I hate exams! And you?

Tags

"receptive skills", FCE, listening, PET, reading, tests

I hate exams. Both taking and preparing students for them.

I wish there were a better and more accurate way of judging learners. Part of the reason for my being “out of the loop” recently is that I’ve been trying to race against the clock, preparing three groups for the Cambridge PET and FCE. The CAE group simply disintegrated in the end. Each had their own reason for dropping out, and I can only hope that none had done so because of my teaching. You can imagine the thoughts that had gone around my head these past weeks…

Now, why do I hate exams?

For me, they are not really an accurate measure of the level of the candidate. Let’s face it. How many native speakers will pass these exams? So, what does this prove? I’ve even known native EFL teachers to fail local Official School of Languages examinations, which are based on the format of Cambridge’s. Amazing but true.

Ideally, exam questions ought to be like concept questions, right? To check understanding. But, don’t you get the impression that some of the questions are sort of “tricky”? Like they’re meant to “catch you out”?

Some of the listening questions bother on the absurd. Listening, as it is, is a difficult enough skill for the majority of learners; yet, some listening tasks require candidates to not only understand the bulk of what they’re listening to, but also to interpret and analyse it “accurately” enough to answer the question. Not to mention the time factor.

Of course, I don’t let my students know that I feel this way. I keep encouraging them. I try to motivate them. I try to help them improve their skills, but often, I think to myself, how can I help them improve short of just telling them that the only sure way is lots of exposure to the language? Plus lots of practice.

With receptive skills tests, I try to improve their gist-reading skill by, for example, coming up with an alternative title to a text, or summarising a listening extract. I help their guessing-meaning-from-context skill by guided discovery activities. Sometimes, we converse about the topic.

And yet, even after this, they struggle to get their answers to the comprehension questions right.

Take this extract from FCE Practice Tests, Mark Harrison, OUP.

What’s your answer?

C and D are plainly incorrect. But, between A & B? You read the text, you understand it. But, how do you interpret her father’s thought when he said only rich people can afford to be thrifty? What does he really mean by that?

My personal interpretation is that he considers himself not rich enough to buy in bigger quantities. This, as you can see, is not among the choices of answers. In its absence, I’d opt for B as the lesser of two evils.

The book’s answer is A.

Never mind. I plough on. Onward I march. Pushing and motivating my lot. And hope for the best.

Job Interview Simulation

Tags

CAE, dogme, interview, speaking, unplugged

It’s been a hard few weeks trying to adjust to the strains of preparing for three different levels (we started a pre-intermediate level class to add to the upper intermediate and lower advanced groups) plus my other 1-2-1s, and as though that weren’t enough, I volunteered to make the Aula10 Facebook page more than just an advertising channel. My vision was to make it a language-related page, a microblog in the real sense, publishing regular feeds on words, idioms, false friends, confusing words, etc, and wherever possible, to support them with quoted examples of recent usage. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the link. My target audience is both teachers and students.

Not forgetting, too, that I have to spend time running the Wiki Spaces for each group, feeding in work and correcting them. So, all these meant that I’ve had little time to write, and, honestly, weekends are no different to weekdays lately, i.e. no rest for the wicked! Lots of people will think I’m mad. Maybe I am. All these extras aren’t paid work – they’re just labour of passion.

Coming back to the main reason for the post, today was the weekly 4-hour Saturday lesson with the CAE group. One of the students had previously asked me to go over his CV and cover letter. We warmed up by talking about CVs in general and then I asked him to tell the class about this job he’s applying for.

Since he’d personally requested for some interview work, I decided to get the students themselves to do it – him on one side, and the others on the opposite side. And, so began the gruelling interview…

These were some of the questions they asked him:

• Tell me something about yourself.
• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?
• Why do you want to leave your present job?
• Where would you like to be in your career five years from now?
• What can you do for us that other candidates can’t?
• Can you describe a time when your work was criticised?
• Describe how you would handle a situation if you were required to finish multiple tasks by the end of the day, and there was no conceivable way that you could finish them.
• What salary are you expecting?
• What do you see yourself doing within the first 30 days of this job?
• Tell me about your proudest achievement.
• Was there a person in your career who really made a difference?
• What kind of car do you drive?
• What’s the last book you read?
• What magazines do you subscribe to?
• What do you like to do for fun?
• How many times do a clock’s hands overlap in a day?
• How would you weigh a plane without scales?
• Why is there fuzz on a tennis ball?

