Unit 3 The Teaching and Learning of ESOL

Module 4 Visual Aids

At the end of this module you will:-

a) recognise a variety of aids

b) understand the importance of 'need first' teaching

c) be able to prepare your own aids

d) have thought about the pros and cons of various kinds of teaching aids

AUDIO-VISUAL AIDS

Audio-visual aids should be seen as just that, AIDS. They are props, pieces of equipment which help us to put across our teaching point. We do not advocate building a lesson around the 'aid', we promote the use of audio-visual aids as our 'helpers'.

If you enter every class with a 'bag of tricks', including a flannel-board, a cassette recorder, a video, an overhead projector (OHP) etc, not only will you spend more than half your lesson dealing with the technology, you will also become a slave to these aids and deprive your students of the ultimate aim of communication. They will have no time to communicate if they are:- watching a video, listening to a cassette and looking at an OHP all in one lesson.

Write your lesson plan, then see where you can facilitate more understanding by the use of aids. THE NEED COMES FIRST, and the need decides the type of aid and the way of using it. They must allow us to explain structures and concepts simply or they are not necessary in that particular lesson.

Nor should audio-visual aids be used as a 'treat' for the students, they should be integrated into the lesson to promote practice in spoken and written English.

Also avoid over-use and the regrettable temptation to allow them to become poor substitutes for preparing a lesson! Remember always, that your students learn through the quality of your teaching and the use of your materials, not by the use of gimmicks or your technological know-how.

Now that you are aware of the pitfalls, make use of realia and audio-visual aids to practise language points and to provide extra stimulus.

PART 1 COMMONLY USED AIDS

REALIAThere are different types of realia - the word means ‘real things’ - the things normally found in the classroom such as pens pencils and notebooks, windows and tables, and those that you bring in for simulation of some sort of real world activity.

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OBJECTS IN THE CLASSROOM

The advantage of using objects normally found around the classroom is that they are already familiar to the students, and the practice you can get out of them is extensive. Place things to practise prepositions - in, on, under and behind. Teach comparatives using them asking which is bigger, smaller, more expensive and so on. Use them to build dialogues asking for things and buying and selling things. But don't over-use items of stationery! Remember, they are not usually found anywhere else!

REAL PROPS brought into the classroom are not only useful in this way, but provide an extra, interesting stimulus. Set scenes by using any props you can get hold of :- hats to change characters, flags to show nationalities, toy phones, toy vehicles, dolls, tea-sets etc can be very useful.

Real objects are fascinating. Bring in a few objects that have special meaning to you and get your students to guess something about you. They can then bring in something that is special to them and talk about it. Some objects like fruit and vegetables and food packets can easily be brought to lessons. You can also bring toy cars (to compare price and speed) or clothes, or toy animals. Let students touch as well as see - (even a class of businessmen will love the toy cars). Real signs and notices and brochures are more fun than the course book examples. Put objects in a bag or box when you first bring them to class and get students to put their hand in the bag and guess the object without seeing it.

PEOPLEIf you are introducing or practising use of - has, has got, wears, has got on etc, what better props than your students? Personal questions (usually the first thing students learn) are best practised with the students themselves: ‘I'm Greek, I'm from Crete’ and so on. Students love to learn more about each other. As the teacher in an EFL situation you should be able to mime and not be afraid to do so. Throw yourself into it and you'll enjoy it as much as your students will!

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SELF-CHECK 3:4 1

How could you use the following to help you teach English? Be as imaginative as you can.

Here’s an example:

A rubber snake

To teach third person ‘s’ - wave it every time someone forgets.In a lesson on likes and dislikes as people’s reactions will be differentIn a lesson on how things feel when you touch them (smooth etc) use in conjunction with a bag of other things. As a stimulus for starting a story In a ‘Where is it?’ activity for prepositions. In a lesson on daily habits - ‘I get up at…. I eat my mouse….’ In a lesson on pets or animal habitats or the environment and so on.

Now you try!

The board rubber

A box of chocolates

An umbrella

3 large silk or cotton scarves

4 toy cars

Your sister

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BOARD - BLACK OR WHITE

One of the most commonly available and inexpensive visual aids is the blackboard, or more often now, the whiteboard. All you have to do here is to make sure you have chalk or marker pens and a cleaning cloth.Always make sure your board work is clear. Where possible prepare beforehand and don't stand writing/drawing on the board for a long time during the lesson.

SELF-CHECK 3:4 2

At the end of a 45 minute lesson a board may have one or a number of these features:

The board is blank. It is covered in isolated words and structures. There is a half finished picture on one side. It is full from top to bottom. Everything is in the same colour There are spelling mistakes or words missed out. The writing is small.

How do you think these things affect the students’ learning? Make a few notes here.

The white board may be the most commonly used teaching aid, but it is also potentially the most dangerous!

Teachers are not always careful about how they write on it -But learners tend to copy down everything that the teacher writes.

Learners are not very careful about how they write -But their notebooks are used for revision.

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COMMENT on 3:4 2

The board is blank. Didn't the learners record anything new today? Was it all in the course book? A blank board every lesson is a sign that the teacher is not exploiting the vocabulary very well or encouraging learners to keep notes. These lessons are probably a bit boring……Perhaps the teacher thought the learners could take notes as she was speaking? That is relying too much on auditory learning. It is very important to write down important words and phrases to ensure that the learners have an accurately spelt record and a chance to see the word. As we mentioned in Unit 2 you can also mark word stress and pronunciation on the white board.

The board is covered in isolated words and structures, squiggles orhalf-finished pictures.A board like this is (obviously!) a sign of disorganisation in the way that material is presented and practised. The teacher may also be going too fast for the learners. See the diagram at the end of this module.

It is full from top to bottom.Make it a habit to clean the part of the board you are using when you are sure that everyone has recorded what you want. Of course, give learners enough time to write but don't leave everything up there; as the lesson wears on the board will become more and more difficult for the learners to read.Also, are you sure that everything on the board is really necessary? The teacher has spent all this time writing so has had her back to the learners for a long time in this lesson. These learners will rely on the written word and not listen to the teacher.

Everything is in the same colourA simple point, but a good colour scheme can help highlight. Try to make it consistent, perhaps using red for highlighting stress in words or to show the way tense forms change in questions: He plays tennis.Does he play tennis?He doesn't play tennis.

Always think about how you can highlight the meaning you are teaching by using colours. There are spelling mistakes or words missed out. It is quite possible that there are! People often expect that English teachers will be able to spell perfectly. However, pressure of time and nerves in lessons makes spelling less accurate. Make it a habit to 'reed what you have just wrutten on the bored'

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If you find an easy mistake, encourage the learners to find it too, it will make them think more carefully about copying from the board without thinking! The writing is small.

This really needs no comment. Just make sure you check from time to time that your writing is large enough and legible for all learners. Remember, in a large class, the most reluctant learners head for the back, so they may not bother to tell you if they can't read what you have written! A blackboard, though old fashioned, is a useful tool, especially if it has a roller or can flip over. This means you can show information gradually without writing during the lesson. Write your homework up. Write the answers to an exercise, or draw a picture, then roll or flip the board. The board may have a useful edge around which you can stick flashcards, while the language is still in the middle:

Look at this three- part board plan:

The centre of the board may keep changing and the vocabulary list gets longer, but the left hand side of the board stays the same through the lesson.It is a useful discipline for you to divide your board in this way.

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Colours

RedBlue

It’s GreenYellowOrange Black

What colour is it?

12th June What’s your favourite ….. VocabularyLesson aims food can’t stand

music don’t mindTalking about our likes anddislikes

Student writing area

H/W story Finish 1.50Not 2pm page 42 and 43

If you can, allow students to write on the board from time to time. That way the board is for everyone.

SELF-ASSESSMENT TIP

Check your board work in the lesson from the back of the classroom and try to see what you have written. It can be a shock!

