Teachers With a First Language Other than English: A Reflection on Post-lesson Interviews
Gerhard Erasmus, Taiwan
Gerhard Erasmus has an MSc Ed TEFL, a PGCE and a Cambridge Delta. He is currently the Director of Studies at a language centre in Taipei, Taiwan, and actively involved in teacher training, from entry level qualifications to tutoring on the Cambridge Delta. He has authored a Young Learners series and consulted on various curriculum and training design projects. He also co-authored the ebook “Brainstorming” with Hall Houston. His main area of interest in ELT is teacher development including continuous professional development. E-mail: heimuoshu@hotmail.com
Menu
Introduction
Some background
A final comment
References
A fairly large percentage of English teachers worldwide are teachers with a first language other than English. While the ‘native’ vs ‘non-native’ dichotomy continues to light up the internet and staff rooms, the fact is that there isn’t a big enough supply of English teachers worldwide with a CEFR C2 language level. There are environments, in Taiwan for example, where teachers with a language level as low as CEFR A2 are required to teach English in both the private and public sector. We need to look at how to best equip these teachers with skills that could optimize their teaching regardless of their level. Quite a few entry level teacher qualification such as CELTA, require a minimum ability of C1. In my context in Taiwan, the unavailability of CELTA over the last few years as well as the language requirements of teachers have forced us to design courses for teachers with English language levels below C1. This article highlights problems these teachers experience in the classroom and some ideas on how to overcome such problems.
The training courses referred to in this article include training for teachers working in both elementary and junior high schools as well as in language schools in Taiwan. The group size for these courses could be anything from 5 teachers to 20 teachers and while there is occasionally a native speaker or two in the classes, this is the exception rather than the rule. Preparation classes for the Cambridge English Teacher Knowledge Test (TKT)
www.cambridgeenglish.org/teaching-english/teaching-qualifications/tkt/
usually run for 18 hours and a more focused TESOL type course, through Cambridge Taipei, runs for 35 hours. These hours refer to in class hours and exclude online or study group hours.
Due to the limited time we have, teachers on the training courses often only have enough time to do one or two observed lessons. Most of the data collected for this article is from post lesson interviews with the teachers. These very informal interviews were conducted after the completion of the course, often over a coffee, with myself and one or two of the teachers in the group. The teachers usually reflected on the teaching practice (I had given my observation feedback to them by then) and then I prompted them with questions related to the points or problem areas mentioned below. There was no formal interview script and as a result this should by no means be considered empirical research.
This article will look at problem areas that I noticed in my observations of the trainees and in the interviews with them afterwards and each section will include “Tips I give” aimed at helping the trainees.
Problem area: Error correction
There is no doubt in my mind that error correction is a very important and very useful part of teaching. Smith (2016) neatly summarizes many of the benefits and some of the research and points out how teachers sometimes veer away from correction for the wrong reasons. What then would the problem of excessive correction be? Perhaps when the teacher gets to a correction slot in their lesson and has 5 minutes, but needs to correct 10 student errors so not having enough time to check that students understand the correction or to elicit improvements. When students are engaged in a discussion or are checking answers to a reading task with a peer, for example, the teacher uses on the spot correction and, as a result of that correction, the conversation breaks down, then that’s excessive. Excessive correction was a very common problem in the lessons I observed. It often led to very stilted or unnatural conversations in the class.
Interviews with teachers indicated that they felt quite stressed about contributing in our training lectures and seminars due to uncertainty over language use. My experience in doing seminars and workshops supports this, as often only one or two people would contribute publicly. The teachers, so nervous themselves of making a mistake in public, felt that by consistently correcting their own students’ errors, their learners would not end up with a fear of contributing to class discussion! One can understand the reasoning and sympathize with their plight but it seems to indicate that the role and effect of error correction is often misunderstood. There is good reason to explore and investigate our approach to error correction as discussed by Conti (2015) and look at how effective we really are. The tips below are not error correction tips, but rather tips to help avoid trying to correct too much.
