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I had the pleasure of attending NATECLA Scotland‘s conference on Saturday 3rd November. As usual with these events, I left brimming with ideas.   Here’s my (somewhat belated) rundown of the day!

Amanda Avison – I say, you say

Amanda Avison was my first port of call and I don’t say this lightly when I say that her talk was revelatory.  I wish I’d attended her talk way back at the start of my teaching career, or at least during my Diploma.

I’ve always known that my west coast of Scotland accent just didn’t cut the mustard on the Received Pronunciation IPA chart.  Myself (and most of my colleagues) were the black sheep, avoiding /u:/ and /ÊŠ/ when they came up in the book (food and full are absolutely the same sound) but over-dramatising the long ‘a’ in /cÉ‘:/ (car) before drilling students to roll their /r/s!

Amanda’s talk was so refreshing because it focused on how my accent sounds, rather than how my accent is supposed to sound. Here’s some examples:

/u:/ and /ʊ/ are the same sound /ʉ/ (e.g. food and full)

/æ/ and /ɑː/ are also the same sound /a/ (e.g. tap and staff)

/ɪər/ as in beer or ear is more of an /i:r/ in my world.

So Amanda wins the medal for inclusive practices in pronunciation teaching!  I left having experienced one of those lightbulb moments, and with my own personal phonemic chart, just for my own wee accent.  If you get a chance to see her, you too could have your own.

Rosie Quin – ESOL Literacy – Creating Accessible Resources for Adult Learners

My dear colleague, Rosie, is always inspiring to me. Having taught ESOL Literacies for years, she knows her stuff.  ESOL Literacies teachers have even fewer options for off the shelf resources than ESOL teachers, so Rosie has embraced the language experience model of teaching.

The language experience approach allows learners to connect their experiences with speaking, listening, reading and writing.  Starting with an object or an image, the class create a short text using their own language skills.  The text is then exploited to allow as much practice of the words as possible. This could be scrambled word/letter activities, gap fills of words within a text or letters within a word, circling words with certain letters or sounds or using word shapes (see image below) to assist with spelling and letter formation.

Rosie also spoke about the importance of phonics for literacy.  The Jolly Phonics approach is widely used to teach reading in schools.  And it works.  Rosie starts off the academic year teaching her students the basic sounds that accompany letters – and that sounds and the names of letters are different. She’s strict about training students to differentiate ‘sounds’ (finger to ear) and ‘letters’ (hand on head).

The first six sounds in Jolly Phonics are s, a, t, p, n, i and students are then taught various words with these letters (e.g tap, sit, at) before moving on to the more advanced sounds and blends (e.g. ck, e, h, r, m, d > man, pack).  For more information and a list of sound sequences, visit the Jolly Phonics site.

Kenji Lamb – ESOL and technologies

Last but not least was Kenji, a super-enthusiastic speaker who raved about the use of Lego and elastic bands for teaching syllables and word stress. He also renewed my faith in speech to text technology. For those of you that have seen the Burnistoun Voice Recognition Scottish Accent comedy sketch, you’ll know the pain that us Scots have to go through and I’m sure you can imagine how successful voice to text is for us!

But in fact, Kenji demonstrated, successfully, that https://dictation.io/speech and GoogleDocs (Ctrl+Shift+S to activate voice typing) both actually have pretty effective voice to text functionality.  Very handy when all students can use them for free on their phones to practise their pronunciation at home, or collaborate on group projects.

Even more exciting was when he showed us how to use the captions function in GoogleSlides!  In ‘present’ mode, you can turn captions on, which will display subtitles for every word you say (as long as you have a microphone, of course)!

Kenji recommended a whole host of websites to support students’ learning.  For those students needing extra writing practice, Kenji suggested www.quill.org and for karaoke loving students, www.lyricstraining.com.  For pronunciation, www.youglish.com searches YouTube videos for specific words so that students can hear a range of pronunciations.

The Ruth Hayman Trust

I was delighted to hear about the wonderful work of the Ruth Hayman Trust.  Set up by NATECLA in honour of their first secretary, Ruth Hayman, the trust is run entirely by volunteers.  They provide ‘educational grants to people who have come to settle in the UK and whose first language is not English’.  You can find more information and donate here. 

And finally….

Thank you NATECLA Scotland for such a great and inspiring day.  It’s a shame I had to choose between so many great talks.  Participants were buzzing about Glasgow ESOL forum, Steve Brown and Berenice Hunter, but perhaps my poor little brain would have exploded if I’d heard any more good ideas!

I should mention that I also spoke about my principles of teaching ESOL.  Watch this space, as I will blog about this in the future!

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I spoke at the City of Glasgow ESOL conference in June.  I literally spoke about speaking.

