“Thinking in the EFL Class”: an Auto Review by Tessa Woodward

Tessa Woodward, UK

Tessa Woodward is a teacher, teacher trainer, and the Professional Development Co-ordinator at Hilderstone College, Broadstairs, Kent, UK. She also edits The Teacher Trainer Journal for Pilgrims, Canterbury, UK. (The TTJ is the elder sister HLTmag, by the way!) Tessa Woodward was President of IATEFL from 2005-6. She is the author of many books and articles for language teachers and for teacher trainers. Her books have included Loop Input, Models and Metaphors in Language Teacher Training, Ways of Training, Planning from Lesson to Lesson, Ways of Working with Teachers, Planning Lessons and Courses and Headstrong. Her latest book, and the subject of this review, is Thinking in the EFL Class (2011) Helbling Languages. You can get it via The Bournemouth English Book Centre (BEBC) and the English Language Bookshop (ELB Brighton), but not through Amazon just yet. E-mail: tessaw@hilderstone.ac.uk

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Why I wrote the book
Basic facts about the book
An example teaching tip
An example practical activity
Marketing speak: Thinking in EFL classes…
About how long it takes to write a book
And the review is..?
Bibliography

Why I wrote the book

In conference presentations these days, in articles in professional magazines, on internet web sites, in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) settings, and also in some primary, secondary and tertiary syllabuses recently, there has been an increased interest in teaching thinking skills. I feel that the approach has been a bit narrow and..er..well…unthinking, dwelling often just on ‘Critical Thinking’ and based on just one framework , Bloom’s taxonomy.

Thinking and the idea of teaching thinking is a huge and potentially very complex area. So, I wrote a book exploring the topic and have come up with what I hope readers and teachers will agree is a clear, practical approach to working with it. I wanted to help us teachers stay interested in our jobs and to help students cope with the demands of learning a language and living in a restless, changeable world. I wanted too to help both parties enjoy flexibility, fun, creativity and rigour in our work.

Basic facts about the book

Thinking in the EFL Class: Activities for blending language learning and thinking. 250+ pages.
ISBN 978-3-85272-333-4. The book is in the ‘Resourceful Teacher Series’ of Helbling Languages.
Price £21.50.

Text Divisions

It has an introduction and then seven chapters. The main chapter headings are:

# Fundamentals
# Building concepts, looking for patterns and memorising
# Keeping it practical: ways of structuring lessons to work with thinking, exploratory talk and imaginative education
# Using everyday thinking frameworks for mental exercise
# Creative thinking
# Thinking clearly about texts and situations
# Designing tasks and activities to encourage thinking

There is a Further Reading section and a Teacher’s Quick Reference guide. There are also ready-to-use handouts, freely downloadable at:
www.helblinglanguages.com/thinking/downloads in both PDF and DOC format.

It contains two types of teacher support; teaching tips and practical activities. There are 30 realistic tips for teachers (These are clearly marked in the margin with an icon e.g. TT1 or TT2.)

An example teaching tip

Here is an example of a teaching tip about ‘wait-time’:

TT6 Wait-time

Wait-time is when the teacher pauses in class and ……………………….. waits!
There are two different times when it is invaluable. First, just after we have asked a question. Secondly, after we have received an answer. Thus …

Teacher: What do you notice about the sentences in this story?
Pause
Student 1: They’re all short.
Pause
Student 2: There’re no commas or anything.
If we wait after we have asked a question and after a student has ventured an answer, we give students time to think. Research tells us (Rowe, 1978) that good wait-time will get us more and longer answers from more students who will also start to build on each other’s contributions. Improving wait-time also appears to increase student confidence and speculative thinking. It will also give us teachers benefits. The quantity of our questions may go down while the quality may go up. We may become able to ask questions that require our students to do more complex information-processing and thinking. We may thus improve the quality of our own utterances and interventions because we have time to think about them. Disciplinary problems may also decrease. The concept of wait-time can be shared with students too.
If you find pausing after questioning hard, try …

• noticing your breathing and gestures and keeping them relaxed
• slowly and silently counting ‘One Mississippi, two Mississippi …’ up to five, slowly
• calmly looking round the classroom
• mentally checking that your own question was a well-worded, clear and relevant one.

An example practical activity

Here is an example of a practical activity designed to build empathy. It comes in the chapter on creative thinking.
5.17
Questions to the head
Building empathy
Focus
Encouraging students to think what it would be like to be another, very different, human being. Speaking and listening. Asking and answering personal questions.
Level
Intermediate upwards
Time
30 minutes
Materials/Preparation
You need an A4 portrait of an unknown person who is very different in look, age and life experience from your students. Put the portrait on a piece of card. Cut out a piece of blank paper about the size of the face, and clip it onto the portrait, leaving only the edge of the face and the hair, neck, shoulders and periphery details visible. Think up the sorts of questions that might be asked about the person by people seeing this doctored picture, and for levels up to lower intermediate think up some possible answers and make notes on the back of the picture.