OK, I confess. They took this from the list of 100 questions I printed from Monster.

The session was quite lively, including some heated debate on what are strong or weak answers. There was some talk on eye contact, sitting posture, skype interviews, interviews using web conferencing software, etc. Also, a heated debate arose on whether one should lie or stick to the truth in interviews, and how one should address personal questions.

After the interview, we continued discussing other related matters, such as intelligence (What is intelligence? Can it be measured?) and non-related ones such as horse meat, a topic very much in the news this past week. This led to what is ethically correct or incorrect, how different cultures perceive this differently, and what humans are capable of in desperate circumstances.

All in all, I felt it was a productive session, the emphasis being more on fluency rather than accuracy, although I did do some minor corrections and also introduced some new lexis. Generally, however, the level of language used was quite accurate.

Food for Thought

Tags

FCE, food, speaking

Today, I had two new students! The group has been steadily growing; although some have left, because of personal reasons, the class is approaching an ideal size.

By now, this group is used to my modus operandi whenever we have a new student. They go into interview mode and start to find out a bit more about their new classmate or classmates, in today’s case. Then, I always ask them to report back to me – in this way, they get to practise the third person: What can you tell me about X? What does he do in his spare time? What kind of sports does he practise? Etc.

Every now and then, I like to do a PACS on their Wiki work. Today, there were some issues I considered important, so that was what we did. I beamed up their lesson reflection and we analysed it, sentence by sentence: what was good, what could be improved upon and what was erroneous.

Next, I showed this slide.

Food images by Chiew Pang. Copyright 2013

I didn’t need to say anything except to designate the pairs. They read and they knew what they had to do:

• First, three of these dishes were prepared by me. In pairs, discuss which you think they are and why you think so.

They already had some practice on agreeing & disagreeing (Speaking Part 3) so I was hoping they would use enough of the appropriate language chunks such as

• Well, in my opinion … because …
• I’m not sure. I think …
• I don’t really agree …
• I quite agree.
• What do you think?
• Do you agree with me?

There were eight students today, a nice round number. When the pairs had come to a decision, I told them to confer with another pair (so then, there were two groups of four students each) and to come up with an agreement. When they had, I told the two groups to discuss again and to come up with a final decision, which they did.

It wasn’t really important whether they were right or not, but because they were curious to know which dish I had actually prepared, they discussed until they had the right ones.

The next activity was this:

Food images by Chiew Pang. Copyright 2013.

Again, they went into an immediate discussion until they came up with a list. Poor English breakfast was unanimously voted the unhealthiest!

Following that, these instructions were beamed to the WB.

• Work on your own. Write down 5 of your favourite dishes on your notebook.

• Now, walk around the class, ask your classmate about their favourite dishes, and find the person

whose tastes are most similar to yours and
whose tastes are most different to yours.

Students discussing by Chiew Pang. Copyright 2013

The pair with the most similar tastes sat together and were told to attempt a crossword puzzle on cooking verbs. This can be obtained from my other blog. Incidentally, I’d written on other cooking activities about a year ago (I’d forgotten until now!) and can be found here.

After a few minutes, I realised that the “test” was too difficult, so I wrote the verbs on the board in random order. They fared better then. They were told to compare their efforts with the answers on the other side of the handout, and time was up.

The last thing I told them before they left the class was to look at the verbs at home and try to remember them as they would be needed for the next lesson!

Reflection

This was a great fun class. I love doing food, don’t you? There’s so much that can be done and it’s a popular topic so everyone usually gets really involved. Using my own images to generate conversation worked a treat. They had preconceived ideas of me and it was fun listening to their reasons for choosing the dishes. Like one of the students mentioned in her reflection, time went by so fast that she hadn’t realised how late it was and almost missed her bus home!