Speaking is arguably the most important skill in English.  Without the ability to speak confidently, students can’t access social, educational and employment opportunities.

So how do we help our students improve their speaking skills?  Here’s ten ideas.

1. Engaging topics

If students want to talk about something, they’ll speak.  If students don’t want to talk about something, they won’t.  This seems simplistic but I don’t speak about things I don’t want to speak about, so why should we expect them to!?  If someone or something annoys me, I’ll talk about it.  If I don’t relate to a topic or know anything about it, I won’t talk about it.  Simple. Get them engaged.

2. Annoying topics

In short, annoy them (just a little).  Ask them about their pet hates, their least favourite words (in any language), or anything else they can moan about (including politics).  Let’s be honest, as much as we like pretending to be positive, we all love a good moan!

3. Relevant topics

When selecting relevant topics, think about what they need.  My students are much more engaged in role plays about calling the emergency services, arranging a building repair or preparing for a job interview than speaking about some famous person they’ve never heard of!  You can download a sample lesson on building repairs here.

4. Devote class time

Speaking can often be taken for granted in class. The majority of schemata activating warmers and free practice activities are spoken. This year, my college decided to trial speaking skills classes.  For one hour each week, students could attend a skills class based on whatever they needed to work on the most.  This really allowed them (and me) to focus on improving fluency, accuracy, pronunciation and register with the students that lacked confidence in their speaking abilities.

5. Give planning time

I’ve mentioned this in a previous blog post, but I’ll say it again because it’s important. Jon Hird, a lecturer at the University of Oxford, did some fabulous research and found that giving students time to plan before a speaking task significantly improves their fluency and accuracy.  Students who planned before a speaking task paused less during the interaction and were 11% more accurate than those who did not plan.  I have adopted this with my pre-intermediate+ students ever since seeing his talk.  I did, however, trial this with my beginners and was met with mostly blank stares – so when teaching beginners, scaffolding, drilling and pre-teaching vocabulary and lexical chunks is key.

6. Have a purpose

I’m a big fan of project based and task based learning.  Giving students an immersive task and getting them to work together to achieve a shared goal really gets students talking.  Think about giving them some paper and sellotape and asking them to build a bridge together, or some spaghetti and marshmallows and have them compete to build the tallest tower in the class, or get them to do each other’s hair and nails or teach each other to cook something from their country.

7. COLA: Create Opportunities for Language Acquisition

I think this is so important that I’ve already blogged about this and I’ve even created my own acronym for it. Students that are good speakers use their English outside the classroom.  They work, volunteer or get involved in social clubs and community groups.  We, as teachers, need to encourage them to get out and about.  We can do this by holding discussions about hobbies, interests and local places where they can practise their English or referring them to websites like meetup.com and bringing in adverts for local opportunities.  More ideas on my previous blog post. 

8. Relaxed atmosphere

A relaxed atmosphere is crucial. If a classroom is quiet, play some music so that less confident students don’t feel anxious about others overhearing their conversation. Try some breathing exercises with the class before they start.  Smile and give encouraging feedback.  And think about your pairings; asking the weakest and strongest students in the class to work together may only result in the confident student dominating the conversation and the less confident student feeling inadequate.

9. Focus on one thing at a time

I have recently been learning how to swim front crawl more efficiently.  I know that I need to focus on my body rotation, on looking at the lane ropes when I breathe (and not the ceiling), on engaging my core, on keeping my arms wide, on a strong catch, and on my head position when I exhale.  If I think about all of this at the same time whilst swimming, I end up swimming more slowly.  When encouraging students to speak, it’s also wise to give them just one thing to focus on; their pronunciation of the recently learned vocabulary, the one single grammar point they studied that day, using only formal language, being polite, etc.

10. Variety of activities

Variety is the spice of life.  Here are some of the activities that I used with my speaking skills class this year: role plays, information gaps, presentations, dramas, discussion questions, storytelling, find someone who, drills, interviews, speed ‘dating’ conversations, immersive activities and using pictures (describing what they see, ordering events, predicting the past and future, giving the people in the picture a voice, etc).

How do you teach speaking skills?  Any ideas you’d like to share?

If you’d like more innovative ideas, tips and tricks about teaching speaking, why not check out my courses? Click the laptop icon to find out more! 

Every time I go to IATEFL, I leave with a head so full of ideas that I genuinely fear it may burst!  I have so many ideas that they mostly fall by the wayside. Not this time! This time I have my trusty blog – and a list of five things I promise to do before the conference in Liverpool next year!

