English Firsthand - Ideagora

For the past few years, I have been exploring ways English Language Teaching and Positive Psychology can connect. Positive Psychology, which TIME magazine calls “the Science of Happiness”, is a new area of psychology which studies the behavior of happy, mentally healthy people.

I have written a number of lessons, worksheets, etc. to incorporate these ideas into my own classes. I have put together a website to distribute the materials. The URL is:
http://eltandhappiness.terapad.com/

I hope you find it useful.

Best,

Marc Helgesen
EF author

I’m about 2/3 of my way through my short stay in Taiwan, teaching listening/speaking with Firsthand, as well as Writing, English Idioms, and Intro to Western Literature. The speaking classes are going smoothly enough, but I’m pulling out all the tricks to get them to stay in English for 100 minutes and to pay attention when I’m demonstrating with other students what they’re to do. My colleagues tell me that the students aren’t motivated and that teachers can’t ask the students in the back who are chatting in Chinese to listen because if they did, the students would complain to the administration. I didn’t find that was the case when finally in the 50 person first-year Idioms class I banged the desktop and scolded the entire class for its lousy study habits. But then, I have a job to go back to. (Note the same students happily greeted me outside of class after the scolding, and they shaped up.)

 I’m studying Chinese, but there’s not much time. By the end of the week, I will have given 19 hours’ worth of workshops, mostly in Taipei, Taichung, and Kaoshiung. In fact, I’ve had to cancel my Chinese class for the rest of the semester because it conflicts with an orientation class I’m supposed to give to our exchange students going to the US. So I’m working with tapes that a colleague recommended instead. Pronunciation is frustrating, as was my teacher’s intermittent attempts to correct it (I wanted the correction, but I never could figure out when she was focusing on it and when not). I hate, hate, hate having to make complete sentences; people do not speak in complete sentences. Chinese textbooks all start with greetings and nationalities and, usually, ability to speak a language. Personally, I’d put eating out in a restaurant and telling the taxi driver to stop just a little before the school more at the top of the list. I feel that I’m progresing a little, though, and hope to have the discipline to continue once I’m back in the states. In any event, language teachers should always be studying a language, right?

 Steve

Many consider the Duet section to be the “heart and soul” of the English Firsthand series. This was, in fact, the original section of the first Firsthand book around which the rest of the unit was generated. Many of the first ideas were drawn from Marc Helgesen’s Master thesis on “Games in language learning.”

Recently, I was at a CALL presentation in which the presenter said something to the effect of “technology is an enticing theory of language learning in its own right. Usually what is technologically coherent equates to ‘good teaching.’” Gulp… Did I hear this correctly? Unfortunately, a lot of teachers believe this kind of assertion! (I think this is a kind of division fallacy: the opposite is certainly not true (What is technologically INCOHERENT generally amounts to ‘good teaching’…, so the assertion seems to be right.) Of course, there is a lot of excellent teaching that makes coherent use of technology, but the technology itself is not what makes it good teaching.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about here. In my teaching career, which started many moons ago as a Peace Corps teacher in West Africa, there have been a few really exciting technological breakthroughs. One of them was “pair work”. We take pair work as a “technology” for granted now, so it’s hard to imagine a time when there was no pair work, or a time when pair work was seen as a viable means of language practice and an avenue toward language acquisition. My sense is that the “pair work” movement was a result of the Council of Europe think tank propelling Communicative Language Teaching into the forefront of language education and also the budding research movement of SLA analyzing, often on a very micro scale, the mechanics of interaction that lead to comprehension and hence to language acquisition.

When I first met Marc Helgesen, at a presentation he gave on “game theory and language learning”, I remember that we talked afterwards for a long time about the various benefits of pair work. The English Firsthand series, in some sense, was born from that meeting, and Marc has often said that pair work is the “heart and soul” of the Firsthand series. It is, and (to tie into my earlier anecdote) not just because it’s “pair work” as a technology, but because it’s the technology in combination with the personalized topics, the timing within the lesson, the student control of the pacing and depth, the structured turn taking, the need to listen, the graphic interface, the tangible outcomes. And probably also the variety, the lack of predictability that keeps students guessing a bit. At least, that’s my take on what makes the pair work “work”.

- Michael Rost, Series Editor

Hi everyone.

This is the English Firsthand IdeAgora.

An “agora” was a place in ancient Greece. It is usually translated as “marketplace” but was really more like a plaza. It was a place to interact, a crossroads for exchanging ideas as well as goods.

An “ideagora” is concept introduced by Don Tapscott and Anthoy D. Williams in their book “Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything” (http://wikinomics.com/). Wikipedia is probably the most obvious example of this kind of mass collaboration but other examples range from serious/important things like the human genome project and Linux to “pop” things like Youtube and MySpace.

There was a fascinating interview with Tapscott a whild back on National Public Radio. The URL is:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6711038

Anyway, we want to welcome you to the English Firsthand IdeAgora. We hope you will send us your ideas, experiences, challenges — whatever. We want this site to evolve into a place where teachers can network and share ideas.

Send your ideas to ideagora@efcafe.com

Best

Marc (and all the EF authors)

I went to a really interesting over the weekend by Joseph Shaules on “The creative use of silence.”

He pointed out that there can be both “destructive silence” and “constructive silence” in the classroom. Destructive silence indicates either a failed task or a speaking failure. He used the example of calling on a student who just isn’t ready to answer. That learner looses face and often panics, making it even harder to come up with something to say.

Constructive silence, on the other hand. Creates space for thinking and learning. It can mark boundries (the task is starting now… and now it is ending.) and can allow learners to focus.

I think it is easy, especially in conversation classes, for us to want “instant production”. But that, unfortunately, lock learners in to the easiest, simplest things they can say. They are actually capable of much more interesting communication.

In the Firsthand series, we put “Plan ahead” or “Think Time” before speaking tasks. This is to allow learners to think through want they want to say and how they say it. (BTW, there is background music on the classroom CDs do use to make the “silent classroom” more pleasant.)

Being in Joseph’s workshop helped me notice something: The bit of silence before a speaking activity will often occur — either as destructive silence when the learner is trying to come up with something to say, or as constructive silence in the form of “Think time.” So it is sort of a matter of framing silence for success or failure.

Joseph, by the way, is director of the Japan Intercultural Institute and the author of several books, including “Identity” (Oxford) and a co-author of Impact Values (Longman/Pearson Education).

Hi,

We got this message from David Hull. I’ll also be interested in reading what other teachers think.

Marc

Dear Teacher:

My name is David Hull, and I am completing a Masters project regarding how idioms are presented to ESL/EFL students. I have three brief questions that I would appreciate your expertise in answering.

1. Do you present idioms as a single (or series) of lesson plans during the year, or do you insert idiomatic expressions throughout the year either with vocabulary or other generally repeated elements of your class?

2. Do you utilize computers, books, audio/visual materials, or some other teaching aide in these presentations? What would your ideal method be were you given an unlimited access to resources?

3. How would you describe ESL/EFL students reaction to idioms? Do you notice their attempt at using them or a shying away from practicing them either inside or outside the classroom?

Thank you for your candor and experience in answering these questions. I appreciate your assistance in helping me to inject into this project your experiences.

David Hull
Name: David Hull | E-mail: wdhull@hotmail.com | IP: 68.12.197.195 | Date: March 14, 2007