’m wondering how to best integrate students’ ILPs into the planning process – it strikes me as very time-consuming and unwieldy to sit with students’ ILPs in front of me while planning sessions. Perhaps there is a way to integrate the most salient parts of a student’s ILP into the scheme of work – almost like the tags that appear on many websites to sort by category… It seems I have more to think about…

Just a quick entry to stroke my inner geek. Since it’s waaaaaaaay off-topic for this blog, I figure it’s best kept short.

I’ve been running the Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon release candidate for a few days now, and I have to say it really is a big step up from 7.04.

I’m not going to say “LOL! it’s better than Vista LOLOL!”, because I’ve never used Vista. However, I will go so far as to say that its feel is much better than any iteration of Ubuntu I’ve ever used – It’s usable, stable, pretty (so, sooooo pretty!), and says (in its understated way, of course) “we’re serious about this”. Perhaps that’s all that matters.

I think I’m in love with it.

Seriously.

The PTLLS certification is a preliminary qualification that all post-compulsory instructors must now undertake from the 2007-2008 academic year. It’s a very elementary qualification. Nevertheless, the teaching component was actually pretty hard, and rather nerve-wracking.

The teaching practice, dubbed a “micro-teach” by the university Education Department, involved looking at one aspect of English (above word-level) and putting a small lesson together on that topic. The lesson is aimed at your classmates. Almost all of mine are native English speakers. Here’s the killer aspect of it – why I called it difficult: you only have twenty minutes to deliver a three stage lesson! I was given conjunctions and connectives in general as my topic.

The actual planning of the lesson was problematic for me. We were asked to design a lesson plan template which takes into account issues that might seem surprising to teachers in private schools outside the UK. Equal opportunities issues (physical disability, gender discrimination, learning disabilities) and Health and Safety issues, for example. You can find a preliminary copy of the lesson plan template I’ve devised here. It’s in OpenDocument Text (.odt) format. This is due to issues I have with MS Office – I see no reason to buy it or steal it when there are perfectly good free alternatives out there. Using the software I do, I could save the work in .doc format, but this tends to lead to formatting errors which aren’t present in OpenDocument format. Anyway, I have a post in the works about this, so I’ll leave it at that.

Something that gave me trouble, but which I’m just going to have to get my head around, is the language we are expected to use on the lesson plan. Instead of “aims” we are expected to use the term “learner outcomes”, and instead of a “Main Aim” and “Subsidiary Aim” – two terms I’ve used since I did my CELTA three and a half years ago, we are strongly encouraged to use the term “General objectives” and “Specific” objectives. This confused me, since the new language doesn’t seem to be immediately compatible with the way I’ve always formulated my aims, and requires me to think about them in a different way. I’ll get used to it eventually, but it’s illustrative of a problem that many students of foreign languages have: assimilation of entirely new concepts is not a simple process. On reflection (does that make this a recursive blog?), I think it implies that assimilation of a new paradigm may, in some cases, cause extra problems for a student at first, before expanding their potential language. I’ll continue this thought in a later post, as it ventures too far off-topic here.

The planning was difficult, as I’ve had to leave my planning comfort-zone and reassess my language. The biggest issue was that I found it practically impossible to get what I wanted into twenty minutes. Even if I had gone against the instructions I was given, and focused purely on conjunctions, it would have been practically impossible to give anything more than the most basic information – “This is a conjunction, this is how it works” – and then have the students do an exercise – “Find the conjunctions in this text”. It was illuminating how teaching an unfamiliar target to a learner group I never thought I’d teach (native speakers of English) really made errors surface that might not have, had I been teaching “students” in a familiar setting and format.

I indulged a little in my most common teaching error, which is a tendency to over-teach. I included connective adverbs in the lesson, but my first activity was too long, and because the presentation included connective adverbs, it was too long as well. This took up all the time earmarked for my third activity. In truth, I think I went about the micro-teach in the wrong way – my activities were too fine-grained or they were too long. If I’d had half an hour for the session, I might have been able to achieve the outcomes I’d set, but not in twenty minutes. I wanted to communicate the complexities of the grammar to my classmates, many of whom have never taught English before, but lost sight of the outcome in the details.

In future, I’ll need to pay more attention to the timing of my lessons.

Right then… This is my first post, so I suppose a brief overview of what this blog is about would be sensible:

I’m an English teacher in the UK. At the moment, I’m working towards a PGDE in Skills for Life – English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). This is a full-time course similar to the more widely known PGCE, which is the standard qualification for teaching in English secondary schools. The main difference between the two qualifications is that the PGCE is for those intending to teach in 11+ education in the UK, whereas the PGDE is aimed firmly at the post-compulsory (usually 16+) sector. Indeed, I will not be qualified to teach in a secondary school when I graduate, only FE colleges or schools operating in the non-compulsory state sector. Basically, I want to teach ESOL, and I want to teach it to adults. I hold a CELTA from International House London, but have chosen the PGDE over the DELTA for personal, financial and professional reasons.

An important component of the course is what’s known as a reflective journal. In a way, it occupies the space between a simple log of what I taught and a diary where I record my feelings about my day. Part of the reflective process is for me to think about all parts of my teaching, and to record and reflect on my reactions to them. Through that, I can find my ways to improve my teaching, be it what happens in the classroom, the methodologies and planning that happen before I set foot in the classroom, or even the way I work with others. The idea is that this is not simply for my own benefit, but for the benefit of my students. One of the goals of this blog is to allow others to be part of that process, where people that, perhaps, I’ve never even met can offer insight into my teaching, and help me improve.

Professional stuff aside, I’m also a bit of a geek – I love computers, which I use for gaming, writing music (released under a Creative Commons license) and generally wasting my time on the internet. I’m also interested in Linux and Open Source Software – I use Ubuntu (Feisty) on my laptop PC, and am currently “between” distros on my desktop PC (yes, that means I have Windows). Nevertheless, there are probably millions of other people who are more knowledgeable (and better writers) about these things than I am,. So, while I may post about these things among others, they won’t be the main focus here. The main focus is ESOL and the process of becoming a better ESOL teacher. Naturally this might change over time, but since this course is going to be a huge part of my life for the coming nine months, I expect that the focus will remain largely on teaching.

Anyway, it’s getting late, and I have school tomorrow, so I’ll leave it here. More to come.