Tips I give
Tip 1: Limit your correction to the target language you are teaching. Errors students make in other structures you have taught before will likely correct themselves once students have had more exposure to the structure.
If students make no errors in the new language, then by all means correct inaccurate previously taught language, but don’t try to correct everything.
Tip 2: Correct errors where the message is lost due to an error. These more often than not relate to lexical rather than grammatical errors.
Tip 3: Learn the LIFT (Learner Initiated Feedback Technique) method for writing correction. It limits the number of errors you need to correct and allows students much better uptake of correction. The LIFT method (Conti 2015) allows learners to ask a few (no more than 6) targeted questions about language they are uncertain of when writing. They write these questions in the margins of their work. A student could for example write “bought a present to” and then write in the margin “or for?” which allows the teacher to notice where there is uncertainty. Students can then use dictionaries or other resources to self-correct and the teacher can guide where necessary.
Problem area 2: Unnecessary pre-teaching of lexis from reading and listening texts
As our observation lessons are often limited to 30 or 40 minutes, spending 10 minutes pre-teaching lexis takes up a big part of the lesson and more often than not leads to teaching too many new items for the learners. Considering that a CEFR B1 level teacher can teach learners at A0 or A1 (maybe A2), teaching 10 new words in 10 minutes is excessive. Teachers report that their discomfort with getting stuck in reading and listening texts on unknown vocabulary fuels their desire to eliminate this for their learners. This is further complicated by the fact in Mandarin, lexical items are made up by combining characters. This makes guessing what a lexical item is a lot easier as both characters forming the unknown item might be known to the reader. English, unfortunately, is not as simple. As it is very difficult to guess from context or co-text in English for the teachers, they avoid the area altogether. Although there is some doubt over whether guessing from context actually has benefit especially at lower levels, there shouldn’t be the need to pre-teach every unknown item in a text.
Tips I give
Tip 1: If your gist task requires pre-teaching vocabulary, then rethink your lead-in and your gist task. You should ideally not be pre-teaching lexis for a gist task.
Tip 2: Look at your detailed questions and the answers you require. Only pre-teach words that would make it near impossible for them to answer detailed questions.
Tip 3: Look at questions they can answer with words that are unfamiliar. Teach those words or structures after the reading or listening and use the listening or reading as context to highlight meaning. Allow for them to guess meaning from co-text and context. It is an important skill to learn.
Problem area 3: Excessive focus on form or focusing on form before meaning
Although these are two separate issues, I have grouped them together as the tips at the end are fairly similar.
Excessive focus on form refers to extended teacher explanations about form often with language students already know. An example of this would be to focus an entire stage of the lesson on which form of the verb ‘have’ needs to be selected when teaching present perfect. A quick review would have been sufficient and would have taken up 1 minute of the lesson instead of 5 minutes that could have been used to practice new language.
As for the second part, form should not be focused on unless students are certain of the meaning. It’s pointless trying to memorize a formula if you don’t know what it is you are trying to memorize.
Conversations surrounding this was somewhat linked to the fear of students making errors, but deeper investigation lead me to believe that uncertainty over their own language ability meant this was the one stage of the lesson the teacher could control. As with pre-teaching lexis, a focus on form stage that takes up 10 minutes in a 30 or 40-minute lesson leaves little room for other stages to be completed effectively. It also increases bad teacher talking time (contrasted with good teacher talking time). This is further complicated by the fact that the majority of tests the teachers design or those designed by them, focus on form rather than meaning and usage.
Teachers also mentioned that it is difficult to design activities that focus on meaning first, especially for grammar. For lexis, there is a very big reliance on flashcards, and although this is not bad, there is often a lot of drilling and spelling taking place before teachers have confirmed that students are actually aware of what the words mean.
Tips I give
Tip 1: Students will not retain form if they do not know what it is they are supposed to be retaining. Meaning gives them something to peg the form too.
Tip 2: Look at functions to help you clarify how the language is used and set up tasks accordingly. For young learners (most of the teachers are young learner teachers) focus more on lexical items and lexical sets in context than on grammatical structures. It’s easier to control from a teacher’s perspective.