SELF-CHECK 3:4 3

Put these words onto the board to make a neat plan:

Notices Lesson work Vocabulary

I’m going to visit meet he’ll do it museum mosque

I’d like some ….. palace 2pm today computer room

Today: elision June 12 th

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FLASHCARDS (incorporating word and picture cards), coloured card and paper.

These are pieces of card (preferably covered if you want to preserve them) on which words and/or pictures are written or drawn. They should be large enough to be seen from the back of the class. They can be used for practice and consolidation of vocabulary, building up sentences, prompts for dialogues or drills etc. They are invaluable, and several sets can usefully be prepared in advance.

What is on the board does not move round the class and is always at the front, but flashcards can be held by students or stuck on the wall. Paper can be drawn on, written on or cut up. With a small class stick the pictures or the words on the wall and get them to walk to the right picture/word when you say it. This works very well with pronunciation practice. Make a storyboard around the class and get students to follow it. Shuffle flashcards and hand them out face down. Students ask each other questions as to which flashcard they have.

Give students action flashcards and objects and get them to make a story from the pictures they have: skating, banana, dog. A group of students can make a presentation using a poster. Students can make their own Bingo cards and numbers. And paper hats for celebrations of course…..!

SELF-CHECK: 3:4 4

Finish this sentence in 4 ways without copying from the text.

Flashcards are useful because they are

a)

b)

c)

d)

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WALLCHARTSBeware! Many wall charts which look beautiful in the shop are virtually useless and end up spending most of their life rolled up in a cupboard. Shiny ones especially seem to fall off classroom walls worldwide! Flexibility is what is needed in a visual aid. If you can prepare charts which will be helpful for various levels, to demonstrate a variety of points, and will be helpful in different teaching situations, then they will be worth the hours of preparation time which they require. This is rare and another aid will probably be a better option. If you want your walls to look bright and cheery then cover them with students’ work!

PART 2 GETTING TECHNICAL…

OVERHEAD PROJECTOR (OHP)This is entirely flexible and is now very often found in ESOL classrooms so that you only need transport the transparencies. With an OHP you can change a display by adding or taking away parts while the lesson is in progress.You write or draw on a transparency and project it onto a screen (or wall). You don't have to turn your back to the class, and you don't need to prepare lots of charts and pictures in advance. OHP transparencies can be taken off the machine and put back later (you won't have cleaned them off, as with a black or white board.)

The best features of this machine are:

It can be seen by everyoneIt can combine typed script and handwritten notes It can be added to during the lesson (in colours) It cuts down on photocopying

But be careful of the problems:

The class need positioning carefully if everyone is going to see. The white board must be clean if you have no screen, so plan carefully. Can break down a lot - take care switching it on and off.

Tips for success with a projector:

If you use washable pens and get yourself a piece of string and some clothes pegs you can hand write the transparencies, wash them after the lesson and hang them up to dry. Add student comments to OHT during the lesson. Students can write notes on a transparency during a group activity. At the end the whole class can see the group’s points.

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AUDIO RECORDING AND PLAYBACK EQUIPMENT

This is essential as, without it, the students would only hear your accent. Students need to be exposed to a variety of voices and accents otherwise they will eventually only understand you! There is a great deal of pre-recorded material available in ESOL, but it is just as useful, and often more so, to have your own recorded materials, especially if they present up-to-date, authentic materials direct from England, Australia etc. Dialogues recorded by you and your friends on a variety of topical subjects; a conversation in a shop; the pub; directions in the street etc are invaluable in overseas teaching situations.

It can also be useful to record the voices of your students. You can provide your students with useful feedback on their reproduction of English if you play back a dialogue done during pair work, for example. The best option still for many teaching situations is a cassette recorder with a record function as this can be moved around the classroom and does not have any compatibility problems, but if you have a good way of recording MP3 files or a hand held movie camera then of course this is also an option (see also below).

Best features:

Easy to play over two or three times. Machines are usually portable and hardwearing. Good ones have a record function. Learners hear other people’s voices. There are usually CDs provided with the course book.

Problems:

It can be difficult to find the place on a tape. Some CDs will not permit you to play small sections again. Sound quality can be variable. Some course book recordings are very repetitive - eg every unit has a dialogue, or every unit has a very long listening. Can be ‘borrowed’ too easily!

It is worth putting time and effort into using listening resources. Here are a few tips:-

Check volume and clarity from the back of the class yourself.

Look for variety in ways to use course book listenings, for example:

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Play the tape right at the beginning and get students to guess today’s topic.

Read part of a dialogue or listening text first and then get students to listen to the rest.

Write and then record your own dialogues using colleagues instead.

Download music or news items from the internet or record from the radioand make your own CDs.

Use song websites to get song words and then make gap fill exercises from them.

SELF-CHECK 3:4 5

What makes a good song? Find yourself a song that you think you could use successfully in class. Record it and find the lyrics on the internet.

VIDEO RECORDER/DVD

Bringing the visual elements of communication into our classroom means we can talk about and train students in understanding body language, facial expressions and visual clues from the setting as these are all things they should be using when they are communicating ‘in the real world’ in a foreign language.

If you have access to video recording equipment in the school, take advantage of it to film the students as they act out dialogues. They will be greatly encouraged and stimulated by watching themselves speaking English on film. As you can stop the film, fast forward and reverse it, this is invaluable for correction.

The extracts that you choose from a DVD or TV programme should be visually interesting - not just a ‘talking head’. Choose something with clear speech and a clear topic, even if some of the vocabulary is difficult. Keep it short. We all stop listening properly after 20 minutes or so. Try covering the screen with a cloth and playing the dialogue to get students to decide what is happening. Then show them if they were right or not.

Turn the sound down and have the students guess the dialogue. Then match it with what was actually said.

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Play a short clip (eg from a soap opera) and have students imagine the plot or the relationships between the characters. This can be done with or without sound.

Use video as a model for role plays picking up phrases from the clip.

ALWAYS HAVE A CLEAR AIM OR FOCUS FOR YOUR STUDENTS.

THE INTERACTIVE WHITEBOARD

The ‘IWB’ is a wonderful development. It remains a luxury in many countries and teaching locations but if it is not in your school now, then it may come soon. So read about it now and be the first to have training when it arrives!

Best features:

Can import language, pictures etc from online sites or even movie clips and project them.

Lessons can look very tidy and can be prepared beforehand. You can use ‘spellcheck’. You can combine type and handwritten notes (as for OHP) but also type in another colour on a document you are projecting - so for example you could do whole class on screen correction of a piece of work.The lesson notes can be printed out at the end to reflect what actually went on.Students are interested in the IWB!

Just watch out because:

Slow connection and display speeds can make the class restless. Equipment may not be strong if handled by students. IWBs can get boring if students are always facing it and not each other -unless you are planning carefully the lesson becomes very passive with the students not moving around at all - just looking at the screen.The temptation to turn every lesson into a PowerPoint presentation. If you are not giving out handouts then the students have to rely on their own inexpert recording of information from the board.

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Tips for using the IWB

Bring up a web page and do a scan reading exercise for information. (Cache or bookmark the page first.)Project a text and underline features. Type in students’ suggestions and make them into a worksheet for the end of the lesson Let students do PowerPoint presentations to the rest of the class. Do online quizzes such as ones about the week’s news or a controversial issue as a whole class.

THE LANGUAGE LABORATORY, ‘SAC’S AND COMPUTER SUITES

Many schools have some sort of a room that you can book with your students for use on an irregular basis. In some schools this is called a self-access centre or SAC. This could be any one of a number of different sorts of room! It varies from school to school. The advantage of such a room, whatever is in it is the chance for the students to direct their own learning and have a break from the teacher led classroom. They may be allowed to enter on their own if someone is in charge of the centre or they may need to be taken in by their teacher.