1. Allow students planning time before a speaking activity. 

Jon Hird spoke about how giving students time to plan before a speaking task really bridges the divide between accuracy and fluency.  He shared some research that showed that students who planned before a speaking task paused less during the interaction and were 11% more accurate than those that did not plan.  My students will be getting more planning time in their speaking classes from now on! You can download Jon’s handout here.

2. Promote the BBC Learn English website with my Eritrean students.

I’m always looking for useful websites that students can use at home.  I often find that it’s really easy to signpost lower level learners that speak Arabic, Chinese or Spanish to online learning platforms (e.g. Babbel).  However, my Eritrean students often miss out.  Not any more!  It turns out that the BBC Learn English Website is also in Tigrinya!  Happy days!

3. Be (more) mindful!

Rachael Roberts, as usual, left me bursting with ideas for the classroom.  In this case, she also left me bursting with ideas for life!  I do endeavor to be mindful.  I really do, but sometimes I can’t turn off what Rachael calls the ‘lizard brain’.  That’s all the negative thoughts ‘Why will anyone want to read my blog?’ and ‘That activity was rubbish.’ are common ones. Just being aware that everyone has a lizard that must be quietened or silenced so we can get on with the fun, happy thoughts is a step in the right direction.  Buddhify and Headspace are apps that Rachael recommended in her talk.

She also recommended getting the class in the right mood for learning.  Starting the class with a calming conversation or a fun puzzle; doing a quick breathing exercise or asking your students to close their eyes for a minute and listen to the sounds to relax them; fostering an atmosphere of positivity… and of course breaking up the lesson with a random fun video of a baby laughing!  Everyone loves a laughing baby video!

4. Appreciate resources.

I teach at a well-resourced Further Education College.  I am lucky that I can pretty much ask for any book (within reason) and it will magically appear on my desk a couple of weeks later (more or less). Dorothy Zemach‘s hard-hitting plenary (how can you mention IATEFL 2018 without mentioning that plenary) really hit home about the squeeze on all involved in ELT publishing.  Teachers want more supplementary stuff, which squeezes publishing companies, who then squeeze authors.  Everyone gets squeezed and nobody wins.  And most specifically, one size does not fit all.  Cleansing coursebooks of all taboo subjects (love, alcohol, tattoos, LGBT, etc) does not promote equality, diversity or inclusion – or indeed help an ESOL student settle effectively in the UK!

5.  Think outside the box (apologies for the cliche)

Steve Brown is a world changer.  Last year he spoke about how we have to embrace the PARSNIPs (taboo topics – Politics, Alcohol, Religion, Narcotics, -isms and Pork) in the ESOL classroom.  I couldn’t agree more.  These are important topics for my learners.  Interacting with these topics helps understand the social intricacies of the country they live in.

This year, Steve once again pushed the boundaries and got everyone thinking.  He questioned whether the activities we give our learners truly meet their needs and truly get them thinking critically about the world around them – and whether the environment in which we operate truly allows us to teach them what they need.  You can watch the full video at the British Council website. 

Were you at IATEFL Brighton?  What five things do you plan to do before IATEFL 2019?

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I’m off to wonderful Brighton again for an intense week of inspiration from the world’s most innovative ELT professionals at the IATEFL conference.  I look forward to leaving  bursting with ideas as usual.

For those of you that can’t make it, I promise to share some of those ideas here after the event.  For those of you that can make it, please come and see me at the following times:

My workshop: Sharing Lives, Sharing Languages (Peer Education for Language Acquisition), Room 6, Thursday 12th April from 2.20-3.05pm.  Here I will share all the exciting things that we achieved during the Scottish Refugee Council’s SLSL project 

Book signing: I will be signing copies of my first book, The A-Z of ESOL, at the BEBC stand on Thursday 12th of April from 3.50-4.20pm

I hope to see you there!

So I’ve read that blog posts should have snappy titles.  I hope that this one was snappy enough.  I even created a new acronym there!  Gotta love acronyms!

Having taught ESOL for more than ten years, one thing that is very clear to me is how quickly students that are engaged in their community acquire the language whilst more isolated students can struggle with their communication.  I’ve had students that use their English at work, a volunteer placement or a local football club speaking to me in broad and confident local dialect (Glaswegian in my case). It goes without saying that when it comes to my teaching, I’m very much a proponent of getting them out there into the big bad world to use their language.

I’d like to share some tips and ideas that have helped me get my learners out of their ESOL bubbles and into the wild over the years:

Peer Education – The Scottish Refugee Council‘s Sharing Lives Sharing Languages project that I managed last year, was born specifically to get ESOL learners out there.  It basically trains local community members (whether they are native or non-native speakers) to be peer educators and support ESOL learners to get to know people and use their English outside of class.  The pilot project was delivered by organisations in four local authorities, including Dundee International Women’s Centre, Aberdeenshire Workers’ Educational Association, Midlothian Council, and Renfrew YMCA.  Outcomes included the establishment of an international women’s group that meet regularly to cook, chat, meet other community groups and visit local places of interest as well as learners joining local community gardening projects and walking groups.

