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  Observations on TEFL in China Today  
作者:FroG 点击数: 更新时间:2006-3-2

[…so thank you for coming] I want to make some observations about classes that I saw when I was observing down in […put this on] classes that I saw when I was Tianjin and Wenzhou , in October. And I want to speak about 3 areas that I think are a bit concerning, areas that I felt would be interesting for you to hear my  ideas on. And some of the points I’m going to mention this morning are also relevant for the classes – or aspects of classes - that we saw yesterday, so I hope that some of the things I will say to you will connect with what we observed yesterday, as well. Particularly the first class. If you can keep in your minds that some of my worries… my concerns are connected with the type of class that we saw in the first lesson, which was a lot of audio-lingual drilling and repetition. [Now the microphone is changing…can you hear me? Can everybody hear OK?]

Alright. The three areas that I want to look at this morning. The first is that I think there is sometimes an imbalanced teaching approach. And I want there to look at two aspects of that. One is a lack of skills integration and the other is something which I think is very central to the 4-in-1 Approach. The 4-in-1 is advocating, it is stating, that we should have focus on form, and in the lessons I saw there was a neglect of form, so we’ll look at that. The second main area that I want to speak about is the approach to the teaching of oral skills, the approach to teaching speaking, particularly, and listening. I’ll look at both there. And then the third and final section will be speaking about centredness. Often we speak about the centre of the classroom. Is it the teacher? Is it the students? I want to look at that and see [you know] what is at the centre of the Chinese EFL classroom? Again, I think something important for the 4-in-1 Approach.

So let’s have look first at the teaching approach. What do I mean imbalanced? Well, there was a lack of skills integration, a lack of skills integration, and I’ll come back to that in a moment. There was a dominance of oral skills, almost exclusive dominance, meaning there wasn’t anything else happening in most of the classes. And this means there was a great neglect of literacy skills.

What do I mean ‘literacy’? Well, I would include reading, writing, translation… you can see on the right-hand side. [I’m not sure if this is clear for you…it’s a little bit small from the back. I’m sorry it’s not a bigger screen.]  But here I’ve divided the skills into communication and literacy. And I would say that communication skills were dominant, they took the best part of the lessons I saw. In this table I like to think of two ways to categorise the skills. And you can see that running from left to right, we have the receptive skills and the productive skills. Receptive: listening, reading… very closely connected in how we can use those to the benefit of students. And again with the productive skills, speaking and writing, I don’t see that you can separate these skills and look only at the communication skills. So if you can keep in your mind that what I’m saying here is that these 5 skills are really like a web that run together and you can use reading to develop speaking, you can use listening to develop writing. There is no reason to say: “I am a communicative teacher. I am not going… I am not going to focus on literacy.”

Now in terms of writing, I’m going to concentrate more this morning on writing than on reading because I didn’t have so many worries – a little bit about the reading but mainly about the writing. So what did I observe? What did I see?

There were no writing or translation tasks or activities in any of the nine classes that I saw. None of the teachers at any time wrote anything on the whiteboard or a blackboard. Now this for me was amazing. I think I’ve said it before in a different place, but I am a writer… as a teacher, I cannot spend 5 minutes in a classroom without looking around to see are the students understanding me, do they know a word that I have used, and can they spell it? And often my students will ask me, although I am teaching, I was teaching adult learners and you know that adult learners know what they want. They are very decisive so they will tell you what they want. But using writing as a teacher to communicate, not only your voice, not only your speaking skills – use your writing to help them to spell, to look at sounds, and to develop their knowledge of what English looks like. It’s very important.

Connected with this was the fact that none of the learners wrote anything down. And I’ve written it specially here, they were not ‘required’ to write it down. Because young learners particularly, why will they write anything down? Why would they? They are there to just sit and to take what you give them. So if you want them to write in class, I think you have to ask them. “Here is the word. Please write it in your notebook now. Write it down now.” And give them time to do that.

Connected again (I like to connect the points), they didn’t seem, the children did not seem to have anything to write in or to write on. I wonder how many of you here today will make sure that your learners have notebooks, have exercise books. And I particularly would like to see notebooks for vocabulary and notebooks for grammar, and let them have those books on the desk, open at the start of the lesson. Not 20 minutes in, not 10 minutes into the lesson, right at the beginning.

Another aspect that worried me a bit is that only one teacher out of nine teachers… that means 8 out of 9 did not give any homework which involved writing. In fact they didn’t give homework… or I think two did, but not to extend or develop writing. That’s a big opportunity missed, I think.

Now this is a bit strange this slide.

OK. I want to speak now about the implications. I spoke about my observations. Now I want to speak about what…what does it imply? What does it mean for me as an observer and as a teacher…and as an expert? It means, first of all, that in the 4 Ps approach, which you have in your 4-in-1 Approach… traditionally, we have 3 Ps, starting at P2 on the slide: Presentation, Practice, Production. Professor Bao, he adds in a fourth P at the beginning, Preparation. And I want to look at the four and ask myself, ask you: what is happening in these lessons if there is no focus on literacy, there is no focus on homework, the children write nothing down in the classroom? Well for me, first of all, it means in Preparation, if we think of the teacher’s preparation and the learners’ preparation, which again is in the 4-in-1… that the teachers give students something to help them prepare for the next lesson… I saw nothing of that in these classes. It’s such a useful thing for you as teachers to get your learners tuned a little bit, like tuning a radio, get their minds ready for what you’re going to give them. And in terms of teacher preparation, yes, there was a lot of that… a lot of the teachers had worked hard. But on my slide I’ve put a tick and a question mark because I think if you’re missing… if you’re missing some of the later stages in your lesson, your preparation is not complete. There is some problem with the preparation.