LANGUAGE LABS

These are rooms with a number of consoles with headphones where students can listen to recordings and speak into a microphone at their own pace. There are some teachers who see language labs as the biggest white elephant ever introduced to the language-teaching world. There are others who believe that they are truly invaluable as a time-saving teaching device. If your school has one, you may already have a view, if not and your school is considering the purchase and need your opinion, here are some points to bear in mind.

1) It must be properly serviced and maintained.2) It requires someone, preferably on the spot, who can do this.3) It needs a considerable supply of materials which wear out.4) It is expensive to install and to run.5) It takes the space of a classroom.6) Will it justify the expense in your size of school?7) Would the money be better spent on a computer suite?

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SAC LIBRARIES

If your school has a library then try to take your students in there regularly for a part of a lesson. You can give them a research task - even a simple one such as finding images or checking facts. It gets them used to the idea that research is not just based on cutting and pasting from the computer screen. Libraries can have a very calming effect on younger classes that are too boisterous after a day at school. And if you are working in a school then liaise with the school librarian to get a good English section and a supply of class readers.

SAC COMPUTER SUITES

These are popular in schools that have the money to provide them or in countries where hardware is relatively cheap. A range of computers will be set out in a room so that students can access CD ROMs or internet based language games and can do activities like gap-fill sentences without having messy photocopies and with instant on screen feedback. The teacher can monitor them. A quick search on the internet will throw up hundreds of possibilities for this kind of work if the room is online. However, computer suites are sometimes set up with a supply of games on CD and cached sites, but are offline. This is to minimise virus problems and the presence of unsuitable material. Very often students will share a computer.

Best features:

Chance to do grammar and vocabulary exercises in a different atmosphere that feels more like a game. Instant online feedback and discussion of mistakes.Students can work at their own pace. Easy for teacher to monitor.Break from routine.Sharing the computer means that they will have a chance to discuss their work so it is not entirely solitary.

Problems to watch out for:

Teenagers can see the computer suite as a chance for hacking, checking sites like ‘Facebook’ and uploading unsuitable material. Monitor younger classes carefully!

Equipment is often heavily used with dirty mouse problems and sticky keyboards. If there is an internet connection it will be slow and whole class access to the same site will need to be staggered.

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Exercise styles can become repetitive if overused.

Note that there is often one person in any class who does not enjoy screen-based exercises so try to provide alternatives.

SELF-CHECK 3:4 6

Look at these scenarios of different teachers using classroom aids. The topics are:

Section 1 Animals

Section 2 Places in the world

Section 3 Food

For the first scenario three negative and three positive things about the lesson are mentioned.For the second and third scenarios see if you can spot the positives and negatives yourself.

Lesson 1

(* on white board)

Teacher: Well done, now let’s go over the names of the animals again. (Holding flashcards all in one hand).Repeat after me: polar bear, mouse, kangaroo, crocodile, penguin, beetle. Now let me shuffle the cards. Karim, come and take a card. Sammy, can you guess which one he has? Sammy: Is it a bat?Karim: No it isn’t Sammy: Is it a beetle? Karim: Yes it is.You take a card Francine.

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Polar bear mouse kangaroo Australia desert pole river

Nile Florida crocodile beetle earth jump

Negative: 1. The words on the board are jumbled together with no attempt at grouping.

2. The selection of animals is strange (unless they are connected with a story). The teacher could have grouped animals by type or by where they live.

3. The flashcards should be held individually so they are clear.

Positive:

1. The teacher has tried to draw. This makes class smile, especially if you are not very good at drawing.

2. The teacher has marked the stress on the words on the board.

3.The flashcards are handled by the students, so they are active learners.

Lesson 2 (20 students)

Teacher: Today we are going to talk about countries and capital cities. Here is a map of the world on the white board. You each have the name of a country on your card. Can you put the country name on a place on the world map?Students place cards on the white board.This country is in the wrong place. Where should it be? Student: What is country name?Teacher: Egypt.Student: There miss. (teacher moves Egypt card to Egypt)Teacher: You also have some names of capital cities. Can you put them in the right place? Lots more cards on the board. Students come to the board and then sit down again.OK, now let’s get them in the right place. (Turns back on class and begins sorting out the board.)

Put your ideas here. Comments appear at the end of this section.

Negative: Positive

1. 1.

2. 2.

3. 3.

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Lesson 3

(5 students. The teacher’s table has a box on it with a hole in the top. )

T: Good evening everyone. I have a box with me today. Can you guess what is in the box? S1: Mobile Phone T: NoS2: Beer and cigarette.T: Sorry, no! (taking out the banana, puts it on his desk) It’s a banana. (laughter from everyone) What else is in the box?S3: Apple?T: Yes, very good. It’s an apple. This is an apple. (puts it on his desk)There is one more thing in the box. S4: Is it an orange? T: No.S5: Is it a mango? T: No. It’s a pineapple. Puts it on his desk. Today we are going to talk about fruits

Negative: Positive

1. 1.

2. 2.

3. 3.

COMMENT

Lesson 2

Negative

The board gets covered in little pieces of paper and the teacher cannot use it. The names are too small and there are too many.The teacher has to turn her back on the class in order to sort out the problems - delay.

Positive.

The world map is well drawn and large. The students are immediately involved in the lesson, as the pieces of paper are ready on their desks when they come in. The overall topic of the lesson is very clear because of the visual aids.

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Lesson 3

Positive

There is an element of surprise in the lesson, and fun, by introducing the box.Students are able to participate as they are asked to guess. The teacher has brought in real fruit.

Negative

He does not let the students take the fruit out of the boxHe hurries the presentation and the class do not get many guesses.He gives the words banana and mango as he takes them out of the box. It is important that students try to give you the word, especially with beginners as you can judge how much they know already.

Perhaps you spotted different things?

Now consider the following extract:

Computer-based presentation technology Computers have changed the world of classroom presentation forever - that is for those fortunate enough to have the money and resources for both hardware and software. The two crucial pieces of hardware are a computer and a data projector. Anything that is on our computer screen can be shown to the whole class using a data projector to put up an enlarged version of it on a screen or a white wall. This means that all the class can see a word processed task at the same time, or we can project a picture, diagram or map, for example.

Presentation software, such as PowerPoint, increases our capacity to present visual material (words, graphics and pictures) in a dynamic and interesting way. However, the most commonly used PowerPoint template (a heading with bullet points) has suffered from overuse and may not be the most effective use of the medium. In fact, the software offers a more interesting option where we can mix text and visuals with audio/video tracks so that pictures can dissolve or fly onto and off the screen, and music, speech and film can be integrated into the presentation. Some people, of course, may find this kind of animated presentation irksome in its own way, but there is no doubt that it allows teachers to mix different kinds of display much more effectively than before such software came along.

One of the major technological developments in the last few years has been the interactive whiteboard, the IWB. This has the same properties as a computer hooked up to a data projector (i.e. you can present visual material, Internet pages, etc. in a magnified way for everyone to see), but it has three major extra advantages, too. In the first place, teachers and students can write on the board which the images are being projected onto, and they can manipulate images on the board with the use of special pens or even with nothing but their fingers. The pen or finger thus acts as a kind of computer mouse. Secondly, what appears on the board (just like the screen of a computer) can be saved or printed so that anything written up or being shown there can be looked at again. Enthusiasts for IWBs point to this extraordinary versatility and to other tricks (such as the ability to mask parts of the board and gradually reveal information). They say that the ability to move text and graphics around the board with pen or finger is extremely attractive, especially for younger learners. They emphasise the fact that text, graphics, Internet capability, video and audio material can all be controlled from the board.

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Critics of IWBs worry about the amount of money they cost. There is some concern, too, about the fact that currently most IWBs are at the front of the classroom and thus tend to promote teacher (and learner)-fronted behaviours, and are less favourable for groupwork. There are also worries about projector beams (especially in ceiling-mounted projectors) affecting the eyes of teachers who frequently find themselves looking directly at them.

Ways of finding out

It has never been as easy to find things out as it is in the twenty-first century. The wide range of reference material both online and offline (in the form of CDs) is almost infinite. This is especially useful for language learners.