In class

1. Choose a student to help you who is capable of stepping into someone else’s shoes.
2. Show the rest of the class the partly masked portrait. Ask them to look carefully at whatever they can see of hair, clothing etc.
3. Ask them to write down ten questions they would like to ask the person when that person visits their classroom soon for an interview. You can write some question words on the board to help them, e.g. what, who, when, why, which, how many, how long, do, did, are, is, have, depending on what they know. At higher levels, write some more interesting ones such as What if …? Supposing …? and I wonder if …
4. Once students are settled writing questions, take your chosen student to a quiet corner and secretly show them the whole picture. Help them (for lower levels, using your notes on the back of the picture) to predict the sorts of questions they will be asked by their classmates and the sorts of answers the person in the picture might give. Leave your volunteer to prepare, and go back to help your writing students.
5. Bring in the volunteer, holding the masked picture in front of their face, introduce them as a mystery guest and sit them in front of the class.
6. Students then ask their questions, and the volunteer answers them in the role of the person in the picture. Keeping the portrait held up in front of their face will make the interview more lifelike for the rest of the class and will enable the portrait holder to read any notes on the back of the picture.
7. Thank the mystery guest and let them go back to their seat. Ask the students if they would like to see the whole portrait. If they would, show it to them.

1. Students discuss, in small groups or plenary, what they have learned about the mystery guest.
2. Students write a summary of what they have learned. If the person in the portrait was from a definite cultural group, (e.g. Native North American) or specific population (e.g. a prisoner), students can research that before writing to make their work factually correct.

Variations

1. The questions to the head can be written for homework and checked by you before the interview takes place in class. The protagonist can prepare for homework, too, as long as you can trust them not to reveal too much to classmates before the follow-up class. (If they did, it would take away the useful element of surprise and mystery.)
2. Students can choose portraits and prepare a role play. They may well choose pictures of celebrities, which will mean some students may know quite a lot about the person in the picture.
3. Instead of using a partially covered picture, you can sketch the outline of an androgynous figure on the board. Students brainstorm characteristics, and these are written up inside the figure. Students then brainstorm external factors such as appearance, context or influences, and these are written up around the figure. Continue until a character has been created. Students can then write a short paragraph about the character, or can discuss what kind of house, weekend, job or holiday the character might like.

Acknowledgements

I learned the main activity from John Morgan. A version of this activity appeared in Lindstromberg (2004). I learnt variation C from the Department of Education and Skills MFL Learning Unit web site.

Marketing speak: Thinking in EFL classes…

This is what I, the book’s desk editor, and the publisher’s marketing department came up with, between us, for the back cover.

This book:

1. Starts by cutting a clear, workable path for EFL teachers through (the many) recent developments in the movement to teach thinking at all ages and in all school and college subjects.
2. Progresses to the fundamentals of building a positive class atmosphere for communicating well in English.
3. Offers over 30 well-thought out, realistic tips for teachers and over 85 practical, easy to use activities for use with language students. These tips and activities encourage flexibility, fun, creativity and rigour in teacher and student thinking. They involve minimal preparation and a wide range of interesting topics. Most of the activities are multi-level being adaptable to elementary up to advanced students. Many integrate the skills of listening, speaking, reading and/or writing.
4. Is extremely valuable in helping us teachers to stay interested in our work and in helping our students to cope with the demands of learning a language and living in a restless, changeable world/

About how long it takes to write a book

People often ask of a writer, ’How long did it take you to write your book?’ It’s a tricky question to answer because it just depends when you start the counting.

Do you start with the day you do something different in class and the students love it and start laughing and talking? Or with the thinking up of other ideas and trying them out? The doing of the background reading? The realising you are in an ‘’area’ of work which is building up quite a mass of paper in your study? Or with the conversations with friends that you have as you struggle to tell them, clearly, what you are up to at the moment, professionally. Or with the writing of proposals to publishers and the discussions to see if what they want and what you think you can give are the same? Or with the actual first day of sitting down and planning out chapters for the publisher who IS interested in what you think you can provide? Oh and then there is the writing or typing. Do you count the conferences you go to where you search in vain in the programme for something that looks like what you are into? Do you include the desk editing of hundreds of pages to make them lean and fit? And choosing colours for the cover and writing artwork briefs for the cartoonist? Yes, you have to include all that. But do you also count the exploratory self-published book on a similar subject brought out some years ago? Hmm. Should really.

So I guess the shortest possible time I could say, if you mean the actual sitting down and scribbling and then re-scribbling would be ‘18 months’ and the longest time would be, ‘About 9 years!’

What I can say though is ……’I enjoyed every last bit of it. I really like making things!’

And the review is..?

When Hania, the Editor of HLT Mag, kindly offered me the opportunity of writing this column, I asked her for an example of an auto review from the column. Thus I had the pleasure of reading Michael Swan’s auto review of his volume of poetry entitled ‘The Shape of Things’. At the end of his review, Michael says,

“….(This) ... hasn't addressed the crucial question for any reviewer – is the book any good? Well, I think it's terrific (…), but that doesn't mean much; most parents are convinced their children are beautiful. If you're still reading and sufficiently interested, get hold of a copy and let me know what you think.”

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Bibliography

Lindstromberg, S (2004) Language Activities for Teenagers Cambridge University Press

Mercer, N (2000) Words and Minds Routledge

Rowe, M.B. (1978) Teaching Science as Continuous Enquiry McGraw-Hill

Swan, M (2012) Auto review in HLT Mag Feb 12 pubs 03

Woodward, T (2011) Thinking in the EFL Class Helbling Languages

Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.