Get the Eastern Trainees on the Move!

Ream Odetallah, UAE

Ream Odetallah is an English Language Instructor at Al Ain University of Science and Technology in UAE. She is interested in developing learning skills for young and adult learners through researching and conducting workshops. Her first achievement is her contribution to the making of a book titled “Crazy Animals and Other Activities for Teaching Young Learners”:
www.teachingenglish.org.uk/publications/crazy-animals-other-activities-teaching-young-learners.
E-mail: reamfathi@gmail.com

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Introduction
Classrooms in practice
Example of a reflective teaching form
Conclusions
References

Introduction

As a trainer you are obliged to show the trainees how a subject material is taught in accordance with the essential needs of a teaching environment. In other words, when you are training teachers or instructors, focus on developing their current teaching skills rather than their knowledge. Trainees are already assigned teachers, so they are not to be trained on how much do they know about the language, but how should they motor their teaching skills through developing the required teaching materials, and use them in different class skills.

A full training course comprises of five teaching skills in practice and a sample of a reflective teaching form. The exemplified teaching methods of each skill suit the atmosphere of the trainers and trainees since the target audience are mainly EFL trainees in the Middle East.

In prior to a training course, you must:

• come early to class to have to time to write on the board and to show your dedication
• be accessible, in other words, introduce yourself to the trainees to make them feel comfortable about the training course after a long day of work.

It is necessary to give a good impression towards commitment and friendliness that would reflect your character as an ideal trainer. The orientation part always tells what kind of person you are as a trainer and would also give you a good background of your attendees. An expectation feedback form may help you to understand and study your trainees' needs as well as providing you with more information about their educational backgrounds and environments that may be an extra asset to your training course.

The questions that you include in your form may vary from one training course to another, but given below are some typical questions that you may find them necessary to conduct an accurate course as possible:

• What are your learners' age ranges?
• What is, are the most challenging skill(s) you face in classrooms?
• Where do you teach? For example, in city, town, village or online?
• How many years of teaching experiences do you have?
• How important is the English Language in the area you teach? Explain why or why not.
• How do you evaluate the learners' English abilities? Give reasons behind your evaluation.
• For what purpose(s) are you teaching English?

1. TOEFL
2. Academic IELTS
3. General IELTS
4. IGCSE
5. SAT
6. General English for primary students
7. General English for high school students
8. General English for university students
9. Other(s). Specify:

Classrooms in practice

These classrooms should focus on different skillful activities that involve kinesthetic, visual and audial activities for the purpose of injecting the language skills into the trainees' conceptual skills in order to produce better teaching classrooms.

Vocabulary

Switch the trainees out of their traditional or practiced teaching styles into what is called ' My Vocabulary Way!' A trainee, whether experienced or a beginner, would choose a teaching style that would be easily absorbed by mono-minded learners whose thoughts are glued to the traditional styles of learning. Some of these new teaching styles are:

• bringing out words from their familiarities,
• coming up with fun activities that they would find exciting to learn from such as scrabbles, word dominos and so on,
• drilling the words through various step-by-step activities then exercises,
• converting these exercises into advanced vocabulary worksheets and simple writing assignments.

For example, you may present to them a vocabulary exercise such as the 'deducing meanings from words', in which you show them how to get meanings from affixes as shown in the sample lesson plan. Then, assign a trainee to look for different root words with prefixes or suffixes than the ones mentioned in the lesson plan, and to share them with the class, or you would divide the class into groups and ask each group to look up for the meaning of some other root words, and then to compare their results in groups.

Sample Lesson Plan

The purpose of this exercise is to exemplify a useful practical way in deducing meanings from words that are commonly used by EFL learners. The trainees must be aware that many learners fail to comprehend some reading texts because of such words, but using such teaching method would be a good example to encourage them to learn long incomprehensible and unfamiliar words.

Reading

The main points the trainer should highlight in this part are introducing what are the effective and ineffective reading methods. The trainer should also focus on reminding the trainees that they are to pretend to be the learners and the trainer is their teacher, so that they think and respond like them. A reading class is considered the hardest class since it involves many activities: reading, speaking, listening, and in some texts critical thinking.