Dictionaries

Students can access dictionaries in book form, on CD- ROMS, using small electronic handsets and on the web. We will look at these in turn.

Paper dictionaries: dictionaries printed in book form have changed dramatically in the last few years. Whereas in the past, they were monochrome, with forbidding-looking entries which used various codes to denote different aspects of meaning, now they are colourful and laid out in a way that makes issues such as frequency, collocation, different meanings, pronunciation, etc. extremely clear. Dictionaries can be either bilingual or monolingual. In the past, teachers tended to be dismissive of the former since they frequently failed to give users sufficient information about what words meant and how they were used. Modern learners' bilingual dictionaries, however, are considerably more sophisticated, as can be seen in Figure 10.

Here the users are given both British and American equivalents of the Spanish word libreria, and they are also told about the fact that the English word library (which sounds like libreria of course) actually translates into Spanish as biblioteca.

CD-ROMs: paper dictionaries are limited by the size of book that users are prepared to carry around with them. The same is not true of CD- ROMs, which can include a significantly greater amount of information (including audio material). Not only that, but CD-ROMs have one huge advantage, which is that users no longer have to search alphabetically (a skill that some people find difficult in both L1 and L2!). They can type in a word or phrase and it will appear on the screen, together with features such as collocation information, more corpus examples, a phrase-store, and even thesaurus-type word stores. Students can also hear the words being spoken and, perhaps, record themselves to compare with the spoken original.

Electronic pocket dictionaries: many students like to carry around small electronic dictionaries which fit snugly into their pockets. Teachers sometimes find these problematic since students tend to refer to them frequently in lessons at times when we would prefer them not to be accessing such little machines. However, a more problematical issue has, in the past, been the size of the display screen and the information that is included in the dictionaries. Small screens mean that users are never going to get any of the incidental or insightful (and frequently unexpected) detail that we get when we look at a

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dictionary page or a computer screen. Furthermore, students have to scroll up and down continuously to find what they are looking for.

Recently, however, electronic dictionaries have improved somewhat. In the first place, the screens are bigger, and in the second place, more than one dictionary is often included. Users can hear the words being spoken, too, and there are often extras such as spellcheckers, currency converters, etc. Many teachers would still prefer students to use paper or computer-based dictionaries. But the lure of the small electronic models is powerful. We must hope that they continue to improve if students continue to buy them.

Online dictionaries: finally, many dictionaries are now freely available online (although users may have to go through a complex registration process to be granted access). Many online dictionaries have clear definitions and useful information as in the example in Figure 12.

Users are once again given frequency information (the entry is in red on the site), the three red stars indicating that hospital is one of the most frequent words in the language. By clicking on the loudspeaker symbol, users can hear the words being spoken.

Searching the Internet

The greatest source of information not in book form is, of course, the Internet. However, its sheer size and range make it potentially awkward for users, who often find it difficult to locate the exact information they are looking for. This is partly because searching is a skill in itself which students and teachers need to acquire. For example, suppose students were doing a project on the theatre where Shakespeare's plays were first performed and they wanted to know its location, it would be unwise of them just to type the word Shakespeare into the popular search engine Google, because they would be offered more than 51 million sites and the vast majority of them would be irrelevant. However, if they typed in what they were really looking for in more detail (e.g. Shakespeare Elizabethan theatre location), they would only be offered around 420,000 sites (at the time of writing), and the first few would be of immediate relevance. Many of the others would include the words theatre and location, but would have nothing to do with Shakespeare. A way of searching precisely, however, is to type what we are looking for between inverted commas, e.g. ‘Shakespeare in Love' (the name of a fictional film about Shakespeare's life). We will then get references to that film, whereas if we type in the phrase without the inverted commas, we will get many hits about Shakespeare, and many unconnected hits on the subject of love. It is important if we want student searches to be successful, therefore, that the students know how to search effectively. Both teachers and students can, as we have said, find almost anything they want on the Internet. They can go to online newspapers or broadcasting associations such as the BBC or CNN; they can find song lyrics or access history sites; they can find film guides and jokes sites. Two particular kinds of site are worth talking about in more detail, however.

Using encylopedias: there are a number of encyclopedia sites (and other information sites, such as biography.com) on the Internet. In their book about using technology in language teaching, Gavin Dudeney and Nicky Hockly suggest giving students charts to fill in about, say, a country, as part of a longer project (Dudeney and Hockly 2007: 46-51). They can be asked to locate the capital city,

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population, main languages, main cities, economy, geography, sea ports, political system, etc. Students in groups of three can look for this information on three different sites: encyclopedia.com, britannica.com and wikipedia.com (Wikipedia is an encyclopedia where any user can add to or change the information available). They can then share their information and see if the three sites agree on the information they looked for.

Webquests: a particular type of information is provided by a kind of (Internet-based) extended project called a webquest. This employs Internet resources for students to use for researching, but rather than have students search on the Internet for themselves, in a webquest the teacher has prepared an introduction and then given students ‘clickable’ sites to visit.

In the following web quest, designed by Philip Benz with help from Frederic Chauthard and Michele Maurice, students have to write a report about living conditions in the tenements built for immigrants to New York in the 1820S and 1830s. In the Introduction phase, students are told about the construction of tenement houses and how people were crammed into them as tightly as possible. They are told: You are a member of the Council of Hygiene of the Citizen's Association of New York. Your job is to investigate the living conditions in tenements and make recommendations to city officials concerning changes that need to be made. In the Task phase, students are told that they must investigate the living conditions and write a report summarising the situation and offering solutions. They are told to use worksheets provided for them and follow the report template they are given. They are advised that they can always consult the additional resources sections on the website. In the Process phase, (see Figure 13), students are given investigation stages, and, crucially, links to click on which will take them to websites that the teacher has selected so that they can complete their task.

Finally, in the Evaluation phase, students are shown how (and according to what criteria) their work will be assessed.

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The point about webquests is that the Internet research is a stage towards some other goal (in this case a report). And, thanks to the wealth of material available on the Internet, students can do significant research (including text, film and audio clips) at a computer screen rather than having to go to a library.

Practising language on the Internet and on CD-ROM

There are many websites on the Internet for students to practise language. Some of them are based round a school or an organisation (and need the user to register for the site), whilst others are free. Practice material is also available on CD-ROM. Some of the material is related to a particular coursebook, while other material is free-standing (i.e. it is not associated with any particular program).

Ways of composing

Computers and the Internet offer many opportunities for students and teachers to compose material in ways other than using pencils, pens and paper. We will examine some of the increasingly common methods of creating material both by and for students and teachers.

Word processing, word editing

In our everyday lives computers are used for writing letters, putting books together, composing reports, completing homework assignments and making lists. Of course, this can all be done by using a pen and paper. In a classroom situation when groups of writers are involved in a joint composition, we can group the students around a flip chart and have them work together with one student acting as scribe. However, when students working in groups are using word processing software, anyone can offer and execute changes without causing unattractive crossing out, or forcing the scribe to throw a page (or sheet of paper) away and start again. Word processed work allows teachers to give feedback in a different way, too. We can use dedicated software sub menus such as Track Changes in Microsoft Word to show where things have gone wrong or simply give comments and corrections in a different font colour from the student's original text.

Mousepals, chat and blogging

Before computers, teachers were keen for their students to correspond with penpals in different countries. This was to give students both meaningful and memorable experiences of using English, and also to help them to an appreciation of different cultures around the world. Penpals have now morphed into mousepals and keypals; students can send each other emails instead of letters, and where such contact is well supervised and actively promoted by teachers, the benefits are soon evident. However, students will need constant attention to help them to sustain their motivation for the task. Students can also be involved in chatting online. Indeed, many of them already do it both in their first language and in English. Teachers can organise real-time chatting events using programs such as Googletalk or MSN Messenger. It is also easy to set up groups where people exchange messages with each other, such as Yahoo Groups where people who share the same interest can post messages and reply to them. All of this connectivity allows people to talk, whether or not they are geographically near each other. Indeed one of the great glories of the Internet is precisely this breaking down of physical barriers so that we can be in contact with each other, wherever we are and whatever the time is!