The crossword puzzle was a tad too difficult. As another student said, he didn’t even know the answers in his own language! If I did this again, at this level, I’d include the verbs on the crosswords handout along with the clues, albeit jumbled up. Or I could beam a Wordle of them. Now, that’s an idea for the next class…

Testing tenses graphically Part 2

Tags

"error correction", circular writing, FCE, grammar, tenses, writing

Almost a month ago, I tested the CAE group on the usage of tenses in graphic form. You can read about it here. It worked very well and the students’ response was positive – they believed that it was useful . So, today, I decided to try it on the FCE group. However, I made some modifications, which I believed made the concepts clearer. The sentences were replaced and I added a few fixed points in time, e.g. 3pm, 6pm, 9pm, on the line. I took the photos before the sentences were displayed, so they only appear on the answer slide.

Again, before we started, I explained what the graphics meant: the dots referred to points in time, the double-headed arrows between two lines represented something in progress during this period, and the arc linking two points meant that they were somehow connected.

Tenses in graphics. Copyright 2013 Chiew Pang

Tenses in graphics. Copyright 2013 Chiew Pang

As to be expected, they had a little more difficulty than the CAE group, but once they got the hang of it, it was plain sailing. I asked them if they found it useful, and their reply was positive.

On a few occasions, I asked them questions to check they understood the concepts:

• If you rang me at 9am, what time did I start having breakfast? Any time before 9am.
• Which action happens earlier? My finishing the homework or your coming home? Finishing the homework.
• If it started to rain at 5am, at what time did I fall asleep? Midnight.
• If I started to watch the film at 6pm, what time did my mum come home? 8pm.

 After this, we did some controlled practice off the coursebook.

For free practice, I did a circular narrative writing activity while monitoring and correcting on the spot. In a few instances, I stopped the class to go through language issues I considered important enough for everyone.

Error correction Part 2

Tags

"error correction", reflection

Error correction by Chiew Pang Copyright 2012

I started writing a comment as a reply to Dale’s vlog, which was a result of our comment-chat in my Correction, correction and correction post, but it was, I felt, too long as a comment, and so I decided to blog it instead.

If only we could quantify learning, Dale, life would be so much easier, huh? And a lot more boring, too! As we all know, language learning is a complicated process, which, in turn, makes language teaching complicated. Error correction is merely a small part of this, and yet, in itself, poses so many debates and disagreements. I’m not an expert and I don’t expect anyone to stand up and take notice of what I say, but I have my opinions. As I mentioned in my reply to your comment, the best method is a combination of the two you mentioned plus subtle variations of them.

And, yes, I agree that on-the-spot reinforced by delayed correction works very well. In fact, language teaching is a continuing process of reinforcements, don’t you think?

I’d like to reflect on how I correct; perhaps, in this way, we could come to some conclusion… or pose more questions.

First, what do we correct? Errors (for want of a better term) can occur in or away from class. They can occur in oral or written production. If they happen away from class, correction can only be delayed. The shorter the delay, the better it is, I’m sure most will agree.

If they happen in class, what I do varies depending on whether it is during oral or written production. If it’s written, I address the error on the spot, privately, pencil on paper. However, if it’s a point which I consider beneficial to the whole class, I will board it (not necessarily going from the student to the board immediately, which addressed the naming-and-shaming issue) and first ask the class if it was right or wrong, and, if wrong, how we could make it better.

If it’s oral, I do variations of the two methods. I may board problems (or good sentences because feedback doesn’t always have to be negative) while they’re speaking or jot them down on my pad. Either way, I will elicit responses from the class as a whole at a delayed time, at a time I consider to be appropriate. This could be during production and not necessarily at the end of it, and the delay could be seconds or minutes. No naming and shaming here either.