1. Ineffective reading methods
   • underlining or highlighting words in context
   • discussing and studying the required vocabulary lists
   • not using demonstrations in the warm-up sessions
   • treating them as how it should be to adult learners
   • silent reading
   • traditional reading and reading exercises such as specifying main ideas, supporting details, topic sentences and so on.
2. Effective reading methods

A sample reading text:

“A woman called Tsurba lived until age 160. Similarly, a man called "People in Caucasians Mountains in Russia are also famous for their longevity. Official birth records were not available, but the community says Shirali probably lived until 168; moreover, his widow was 120 years old. In general, the people not only live a long time, but they also live well. In other words, they are almost never sick. Furthermore, when they die, they not only have their own teeth, but also a head full of hair, and good eyesight too. Vilcabamba, Ecuador, is another area famous for the longevity of its inhabitants."

Reading lessons are more or less classrooms of discussions and sharing ideas. After highlighting this point to the trainees, a reading text would be distributed and discussed with them based on what would make a reading class effective:

• Start a reading class with a thought-provoking session. You may walk around the trainees hunching with a crutch. Then, introduce yourself as 'Tsurba' and start telling them what made you live till the age 160.
In five minutes or less, you would have demonstrated the main idea that some trainers may sneak a quick look at the text to get a better idea of what you have demonstrated, or they would easily get the general point of the text.
• Ask the trainees to eye the learners as they read, but not like an eagle to terrify them, but in a smiling or a comfy way, and then ask specific questions such as, 'What are the Caucasians famous for? For their long noses? Hair?' And try to keep on triggering them until they get the right answer. And ask another teasing question, like 'What do you think 'longevity' means?' and so on.
The point of this technique is to busy their thinking skills rather than spoon-feeding them with answers, which makes reading lessons lamely traditional and boring. You are trying to extrinsically motivate them to read and to answer questions by indirectly motoring their thinking abilities.
• Avoid interrupting them as they read. Whatever you train them, they would apply the same to the learners. If a mistake happens when misreading, such as mispronouncing the word inhabitants, wait when a trainee has finished and ask another trainee 'Where do you live?' , and NOT THAT PARTICULAR TRAINEE to avoid any embarrassment. Once you receive an answer, you can comment like 'Oh! You are an in/ha/bi/tant in that area?' Moreover, you can keep on drilling that word during classes until the trainee says it correctly.
• Encourage trainees to bring outside reading materials related to the taught topic as reinforcements to the understanding of the passage. For instance, an interview with a local over-aged man and his way of living, also create different types of questions for the purpose of a better comprehension. Then, they can do worksheets that would be rated by you and other trainees to discuss their pros and cons.

Writing

In the writing skill, pick a familiar issue to motivate the trainees to brainstorm and to organize their ideas before writing them down. Moreover, it would be more interesting if images are associated with the writing topics to ease the expressions during a writing process.

For instance, the picture below presents a complex that is situated in the eastern region of Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, and owned by the Abu Dhabi Commercial Properties. It was first inhabited in year 2010.

The reason behind selecting a familiar presentable issue to write about is to motivate trainees to gather notes about a place, thing or person they know and visualize to make them understand that what could be talked about also could be written about. So, if you pick a strange topic, you may face difficulties in trying to grab ideas from them. You are trying to aware them that gathering notes of something not actively talked about would not be a successful writing assignment to the learners, especially if they were beginners.

In the next step, which is brainstorming, the trainees are to apply the group approach in which they discuss and write down their notes and sentences about the complex such as 'Why was it built?', 'How much is the annual rent?', 'How many blocks are there?', 'How do they look like?', and so on. Then, they move on to organizing these ideas logically and in order. The best way to write down ideas reasonably is to have trainees to ask and answer questions in groups before writing them down. For instance:

Trainee 1: When did the Abu Dhabi Commercial Properties start constructing the complex?
Trainee 2: In year 2008.
Trainee 3: How much is the annual rent?
Trainee 2: $ 16, 400

And the conclusion of these 'ask and answer' and 'visualize' techniques could end up with the following writing:
In year 2008, houses were very expensive. A standard apartment was annually rented for $ 16, 400, so the complex is an economical project suitable for people that could not afford to pay any higher.

Listening

The listening skill is never the first skill to be taught to learners. They must be familiar with the topics and the meanings of some words from the lessons taught earlier to ease their listening abilities. In other words, the listening exercises should be success-oriented to reinforce the learners' listening abilities.