One of the most potent ways of telling people what we are thinking (and for sharing facts and events in our lives) is the weblog or blog. This is, in a sense, a public diary which anyone can read. Teachers sometimes write a blog to tell students how they are doing and what they should do next. Students or groups of students can write a diary - an instant autobiography - to tell others what they are doing and to provide feedback on how their learning is going. Blogging is not difficult and there are many sites, such as blogger.com, which tell users how to make use of this particular resource.

Authoring Of considerable interest to teachers are the many sites that allow us to download software to enable us to design our own web-based material. (This enables us to provide practice material for our students that is especially appropriate to them.) The aim of such sites is to allow teachers to key in or import their own text and then, by using the software provided, create a variety of different exercises. Perhaps the most popular of

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these is the Hot Potatoes site at http://hotpot.uvic.ca. We can choose whether we want students to be given multiple-choice exercises, short answer exercises, jumbled sentences, crosswords, etc. and the authoring software provides us with the type of exercise we have requested.

Designing websites

Many teachers design their own websites and even get students to make their own class websites, too. When these are put on the worldwide web (thanks to Tripod and Geocities - services of Lycos and Yahoo! respectively), anyone is allowed to visit them. Web design is not nearly as complex as it might seem. While professional software such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe GoLive might seem a bit daunting to the beginner, Microsoft FrontPage, for example, is relatively straightforward. Students will enjoy making their own website. Teachers can put anything they want on the web, and for private teachers a website is an excellent way to advertise their presence.

Virtual learning: from emails to simulated environments

The easiest way of organising teaching, swapping material and giving feedback to students using IT is via email. Teachers can set assignments, have 'conversations' with students and give feedback on student work. However, there are Internet-based software programs designed specifically to offer teaching and training environments online. There are a number of online courses for both students and teachers of English. These range from the downright shoddy (i.e. not worth the time that users spend on them) to serious attempts to facilitate successful learning even when groups of students are not physically present in the same space. It is now possible to train for almost anything online, and training for English teachers is no exception. However, there is a significant difference between teacher training courses that can, apparently, be completed on websites in just a few hours, and well-designed virtual learner environments (VLEs). The idea of a VLE is that course content (including written text, audio and video lecture clips) can be stored on a website which only course participants can access. Some VLEs also contain blogs (see above) and have chat sites both in pre-arranged real time and on message boards where users can post their comments and read what others have to say. There are various platforms for VLEs (or learner management systems as they are sometimes called), including the increasingly popular MoodIe (which is free), and Blackboard and First Class (which are not). Most VLE sites also allow for real-time tutoring so that wherever participants are situated geographically, they can participate in tutorials and even virtual classes.

Five questions

With so much technology and so many new software options available it is sometimes difficult for teachers, directors of study and curriculum planners to know how to make choices. Almost everything sounds wonderful, and there is a temptation, sometimes, to think that all teaching and learning problems can be resolved with the purchase of a new piece of hardware or a change over to some new software-powered procedures. The issue for decision-makers (or anyone trying to decide what to choose for their own teaching or learning) is that many of the new ‘technology solutions’ which are offered and updated on an almost daily basis are indeed very attractive. However, to adopt any one of them would require (sometimes significant) investment and, at the very least, time to learn how to make best use of it. In order, therefore, to try to think rationally and constructively about new classroom equipment of any kind, the following five questions highlight some of the considerations that should be taken into account. These questions apply not just to new technology, but also to any new methodology, procedures, coursebook or program that is offered to teachers.

Question 1: What is the pedigree? We need to know where a new idea or piece of equipment comes from. Do its originators have a good track record in the field? A good rule of thumb is always to be suspicious, for example, of websites where you cannot find out who is responsible for them. We are not suggesting that all new ideas have to come from tried and trusted designers or publishers. On the contrary, new people can offer new and exciting possibilities. But we still need to know who makes this thing, and what their motives are. This is partly because of question 2.

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Question 2: Who gains? If we adopt this new methodological procedure or buy this new computer or IWB, who will be the beneficiary of our purchase? If we can be sure that students will benefit, then it may be worth investing time and money in the project. The same would be true if we could say with certainty that teachers would really benefit by having their workload reduced, for example, or because their professional quality of life would somehow be enhanced. The owner of the new technology or the proselytiser of the new method will also gain if we take on what they are offering, and there is no reason why this should not be so. However, in asking the question Who gains? we need to be sure that we or our students get at least as much out of what is being proposed as they do.

Question 3: Does it pass the TEA test? If teachers are expected to adopt a new procedure or use a new piece of technology, it needs to pass the 'TEA' test. T stands for training. Unless teachers and students are helped to understand the new thing, and then given training opportunities to try it out, it will usually fail. E stands for the whole area of equipment. We need to be sure that the new procedure or hardware, for example, is properly supported technically. This may sound like an obvious point, but with major government-selected systems in various areas of life (health, education) sometimes failing even after huge financial investment, we should not underestimate the absolute need for teachers to be sure that the equipment is appropriate, is in place, and is properly supported by qualified professionals. Finally, A stands for access. If the new technology, set of flashcards or collection of supplementary books is locked away in a cupboard for safety, it becomes inaccessible. If we have to take students down a long corridor to a computer room that has to be booked three weeks in advance, then the whole idea becomes significantly less attractive.

Question 4: What future possibilities does it open up? When we adopt a new methodological procedure or piece of classroom equipment (or software), it is important for us to believe that it has a future. Many people are uneasy about one-size-fits-all methodologies, partly because they are closed to innovation and infiltration from the outside. In the same way, we need to be confident that what we are investing time and money in is not a closed system - and that it has potential for expansion and future growth.

Question 5: How can I make it work? After reading questions 1-4 above, it may seem as if we are suggesting that teachers should be extremely sceptical about new ideas and technologies, and that, in general, we should reject the new in favour of the old. However, this is far from the truth and instant rejection is just as deadening as instant acceptance can be careless. Before rejecting any new idea or equipment, we should ask ourselves how we can make it work for us and for our students. We need to look at the 'best-case scenario' and use that to evaluate what we are being offered, not only in a cynical, but also in a positive light. That way we have a chance of judging its real worth.

Adapted from The Practice of English Language Teaching, Jeremy Harmer 2007, Longman.

Unit 3 Module 424

PART 3 THE MOST IMPORTANT AID OF ALL

Your syllabus or textbookTeachers should be free, within limits, to vary the diet of any ESOL class. We should be able to adapt and supplement the basic textbook and not be instructed to follow it word for word. This makes it a very important aid, but not the dictator. However, many teachers find themselves in a situation where they have to stick to a rigid course and it can be terribly frustrating. Think only, in this situation, that the opposite can be equally difficult. A teacher, asked to teach his classes without even a detailed syllabus will find himself faced with the impossible task of collecting and creating all his own material.The ideal is to be allowed (or encouraged) to roughly follow the syllabus, using your own materials where appropriate. This is why we should regard the textbook as a very important aid.

Most teachers use a textbook/syllabus with their classes. The textbook is our friend because:

It sets out ‘bits’ of language to teach It helps the teacher plan with the ‘teacher’s book’ It has reading and listening materials It helps with managing time. It saves on photocopying.

Here are THE FOUR A’s to get the best out of the course book that you work with:

ASSESS ADAPT AXE ADD

ASSESSING

Assessing means deciding how suitable the book is for your class - BEFORE YOU START TEACHING.

It is important to work out how your book is organised. Look at the contents page(s) at the front of the book. Some books arrange their language grammatically:

Unit 1: There is, there are Unit 2: Present tense questions

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Books organised in this way may have several different topics in the same unit: Present tense questions could include ‘Where are you from?’ (countries), What do you do? (jobs) What do you do at the weekends? (hobbies).