I may address the issue on the spot if I intuitively feel that it’s right to do so. I’ve mentioned this before, but I consider teaching an art not a science. I think, I’m reflecting aloud here, I am more likely to do on-the-spot corrections when it’s to do with pronunciation or lexis rather than form, unless it’s of a fossilised nature, such as “depend of” or “I’m studying English for to go abroad”. Then again, sometimes I ignore the errors, especially if I felt it would interrupt the flow, especially if I felt the content is worth more than the form.

However I choose to correct, I’d like to think that naming and shaming hardly ever comes into play.

My answers to your questions, Dale…

Product or process? The reason why you were going round in circles is because they’re both, innit? Errors are both a product and a process of language learning at the same time. You make errors because you’re learning and only by making errors, will you learn, as I keep telling my students.

Which scaffolds more? Both and neither. In my opinion, it doesn’t depend on how you correct as much as the type of problem.

Proofs of learning? I think I’ve answered this one at the every beginning.

My question now is this: which is more of an issue? When to correct or how to monitor oral production effectively? How do you detect errors when you have several people talking at the same time? Do you tune in to a group at a time? Do you listen to one group until you hear an error, then move on? Do you attempt to listen to several groups at the same time? Video gamers are able to see up to 5 (maybe more) different objects on the screen moving constantly. Are we supposed to be able to hear 5 (or more) students speaking simultaneously?

What do you readers think?

Oh, no! Not the orang utan again! ;-)

Tags

CAE, images, listening, speaking, video, writing

Thank goodness the holiday period’s over and, hopefully, some form of normality returns to this CAE group, although I have already been warned of some disruptions due to exams commitment, plus, not forgetting, the carnival’s around the corner! Never a dull moment!

Only one absentee today and we have a new student! He’d actually come last week – I didn’t blog about that class. Only two were present then. In the first hour we chatted and I explained my methods and the Wiki, and then we moved the class to a cafeteria, where we spent the next three hours in conversation! It was a good morning

When we’d rearranged the tables and they’d settled down, I beamed a slide up which says this:

• Interview Alejandro
  • past
  • present
  • future
• Discuss: has anything memorable happened to you during this recent holiday period?
• Discuss: what are your personal goals for 2013?

They started speaking to each other while I took a back seat, but occasionally chipped in to encourage more activity and to throw in questions which demand  third-person answers.

I also took the opportunity to ask for their opinion regarding their own progress since they began the course. The feedback was very positive, and almost unanimously they said that their speaking skills have improved inasmuch as they are more self-confident and are less worried about making errors.

Following that, I showed them two related videos on formal and informal letter writing.

For the first video, these were the questions they needed to answer:

• What problems can arise if you are too formal in an informal email?
• What problems can arise if you are too informal in a formal letter?
• What do you write in the very beginning of a formal/an informal letter?

For the second, the task I set them was:

• Try to remember some useful words or phrases from both formal and informal writing.
• How do you end the letters?

They then did some controlled practice exercises from their exam coursebook, followed by a letter-writing activity. I gave them the choice of doing it at home or in class, and, unsurprisingly, the majority preferred to do it in class because, as with the other group, they don’t do many of their home assignments.

They did this quite fast while I went around suggesting corrections and improvements.

Taking notes while watching video by Chiew Pang. Copyright 2013

When we completed this stage, I wanted to lighten the mood a little, so I showed them the now-famous orang utan image. We talked about this for a while. Then, I set another writing task, but not circular writing this time. I asked them to dream up a dialogue between the man (well, all right, me) and the orang utan.

This was quite fun. When they finished, they read each other’s output, and had a few laughs.

My thoughts:

I was very pleased to have six students today, probably the first time I had six since the first day! If Santi had come, there would have been seven! The four hours went by quite quickly, and I think it did for them, too, as I didn’t notice any fidgeting at all; in fact, they were all still seated at 14:05, and I had to say, well, that’s the end of the class! Haha.

Or perhaps, they were all too exhausted to move!

Seriously, though, it felt like it was a productive class. There wasn’t much verbal error correction – a sign of better output? – but, yes, I was constantly dishing out suggestions and rectification during the written practice. I hope that it’s been of use to them.