You can find more information at the link above and I do plan to blog in more detail about this in the future. I’ll also be speaking about this at IATEFL Brighton 2018 (2.20pm Thursday 12^th April).  It would be great to see you there!

Promote opportunities  I like to promote any opportunity that get students out there.  This could be volunteering, training or employment.   I like to promote volunteer opportunities with charities in the local area or encourage students to visit their local volunteer centre.  I also like to promote all things that support students to find employment or boost their skills.  Any interesting jobs, courses or support agencies I come across, I promote through a reading lesson with the leaflet, or helping them to write personal statements and covering letters. Whenever I get the chance I’ll get networking to arrange guest speakers.  One of the most recent speakers was Mozafar from a great little volunteer led organisation called Code Your Future, the (free) coding school for refugees.

Social opportunities – There are lots of great community centres and free events out there.  Most students have hobbies, whether it is embroidery, football or African drums. I like to bring in leaflets of events and social clubs in the local area and use them for reading activities or conversation starters. I also recommend helping students search through meetup.com for local groups that interest them.  Sewing bees have a reputation for being places to have a good natter… so why not get students to go along for a natter and to show off their handiwork?

Class trips – Everyone loves a class trip!  Trips can show students what the local area has to offer and give them the confidence to go there themselves.  Moreover, it’s great team-building for the students and they can practise their English and learn about local organisations, services and places of interest.

While I really enjoy trips to local museums, art galleries and areas of natural beauty, my preference recently has been for places that students don’t have the opportunity to visit outside class time or that increase their opportunities for community involvement.

For example, I love visiting the local fire station because fire prevention is important, knowing when (and when not) to call the emergency services is important and sitting in a fire engine is fun!  I also love visiting places of worship, such as a Sikh Gurdwara or a local Synagogue; because intercultural communication and understanding is essential in a multicultural, multilingual ESOL class.

Language Learning in the Wild  This is a European funded project that has lots of inspiring ideas to get students using their language naturally in the community.  The Icelandic Village, for example, encourages learners to record conversations while they are interacting with sales assistants, librarians and waiting staff (with their permission, of course).  They can then use this to reflect on the interaction and practise their language in the classroom.

Get the A-Z of ESOL Yes, it is a shameless plug.  But when I wrote the 26 photocopiable lessons, the tenets above were very much at its core and there are loads of lessons that promote all of the above.  For example:

• K is for Knowing the local community and is based on the context of adverts for social clubs.  It leads on to supportive discussions allowing students to reflect on which local groups they might like to join.
• S is for Services and is a great lesson to prepare students for emergencies (or for a trip to a local fire station).  Students learn essential vocabulary for emergencies then critically evaluate which emergency service to call (or not to call) in a variety of scenarios before role playing a 999 call.
• V is for Volunteering gets students talking about volunteering and supports them to complete a volunteer application form.

I hope these hints and tips get your students out there.  Do you have any other ideas? Please share them in the comments.

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I was planning on posting my very first blog post this weekend.  It was going to be about getting students out and about and using their English OUTSIDE the classroom.  But since the ‘Beast from the East’ has kept most of the UK well and truly INSIDE, I felt it more topical to start off with a topical snow blog.

Snow has brought most of the UK to a standstill for the last few days.  College being closed meant lots of long, pretty (and cold) walks in Kelvingrove park for me.  It also meant hosting a lovely Belgian Erasmus+ visitor whose flight got cancelled on Wednesday.  After much Skyscanning, Trainlining and rebooking and cancelling of planes, trains and automobiles, she is now en-route to Brussels (via Malta)!

I very much enjoyed finding out about the Belgian approach to teaching the Dutch to Speakers of Other Languages, sampling Belgian chocolates and introducing her to new whiskies.  So the Beast from the East hasn’t been all bad at all!

It also inspired me to write a lesson all about snow, which I’m willing to share with y’all.

I’ve been working on past tense with my elementary class, and what better way to revise past tense than to give them some useful phrases to use for talking about and emailing their friends about snow? This lesson introduces useful vocabulary associated with snow days along with past tense regular and irregular verbs. Students read and then write an email to a friend about the things that they did in the snow (or things they did when avoiding the snow)!

Title: Snow days_EmilyBrysonELT_A2_PastTenseReview

Skill: Reading and Writing

Level: A2

Language: Past tense (regular and irregular)

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