You may have to be careful that the students do not end up with an overload of unconnected vocabulary. Also, it can be difficult to get continuity between the different topics.

Some books arrange their material by topic and then fit the grammar in:

Unit 1: Money Unit 2: Travel

Books like this will cover an area of vocabulary and often have good connections between tasks, for example reading about a place and then writing about your own town. But they may not have much direct teaching of grammar and you may find connections between grammar topics cause confusion.

You also need to assess how much there is in the book. Is it designed for one term or two? Not finishing a book can be depressing for students. If you have to get to the end of the book, decide before you start which whole units you could cut out, and don’t rush. So before you start, try to assess what you will need to make the course a success.As you start teaching, you need to keep your eyes on the other three A’s.

ADAPTING.

This means keeping the materials that you have but changing them so they are more suitable for your class. Sometimes reading and listening activities are too long and complicated, so cut the texts into chunks and write different exercises. In some books every chapter has the same order to the activities. Look at the pictures, talk about them, then a listening, then a reading. Get variety into the lesson by starting with the listening or reading and then do the speaking activity. Be especially careful about writing - course books do not always have good writing tasks and they squeeze them into the end of the Unit. Make sure your course book writing activities are useful and realistic. If not, change them.

AXING AND ADDING

To axe means to cut. Don’t be afraid to just cut out a section of your course book. Sometimes there are too many boring exercises. Sometimes a reading

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or listening is very out of date such as an interview with Margaret Thatcher! Your course book may be 10 or more years old. Sometimes the listenings are just boring. Adding in a more up to date newspaper article or a different song of your own can be much more interesting. Also look for pictures from magazines to replace or add. You may want to add some extra information on a grammar point too.If you add too much, then the students lose trust and interest in the course book. If you axe too much then you will have a lot of work to do to fill up the time! So balance the two. And don’t add at the last minute. Look ahead in the course book and get your materials ready.

SELF-CHECK 3:4 7

Which of these tasks is which? Write the word assess, axe, adapt or add next to each teacher activity.

Count the number of chapters in the book. (Assess)Listen to the cassette tapes to see what the speed and accents are like. Plan two projects per term on topics covered by the book. (Add)As you don’t have a video or DVD you can’t use the video workbook. Choose websites that you can use with each unit. Photocopy and cut up a reading passage for group reading activity. Change the questions for a listening activity.Bring in real examples of what the students have to do for a writing task.Leave out the section on dating as your students are all married!

Now consider the following extract:

Writers and course designers have to take a number of issues into account when designing their materials. Once they have a clear idea of how their theories and beliefs about learning can be translated into appropriate activities they will have to think about what topics to include. This will be based on perceptions of what students find engaging, what research shows in this area, and on the potential for interesting exploitation of the topics they might select. It will also be necessary to consider what kind of culture the material should reflect or encourage, and to ensure some kind of appropriate balance in terms of gender and the representation of different groups in society, racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic.Writers and course designers also have to decide what language variety or varieties they wish to focus on or have represented, and they need to adopt a position on how authentic the language should be, especially at beginner levels.Once these decisions have been taken, coursebook writers (and language program designers in general) can then turn their attention to the central organising strand of their materials, namely the syllabus.

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Syllabus design

Syllabus design concerns the selection of items to be learnt and the grading of those items into an appropriate sequence. It is different from curriculum design. In the latter, the designer is concerned not just with lists of what will be taught and in what order, but also with the planning, implementation, evaluation, management and administration of education programmes. There are now a number of different types of language syllabus all of which might be taken as a starting point in the planning of a new coursebook, or of a term's, or year's work. But, whatever type it is, every syllabus needs to be developed on the basis of certain criteria, such as 'learnability' and 'frequency', which can inform decisions about selection and ordering, as described below.

Syllabus design criteria

When designers put syllabuses together they have to consider each item for inclusion on the basis of a number of criteria. This will not only help them to decide if they want to include the item in question, but also where to put it in the sequence. However, these different design criteria point, in many cases, to different conclusions. The syllabus designer has to balance such competing claims when making decisions about selection and grading.

Learnability: some structural or lexical items are easier for students to learn than others. Thus we teach easier things first and then increase the level of difficulty as the students' language level rises. Learnability might tell us that, at beginner levels, it is easier to teach uses of was and were immediately after teaching uses of is and are, rather than follow is and are with the third conditional. Learnability might persuade us to teach some and any on their own rather than introduce a whole range of quantifiers (much, many, few, etc.) all at the same time.

Frequency: it would make sense, especially at beginning levels, to include items which are more frequent in the language, than ones that are only used occasionally by native speakers. Now that corpus information can give us accurate frequency counts, we are in a position to say with some authority, for example, that see is used more often to mean understand (e.g. Oh, I see) than it is to denote vision. It might make sense, therefore, to teach that meaning of see first - but that decision will also have to depend upon the other design criteria listed here, which might lead us to a different conclusion.

Coverage: some words and structures have greater coverage (scope for use) than others. Thus we might decide, on the basis of coverage, to introduce the going to future before the present continuous with future reference, if we could show that going to could be used in more situations than the present continuous.

Usefulness: the reason that words like book and pen figure so highly in classrooms (even though they might not be that frequent in real language use) is because they are useful words in that situation. In the same way, words for family members occur early on in a student's learning life because they are useful in the context of what students are linguistically able to talk about.

Different syllabuses

The grammar syllabus: this is the commonest type of syllabus, both traditionally and currently. A list of items is sequenced in such a way that the students gradually acquire a knowledge of grammatical structures, leading to an understanding of the grammatical system. Even in multi-syllabuses, it is the grammar syllabus which tends to be the main organizing foundation, with units devoted to the verb to be, the present simple, the present continuous, countable and uncountable nouns, the present perfect, etc. Although grammar syllabuses have been used with success over a long period of time, many methodologists have come to see grammar as the wrong organising principle for a syllabus and have proposed a number of alternatives as frameworks to hang a language programme on (as we shall see below).

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The lexical syllabus: it is possible to organise a syllabus on the basis of vocabulary and lexis to create a lexical syllabus. Applying syllabus design criteria to a lexical syllabus can be complex since there are so many facets to lexis, such as:

- the vocabulary related to topics (e.g. art, clothes, crime)- issues of word formation (e.g. suffixes and other morphological changes)- word-grammar triggers (e.g. verbs which are followed by certain syntactic patterns)- compound lexical items (e.g. walking-stick, multi-storey car park)- connecting and linking words (e.g. when, if, he/she)- semi-fixed expressions (e.g. Would you like to ... ?, IfI were you I'd ... )- connotation and the use of metaphor

Another problem with lexical syllabuses is the relationship between lexis and grammar. Should phrasal verbs be taught as simple multi-word lexical items as they occur, or as a grammatical class? At what stage is the study of word formation appropriate, and when will it be useful to include fixed and semi-fixed expressions? What grammar should be included with new words, and how should that be selected and graded? Though syllabus designers may have little difficulty in applying design criteria to individual words, melding all the other concerns of lexis into a coherent order to make a truly lexical syllabus has not yet been shown to be feasible. A lexical syllabus produced by John Sinclair and Antoinette Renouf was 'several hundred pages long'. Nevertheless, lexis in all its many forms does appear in wider syllabus plans.

The functional syllabus: in his book Notional Syllabuses David Wilkins (1976) included categories of 'communicative function'. These language functions are events which 'do things' such as inviting, promising, and offering, so that a functional syllabus might look like this:

RequestingOfferingInvitingAgreeing and disagreeing etc.

The syllabus designer then chooses exponents for (ways of expressing) each function. For example, for offering she could choose from the following:

Would you like me to ... ?Do you want some help?I'll help if you want.Let me give you a hand.Here, let me.I'll do that ... , etc.