Correction, correction and correction

Tags

"error correction", circular writing, FCE, grammar, learning strategies, pronunciation, writing

If you’d read the previous post, you’d know that we’d been dealing with the topic of holidays, and also that I’d thought that lesson was somewhat low-key. To introduce a little “fun” and to deal with pronunciation issues I’d noticed in the previous lesson, the first thing I did was to beam this slide up.

Deciphering phonetic transcription by Chiew Pang

The words were laid out in two columns, and I split the class into two teams of boys and girls. I’d introduced them to the phonetic script from the first day, but, of course, I didn’t expect them to remember much. Besides, there have been new students since that first day. Still, that didn’t perturb me unduly. Some teachers are hesitant in using the script in class, but I personally believe it is useful. I don’t expect them to learn the script off by heart – I myself am not an expert – but it’s valuable that they recognise the sounds they represent so that when they look words up in the dictionary, they will be able to pronounce them.

Surprisingly, both teams did extremely well. The boys, claiming that their list was trickier, were hesitant in a few of the words, especially “adventurous”. They looked as though they enjoyed the activity. I also made sure they pronounced the words well, and that they knew the number of syllables each had.

That done, I proceeded to beam up 3 different slides on a series of common errors they often make in their writing. I encouraged them to keep a list of these and to check all their essays against it before submitting their work.

Common errors by Chiew Pang

They then moved on to a guided discovery of past tenses (past simple vs continuous and used to): they saw them in usage, established the rules, and did some controlled practice.

The last time I did the orang utan circular writing activity, they enjoyed it very much, so I decided to do it again for their free practice session. This time I adapted the one I used for the CAE group; instead of starting it off with “On a dark and stormy night”, they wrote “For the first time, X was…”

As usual, while they write, I went around monitoring and correcting. Judging from their feedback, they, again, enjoyed this.

“I liked to do the last exercise. I think it´s good to improve your creativity and to have ideas when you do a writing.”

“I liked the writing game, because it’s a good way for improving our writing skills and for spending a nice time at the same moment.”

My thoughts

It was a livelier lesson, and I think quite productive. I’ve been wanting to group their common errors together for quite some time and was glad to have finally done it. I’m hoping that by seeing them side by side, they will take my advice and start a list so that I don’t have to be highlighting the same errors over and over again!

I’ve taken to do more writing in class as they don’t always do their home assignments, and I find they get more out of on-the-spot, as opposed to delayed, help.

What about you? Do you do writing in class often? Do you have frequent error-correction sessions?

Holiday PACS

Tags

FCE, grammar, images, listening, speaking

Today’s lesson was, in essence, quite simple. The aim was to improve oral fluency and accuracy on the topic of holidays. It seemed quite a logical progression from the orang-utan circular writing activity of the previous lesson. I beamed up these photos of mine (except for the backpackers, taken from Wiki Commons).

The instructions were on the slide, so I didn’t really need to say much except to tell them to work in pairs.

Holidays by Chiew Pang

When that trailed off, I did a PACS with them on these four sentences:

• You do more things on a camping than on a beach holiday. (Correct!)
• All time you are moving –> You are moving all the time or You are constantly moving/on the move.
• Some persons are more adventurous –> Some people are more adventurous.
• I always have beach holiday on the summer –> I always have a beach holiday in the summer.

For each sentence, I asked them if they were correct and told them to make the necessary corrections.

Some pronunciation work was also needed:

• history
• island
• culture

And I highlighted the fossilised error of many Spanish students: depend of instead of depend on. I wrote depend ___ and, of course, they knew which preposition should go in the gap, but when they speak, they never remember!

In the next stage, they changed partners, and asked their new partner about their first partner’s answers. For example, first session: Ss 1 & 2; 3 & 4. Second session: 1 & 3; 2 & 4. Ss 1 & 3 would ask about Ss 2 & 4′s answers.