The listening skill is taught in two main strategies: listening for main ideas and listening for specific ideas. The first strategy is taught by training the teachers on the predicting and drawing inferences skills. For example, to answer question one of the following text, the word 'regionalist' could be predicted correctly after teaching them the meaning of the suffix '-ist', which when added to a root word, it would become a noun and it is mainly about a person as discussed in the vocabulary section. In return, this would help the listeners in understanding the question much better.

“Artist Grant Wood was a guiding force in the school of painting known as American regionalist, a style reflecting the distinctive characteristics of art from rural areas of the United States. Wood began drawing animals on the family farm at the age of three, and when he was thirty-eight one of his paintings received a remarkable amount of public notice and acclaim. This painting, called "American Gothic," is a starkly simple depiction of a serious couple staring out at a viewer..”

1. What style of painting in known as American regionalist?
   1. Art from America's inner cities
   2. Art from the central region of the U.S.
   3. Art from various urban areas in the U.S.
   4. Art from rural sections of America

It is a direct question that does not require more than 30 seconds to analyze once learning the affixes. However, the second strategy requires more familiarization on the unfamiliar culture of the text. A teacher must give a brief background of American art and culture before exposing the listening text to class.

Nevertheless, if an eastern trainee has little or no background of the western culture, history or modernity, then it is very crucial to dive into the topic of the lesson beforehand. Follows this knowledge is teaching the learners how to listen for specific details that focus on paraphrasing, recognizing cognates and word-order patterns. The second question below requires the listener to be able to paraphrase the sentences in which the 4 choices are mentioned. The sentence that is closest in meaning would most probably contain the right answer.

1. What is the name of Wood's most successful painting?
   1. "American Regionalist."
   2. "The Family Farm in Iowa."
   3. "American Gothic."
   4. "A Serious Couple."

This strategy is a long-term teaching one because it requires a huge knowledge of cultural background and vocabulary. So, you must highlight the trainees that they should know the places of publications for the materials they are using, whether they were published in the U.S. or in the U.K. so that when a text like the one above is to be taught, a trainee can read more about the American culture and art to have an idea about them and to enrich the learners with that knowledge before listening to a text.

Furthermore, clarify to the trainees that the word 'Wood' in the text does not mean 'the outer solid layer of a tree', on which some learners would base their listening on that concept, and become confused when choosing an answer. They must explain to the learners or listeners that 'Wood' is a name because it is followed by the first name 'Grant' and that a 'wood' cannot perform physical actions such as guiding and drawing.

Speaking

It is a non-stop skill. You should continuously practice the skill with the trainees without making them feel that they are being observed. Also, to encourage them to speak English outside the classrooms, there would be no need to criticize one's way of pronouncing a word or the accent, so that you plant in them the confidence of practicing the language all the time. The purpose of the session is to master the language properly and to practice it in and outside of classrooms to reinforce the trainees' English Language abilities. Also, you could apply the group approach. For example, a group of four people are to converse with one another as work colleagues, classmates, siblings and to discuss about a certain issue assigned by you rather than making it a free speaking class. In other words, moving from a common social issue to a more advanced speaking issue is the best way to upgrade one's speaking abilities.

Example of a reflective teaching form

The form on the next page is an example of a trainee's feedback on a vocabulary lesson on affixes. The form is to be returned to you to discuss the pros and cons of the class conducted according to the skills taken during the course.

Reflective teaching forms are very important in EFL classrooms for 2 main reasons:

1. In almost every classroom there are many different levels of learners. It detects the learners' strengths and weaknesses and the reasons behind them.
2. It helps teachers to decide what kind of recovery plans, assessments and evaluations are necessary to keep in pace with the learners' progressions and to overcome their retreatments.

Conclusions

Learning never stops, even to us as teachers or trainers. Each culture imposes different learning strings from any other culture, and the trainees must think practically when teaching EFL learners as they step out of their shoes into the learners' shoes.

To wrap up, the 'Train the Trainer' course also relies on:

References

D.P., 2003. Preparation course for the Toefl test. Longman, p 85. (2012,11). The secrets of a very long life. StudyMode.com. Retrieved 11, 2012, from www.studymode.comessaysThe-Secrets-Of-A-Very-Long-582736.html

Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.