But the syllabus designer can then run into problems of lexical and structural grading. If a syllabus is designed on the basis of the functions which students are most likely to have to perform (their 'usefulness'), the designer still needs to choose and order the exponents for each of those functions on the basis of 'learnability', 'coverage', and 'frequency' and may have trouble matching the functions with these criteria. It is possible to end up, too, with a series of phrases rather than a coherent system. The modern consensus seems to be that functions may not be the best sole organising units for a syllabus, but that the teaching and learning of functions is an important part of a wider syllabus (see below).

The situational syllabus: a situational syllabus offers the possibility of selecting and sequencing different real-life situations rather than different grammatical items, vocabulary topics, or functions. A situational syllabus might look something like this:

At the bankAt the supermarketAt the travel agentAt the restaurant ... , etc.

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Where students have specific communicative needs, organising teaching material by the situations which students will need to operate in is attractive, since the syllabus designer will be able to define the situation, the likely participants, and communicative goals with some certainty. Material for business or tourism students, for example, can profitably be organised in this way. But situational syllabuses are less appropriate for students of general English largely because it is difficult to guarantee that language for one specific situation will necessarily be useful in another. Furthermore, choosing which situations are 'key' situations for a general class is problematic since it depends on who the students are (they are never all the same) and where they are learning. It is for these reasons that situations are rarely taken as the main organising principle in general syllabus design.

The topic-based syllabus: another framework around which to organize language is that of different topics, e.g. the weather, sport, survival, literature, music, and so on. This list can then be refined, so that the weather topic is subdivided into items such as the way weather changes, weather forecasting, weather and mood, and the damage that weather can cause. Topics provide a welcome organising principle in that they can be based on what students will be interested in. It may also be possible to identify what topics are most relevant to students' communicative needs (their usefulness) - though this may differ from what they want. Yet marrying topics to the concepts of learnability, frequency, and coverage is once again problematic since they will still have to be subdivided into the language and lexis which they generate.Providing students with a sequence of topics which are relevant and engagingis an important part of a syllabus designer or coursebook writer's skill. But on its own such organisation is unlikely to be sufficient for syllabus organisation.

The task-based syllabus: a task-based syllabus lists a series of tasks, and may later list some or all of the language to be used in those tasks. N S Prabhu, whose experiments in Bangalore, India did so much to advance the cause of task-based learning, organised a programme in just such a way, calling it a 'procedural syllabus'. The only piece of 'deliberate language grading' occurred when teachers set oral before written tasks. Otherwise it was a question of putting one task before or after another. Prabhu's tasks are related to topics, as in this example:

1 Clockface

Telling the time from a clock face; positioning the hands of a clock to show a given time.Calculating durations from the movement of a clock's hands; working out intervals between given times.Stating the time on a twelve hour clock and a twenty-four hour clock; relating times to phases of the day and night.

From N S Prabhu (1987: 138)

Jane Willis lists six task types that can be used with almost any topics. These are: listing, ordering and sorting, comparing, problem solving, sharing personal experience, and creative tasks (Willis 1996: 26-27 and 149-1S4). As with situations and topics, it is difficult to know how to grade tasks in terms of difficulty. Prabhu does suggest sequences of lessons where the same topic information is used in more than one lesson and where the tasks to go with that information become more complex with each subsequent lesson, but there is little to say how such complexity is measured. The focus is, in David Nunan's words, on 'learning process' rather than 'learning product', and there is 'little or no attempt to relate these processes to outcomes' (Nunan 1988a: 44). A variety of factors interact to determine the difficulty of a task, but as yet, no one has worked out a satisfactory system with which to combine them into any kind of decent measure of difficulty.A task-based syllabus may well satisfy the desire to provide meaning-based learning but until there is a way of deciding which tasks should go where, such a syllabus remains tantalisingly 'ad hoc', and fails to command sufficiently widespread support amongst teachers and methodologists for it to become universally accepted.

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The multi-syllabus syllabus

A common solution to the competing claims of the different syllabus types we have looked at is the 'multi-syllabus'. Instead of a program based exclusively on grammatical or lexical categories, for example, the syllabus now shows any combination of items from grammar, lexis, language functions, situations, topics, tasks, different language skill tasks or pronunciation issues.Where coursebook writers are not following a syllabus laid down by an education ministry, educational institution, or examination board, this is the approach that is most often followed. As the following example shows, authors often present their multi-syllabus in a 'map of the book':

In practice, many multi-syllabuses of this type take a grammar syllabus as a starting point. The materials designers then start the long and often frustrating business of trying to match this list with all the other items they wish to include - the vocabulary and the skills, the tasks and the functions. As the process goes on, the original order of the grammar syllabus will have to change to accommodate some of the other claims; the list of functions will shift around to accommodate the grammar, and the tasks will have to take account of the language at the students' disposal for the performing of those tasks. No one element predominates; all have to shift to accommodate the others, and the end result is always a compromise between the competing claims of the different organising elements.

The coursebook

For years, methodologists have been arguing about the usefulness of coursebooks, questioning their role (Allwright 1981), defending their use (O'Neill 1982), worrying that they act as methodological straitjackets (Tice 1991), promoting their value as agents of methodological change (Hutchinson and Torres 1994), or arguing yet again about their relative merits (Harmer 2001, Thornbury and Meddings 2001).

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Coursebook or no coursebook? The benefits and restrictions of coursebooks use can be easily summarised:

Benefits: good coursebooks are carefully prepared to offer a coherent syllabus, satisfactory language control, motivating texts, audio cassettes/CDs and other accessories such as video/DVD material, CD-ROMs and extra resource material. They are often attractively presented. They provide teachers under pressure with the reassurance that, even when they are forced to plan at the last moment, they will be using material which they can have confidence in. They come with detailed teacher's guides, which not only provide procedures for the lesson in the student's book, but also offer suggestions and alternatives, extra activities and resources. The adoption of a new coursebook provides a powerful stimulus for methodological development (see Hutchinson and Torres 1994). Students like coursebooks, too, since they foster the perception of progress as units and then books are completed. Coursebooks also provide material which students can look back at for revision and, at their best, their visual and topic appeal can have a powerfully engaging effect.

Restrictions: coursebooks, used inappropriately, impose learning styles and content on classes and teachers alike, appearing to be ‘fait accompli over which they can have little control' (Littlejohn 1998: 205). Many of them rely on Presentation, Practice and Production as their main methodological procedure, despite recent enthusiasm for other teaching sequences. Units and lessons often follow an unrelenting format so that students and teachers eventually become demotivated by the sameness of it all. And in their choice of topics, coursebooks can sometimes be bland or culturally inappropriate. One solution to the perceived disadvantages of coursebooks is to do without them altogether, to use a 'do-it-yourself' approach (Block 1991, Maley 1998, Thornbury and Meddings 2001). Such an approach is extremely attractive. It can offer students a dynamic and varied programme. If they can see its relevance to their own needs, it will greatly enhance their motivation and their trust in what they are being asked to do. It allows teachers to respond on a lesson-by-Iesson basis to what is happening in the class. Finally, for the teacher, it means an exciting and creative involvement with texts and tasks.

In order for the DIY approach to be successful, teachers need access to (and knowledge of) a wide range of materials, from coursebooks and videos to magazines, novels, encyclopedias, publicity brochures and the Internet. They will have to make (and make use of) a variety of home-grown materials. They will also need the confidence to know when and what to choose, becoming, in effect, syllabus designers in their own right. This not only makes preparing lessons a very time-consuming business, but also runs the risk that students will end up with incoherent collections of bits and pieces of material. However, where there is time for the proper planning and organisation of DIY teaching, students may well get exceptional programmes of study, which are responsive to their needs and varied in a way that does not abandon coherence.