This brought about another PACS:

• He prefer doing a camping holiday –> He prefers going on a camping holiday.
• What’s the most enjoy holiday for him? –> most enjoyable. Or: what/which kind/type of holiday does he enjoy the most?
• He say me that you can see a lot of places –> He told me…

For pronunciation, I had to work on “least”.

We then did a listening activity from the coursebook (Cambridge English Complete First Certificate), which, for a change, was quite decent. I find that dialogues of native speakers were OK, but that of foreign speakers are an embarrassment as it is obvious that they were faked.

I was pleasantly surprised that they did their listening rather well, which means, in the future, I could concentrate more on speaking and writing, their main weaknesses.

We wrapped the lesson up with a guided discovery of the differences between travel, journey, trip and way, followed by some controlled practice.

My reflection

This class isn’t very vibrant at best – the most active student having left because he couldn’t continue due to work pressure – so the lesson felt somewhat subdued, some might even consider it boring. However, there was a lot of pairwork speaking and I’d managed to get in a fair bit of correction work, which I was pleased about. One of my personal aims is to continue to improve on monitoring strategies, so I was happy with that today.

The coursebook actually had images, but I decided to use my own to make them “dogmetically” personal. I didn’t have any pictures of myself, or anyone else, on backpack, so I must keep an eye open for that! My worn-out backpack is stowed away in the basement somewhere. The images had helped to build a certain rapport from the beginning as they could identify some of them as places they had been to. That helped the conversation flow.

Circular writing with an orang-utan, with a slight twist

Tags

circular writing, comparison, images, listening, pronunciation, speaking, writing

In the previous lesson with this FCE group, I noticed some problems with past simple -ed endings, so I began today’s class with a quick revision of a few examples. The ending /d/ and /t/ sounds are always more difficult to get right, so I concentrated on these. I told them that the difference might not be very important when speaking, but not knowing the right pronunciation may affect their understanding of the word, especially when they are linked to the next, e.g. worked out is more likely to be pronounced /wɜːktaʊt/ rather than /wɜːkt/ /aʊt/.

They then, in pairs, discussed playing video games before attempting a challenging listening exercise. This led to a guided discovery of the rules of comparatives and superlatives of adjectives and adverbs.

After this, I beamed up an image of Me and Julia, the orang-utan and had them speculating the events leading up to this ominous meeting.

Copyright 2012 Chiew Pang

After a few minutes of this, I asked them to create a story in their mind about the image and write it down on their notebook. However, instead of doing the circular writing activity like the way I did with the CAE group (I wrote about  it here), I set a timer. After every two minutes, I asked them to stop writing, even if they were on mid-sentence, and to pass their notebook to the person on their right.

While they write, I went around, monitoring and correcting. There were four students today. When they got their own notebook back, just as I did with the CAE group, I told them to add another sentence. They were then told to finish it at home, make any necessary corrections and post it on their Wiki.

Copyright 2012 Chiew Pang

Post-lesson, I asked them for their feedback on this activity and here are a couple of thoughts (the other two hadn’t got round to posting theirs):

• Yes, I enjoyed this activity. I think it’s useful to have more creativity when you do writing exercises of others. You need to think of new words or expressions to complete the story.
• Yes, I liked the activity. I agree with Sara, it’s very useful!

And here’s an example of an uncorrected story:

<< Chiew had always wanted to travel to the jungle so, one summer he decided to buy a ticket to Indonesia. It was a little crazy but he felt young and he looking for adventures.

After a long trip, Chiew arrived at the jungle. He was alone, he only had one small bag and one banana to eat.

When the night was coming, he saw a violent orangutan, and he gave the banana to her, because he thought that the orangutan was hungry. He was very frightened. He decided to spent the night in the middle of the jungle, to observe the orangutan’s behaviour. He was very exited.

Next morning, he woke up and, by surprise, there were a lot of orangutan around him. He was very afraid but he realised that orangutans were very calm and they only wanted to see him. It was an unforgettable experience. >>

Mmm… I like it!

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Thanks for reading and special thanks to those who have taken the time and trouble to comment. Hope to see you again soon!

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 3,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 5 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.