Tip 3: Your form stage can be fairly short. For grammar, highlight what the form looks like and use color to distinguish between items. Highlight contractions if relevant, because they will appear in reading and listening texts at this level. For vocabulary, show what the word looks like and highlight spelling rules if necessary. Also highlight silent letters. Then move on to a controlled practice stage where you can consolidate and refer back to form if necessary.
Problem area 4: No pronunciation work
Pronunciation is an area that is often overlooked, even for experienced teachers. Lack of confidence in their own language ability, however, was definitely the determining factor in why pronunciation practice was either avoided or limited to a quick listen-repeat type exercise. The idea of native-sounding pronunciation is still perceived as the ultimate and quite a few teachers mentioned instances where they were told they pronounced words incorrectly in conversation and felt embarrassed by it. This lack of confidence meant they felt ill-equipped to deal with pronunciation issues in class.
Tips I give
Tip 1: Use recordings from your course book to focus on pronunciation.
Tip 2: Look at sentence stress and word stress more than individual sounds. (This is not to say that individual sounds are unimportant)
Tip 3: Use activities for pronunciation where you don’t have to model if you are uncertain. Examples such as circling word stress, categorizing past tense verbs based on /t/, /d/ or /Id/ pronunciation etc.
Problem area 5: Insisting on full sentence answers from students
Although this is tied into error correction, insisting on full sentences not only lead to the large amounts of error correction mentioned earlier in the article, but also to very unnatural and forced utterances if not at times complete silence. In one class the teacher read a story about a monkey who had three boxes. The item in box 1 was revealed. She then asked the class what they think could be in the other boxes. A student (young learner at A1) replied “Maybe candy.” The next two minutes was spent to convert that sentence to “There could be candy in the box” which was frustrating for both teacher and student and modals like ‘could be’ don’t really appear at this level.
Tips I give
Tip 1: We speak in utterances. Not sentences. Don’t force full sentences. It has very little value in communicative activities. Let the students communicate with the language they have acquired. If they get stuck, then help.
Tip 2: Task design will eventually lead to longer utterances. Some questions cannot be answered with only one or two word answers, but if the two word answer is clear, leave it there.
Tip 3: If you want to work with full sentences, do so in drilling. Not in communication.
It would be really interesting to see exactly what effect lower English ability has on classroom approach from a research point of view. I am well aware that my observations and notes would not be sufficient to be called empirical research, but I was not really expecting that teachers’ discomfort with their own language ability would have such a big effect on the classroom. The tips mentioned in the article had an effect on following lessons that I observed, but I am fairly certain that if I had not been observing, old habits would have surfaced. It would be great if these teachers were better supported by their respective organizations in terms of language development, training and professional development.
I should conclude that I thought in general the teachers planned their lesson effectively and executed their lesson plans well. They planned lessons carefully and consulted grammar guides and learners dictionaries for the lesson plans and considering that this was an area we always spend some time on, I have always been impressed by the time they are willing to spend on planning. While this article is not about the role of teachers with a first language other than English, good training and a better analysis of problems that commonly occur in lessons of teachers with lower language level might lead to better designed training programs that would benefit these teachers a lot more. In addition, actually designing recognizable branded training courses for this (fairly large) group of teachers should in my opinion be a priority for organizations that provide TESOL training courses.
Conti, G. 2015. L.I.F.T – An effective writing proficiency and metacognitive enhancer. Retrieved on August 5, 2016 from: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/07/30/l-i-f-t-an-effective-writing-proficiency-and-metacognition-enhancer/
Conti, G. 2015. 7 Reasons why (traditional) Error Correction doesn’t work. Retrieved on August 5, 2016 from: https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2015/07/02/7-reasons-why-error-correction-does-not-work/
Smith, C. 2016. Try this it works! Error correction for speaking. Retrieved on August 5, 2016 from: http://malingual.blogspot.tw/2016/05/try-this-it-works-error-correction-for.html
Please check the How to be a Teacher Trainer course at Pilgrims website.
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