Using coursebooks Around the world, however, the vast majority of teachers reject a coursebook-free approach and instead use them to help their learners and, what's more, to give structure and direction to their own teaching. The most important aspect of coursebook use is for teachers to try to engage students with the content they are going to be dealing with. This means arousing the students' interest in a topic, and making sure that they know exactly what we want them to do before we get them to open their books and disappear, heads-down in the pages, while we are still trying to talk to them. Many teachers want to use their coursebooks as a kind of springboard for their lessons, rather than as a manual to be slavishly followed. In other words, while they base much of their teaching on the contents of the coursebook, they reserve the right to decide when and how to use its constituent parts. There are two main ways they can do this:

Omit and replace: the first decision we have to make is whether to use a particular coursebook lesson or not. If the answer is 'no', there are two possible courses of action. The first is just to omit the lesson altogether. In this case, we suppose that the students will not miss it because it does not teach anything fundamentally necessary and it is not especially interesting. When, however, we think the language or topic area in question is important, we will have to replace the coursebook lesson with our own

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preferred alternative. Although there is nothing wrong with omitting or replacing coursebook material, it becomes irksome for many students if it happens too often, especially when they have had to buy the book themselves. It may also deny them the chance to revise (a major advantage of coursebooks), and their course may lose overall coherence.

To change or not to change? when we decide to use a coursebook lesson, we can, of course, do so without making any substantial changes to the way it is presented. However, we might decide to use the lesson but to change it to make it more appropriate for our students. If the material is not very substantial, we might add something to it - a role-play after a reading text, perhaps, or extra situations for language practice. We might re-write an exercise we do not especially like or replace one activity or text with something else, such as a download from the Internet or any other home-grown items. We could re-order the activities within a lesson, or even re-order lessons (within reason). Finally, we may wish to reduce a lesson by cutting out an exercise or an activity. In all our decisions, however, it is important to remember that students need to be able to see a coherent pattern to what we are doing and understand our reasons for changes.

Using coursebooks appropriately is an art which becomes clearer with experience.

Adapted from The Practice of English Language Teaching, Jeremy Harmer 2007, Longman.

Unit 3 Module 433

PART 4 ‘AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT’

For this section and for your module task we have chosen to focus on a classroom aid not mentioned so far: the flannelboard We have chosen to focus on the flannelboard as a task for this module because:

It may be a new tool for many of you. Anyone can make one and get involved in the process of creating their

own materials. It can be used in low tech environments all over the world. The flannelboard encourages good practice as it is interactive - can be

used by the students and the teachers. It is portable.

You can stick things on to and remove them from the board, but you can also move parts of the display. This makes a flannelboard particularly suitable for explaining sequence such as a story, or describing a process. It is also useful as a way of getting the students actively involved - the pictures and words can be manipulated by the students. It is helpful in formal grammatical work, as an introduction to the grammatical structure, a reminder or a remedial aid.It is not fixed to the wall.

EXAMPLES OF HOW TO USE THE BOARD

Here are two simple examples of how to use the board to teach:

Present simple - question and answer Make a set of visuals as follows: what, they, he, she, eat, at, school, do, (es), (s) full stop, question mark. These words, parts of words and punctuation marks can be used to build up sentences showing the difference between question and answer (ie with do and does), and can lead on to team games etc. A set of food pictures will help things along. This clearly fits into a lesson about habits and the form and function of the present tense.

Understanding simple instructions using prepositions etc. - make a set of visuals as follows:- 5 or 6 people with names (stick figures are fine), a window, a door, a table etc.These pictures can be used in a variety of ways eg 'Put Jim by the door', 'Who is next to the window?', ' Where are John and Susan?' etc.Then your lesson could move on to a game of ‘Find the rubber snake!’ Or you could place your students around the classroom and you could lead into a role play identifying people by where they are in the room, as you might do at a party.

Unit 3 Module 434

Although these are simple examples, there is an endless choice of ways to use the flannelboard. Some of the more inventive ways it has been used by INTESOL trainees worldwide include:

To teach the life cycle of the frog to children (in the Dutch Antilles)

To teach clothing (in Egypt and Japan)

To present the weather forecast (in Greece)

To create a map of a small town (in Namibia)!

See the end of this module for one trainee teacher’s suggestion on how to make a flannelboard and another teacher’s flashcard designs.

Now read the tasks carefully and send your completed submission to your tutor.

Unit 3 Module 435

TASKS FOR SUBMISSION TO YOUR TUTOR

TASK 1

Prepare a set of flashcards for use with a beginners class. Each card is to show a different nationality. Either make a simple line drawing of a face on each of 8 cards and write a typical name to go with each face eg French - Pierre, Japanese - Sho OR If you cannot show the nationality (or it could be confusing or cause offence) by your drawing, draw the national flag on the card instead. Your set of 8 may consist of French, Spanish, Chinese, American, English, Greek, Italian, German or any interesting and useful combination of other nationalities. Illustrations taken from textbooks or from the Internet are acceptable. You are NOT required to send in the set of flashcards, we need to see the designs on paper. Good presentation will gain better marks.

TASK 2

Prepare a flannelboard. Here are some simple, cheap instructions, though you may have your own ideas which work equally well. You will need:- a piece of wood or chipboard, about 1m x 75cm, not too heavy.a piece of flannelette or brushed cotton material (white or black), this must be longer and wider than the board. some drawing pins or good glue

Stretch the material across the board and secure it at the back. You may wish to design your own carrying handle or case.Though you are required to prepare the flannelboard (you will find it invaluable) you are NOT to send the completed board in for assessment. You are not being assessed on this!Email or send your tutor a photograph of your board saying how you made it.

TASK 3

Prepare a set of materials to use on your board. They are of your own choice, but this is how best to prepare them. There are 2 types, the first are made from pieces of card, sanded on one side so that they stick to the flannelboard. The other type costs a little more to make but will probably last longer; they are made from sandpaper. In each case simply cut out your shapes from the card or sandpaper and colour and decorate or write on them as appropriate.You are NOT required to send in your actual materials - the designs (well presented and giving a good indication of the effect of the finished article) are required for assessment.

Unit 3 Module 436

TASK 4

Prepare a lesson in which you could USEFULLY include the flannelboard and the set of materials which you have prepared. Please indicate the level, the aim, the length of lesson and write a plan. For this you will need to refer to Lesson Planning elsewhere in the course.

DO NOT SEND YOUR FLANNELBOARD OR FLASHCARDS THROUGH THE POST. We need to see a copy, on paper, of your set of flashcards and of your set of materials for use with the flannelboard (these may be your original designs). Email course participants will have to be careful about the size of their image attachments. If you have any problems with this, contact your tutor who will offer suggestions.

CHECKLIST

You should be sending to us:- 1) a copy of your set of 8 flashcards2) a copy of your set of materials for use with the flannelboard3) a lesson plan which incorporates the use of your set of flannelboard materials.4) A picture of your flannelboard.

DO NOT SEND ANYTHING ELSE

Unit 3 Module 437

ONE TRAINEE TEACHER’S SUGGESTION FOR A SIMPLE, INEXPENSIVE FLANNELBOARD

Materials

Corrugated cardboard (packing case suitable)

Size: 1 metre x 1.5 metresStapler with staplesMaterial to cover the board (an old bath towel)Self-adhesive VelcroWood or other handle (scrap material used)Contact adhesive

Method

Cut the cardboard into two exactly-matching halvesSize: 1 metre x 0.75 metre eachFasten these together neatly, using staples around the edges. (In my case, the corners were cut ‘rounded’).

The towel should be stretched over the cardboard, towel lying on table or other flat surface, and folded over the edges of the cardboard shape.

Then it should be fixed, either with staples or with tape, or, as in my own case, a draw-thread or string may be threaded through the towelling at the back, and pulled tautly.

Lastly, with suitable contact adhesive, a handle should be affixed to the centre of the back. This will make for convenient handling, and also strengthen the cardboard further.

Materials can be used on the board if you affix a small piece of Velcro ‘hook’ tape on the reverse of each picture or word.

Unit 3 Module 438

Copyright INTESOL Worldwide 2009

Unit 3 Module 439