Moving to the second of this, the Presentation stage was there. I wouldn’t argue with that. But when we look at Practice, the third part, I prefer to think of it as two different aspects: one, the very controlled practice which we saw in lesson one yesterday and then we have freer practice, which is like a middle step between controlled practice and Production… is something a little bit more free for the students to experiment. There was plenty of controlled practice, too much controlled practice, and there wasn’t any free practice that was connected with that controlled practice. Now, think about yesterday’s lesson where the children were using repetition a lot and particularly the little dialogues where they used ‘Here you are’- mmm…how did it go? ‘Here you are’/’Thank you’/’You’re welcome’… over and over and over, this was many times in the course of the first part of that lesson. Now, you’re giving the children something they can go and repeat, but can they work with that language? Do they know how to make a new… a new sentence from any of that language? I doubt it. Yes, they can parrot those phrases but freer practice – very important. And for me the most important stage that is missing here in the lessons is the fourth part – the Production. There was no production in class and there was no production for homework because there was no homework. Now we could speak about this for an hour and I need to move on. I’m going to try to run through some more implications (for me) about the writing.

There were no opportunities for learners to vary the skills… you know, to change the focus of what they were doing in the classes, because it was all oral in the practice phase. And yesterday I liked very much in lesson five where the teacher had the students listening to her, listening to the music, focusing on the text with the missing words, sp…giving her answers, speaking a little bit with her, and then at the end, writing. Lots of change. Lots to keep them interested in what she was doing. And you saw that at the end. Those children, or I should say young people, those young learners were engaged – do you know the word engaged? They were connected to her, because she gave them plenty of different, interesting things to do. OK.

A big worry for me, I’m going to speak more about this, is that there was no focus on form, connected with the production of writing. If there’s no writing, it’s difficult to focus on form, except implicitly, you can, but that needs to be supported. I would argue it needs to be supported. In the 4-in-1 Approach, form is very important, so we’ll look at that a bit more.

Another aspect, there was no focus on translation skills, and I know this is also very important. I think comparison between L1, the first language, Chinese, and the foreign language, English, is important… for the young learners to look at the similarities and the differences between their first language and their foreign language… it can be very helpful indeed.

And another concern is that the learners have nothing to take away, only maybe the textbook. But they have no possibility to review, to go over the lesson content through their own written records of the work that they have done in class. And I think that is… that’s a shame. I think it’s something that can be helpful to them, especially the motivated learners, the very…the very… I know there is a problem with interest in classrooms but, you know, I think sometimes we think the problem is the students’ problem and as teachers we need to look at: why are the students not so interested in what we’re doing, why do we lose them quite early in language learning? And I think one thing is to help them develop their strategies and one strategy for learning is that they have their own personal record of what they do, what they find difficult, what they enjoy, and let them keep that with them every day.

Some more implications, I think there were no opportunities, and I hate… I hate to think of learners having no opportunities. To do what? To be creative in writing with new and recycled language. They have no opportunities to discover what they know and can use in writing, and vice versa, what they don’t know. I have personal experience of this. I have to tell you, I have had many years of trying to learn Welsh. It’s my personal…we have a phrase from French: bête noire. It..the French phrase means ‘black animal’ translated. But a bête noire is something that you…you can’t beat, you cannot really deal with. I think Chinese is my new bête noire. But Welsh has been there. I just want to say in my experience of trying to... to  write Welsh, thinking that I know what I’m doing, it is in the writing that I find I have not got enough grammar, my spelling is not so good, my vocabulary…I need a word and I don’t have it, so I go to the dictionary. I don’t do this with spontaneous speaking in Welsh, there’s no time. But I do it when I’m writing. So I think let the young people understand what they know and what they don’t know. Knowledge again in the 4-in-1 method is a very important element and often we think we know but when we start writing we realize we don’t. I think writing does give time to reflect on what you know and to assess your learning better than any other skill that you practise with the children.

Another very important aspect for me is the use of errors... using errors in a positive way. I’ve seen an awful lot… yesterday too… of errors being ignored, errors being corrected by the teacher and then the students not going over that themselves. And there was one teacher yesterday who said a number of times: “You should say…” and then she said what the correct version was, the correct English, and then moved on. The student didn’t repeat it after her, the class didn’t repeat it after her. There was no confirmation, there was no certainty that the studentt who made the mistake understood the correct answer, understood why his answer was wrong. That is a big opportunity missed. Now, writing gives the teacher time and it gives the student time to correct and to look at corrections and to bring the corrections into the learning process.

And part of that is for learners to learn by re…rewriting, I call this redrafting. OK. I’m getting famous in my Chinese company with one colleague because I have so many drafts, and he said to me before I came away: “Maybe, Yvonne, when you go to Jinan , this time it will be draft 7 or draft 8, because so far the record is 6. But redrafting is important for young learners too because they can see their work improve…and they have one copy with many mistakes maybe and many corrections, then they rewrite it for you and they can see maybe no corrections, or maybe one or two. It’s a big motivation aspect for them.

Now, another implication…I don’t want to spend much time on this, but another important implication of not using writing is that you are not helping some types of learner and, according to Reid, we have these six basic… this is a very basic analysis of learning styles.

Visual learners, they like to learn by reading, by seeing language, so I think you’re not helping them if you don’t focus on reading and writing more in classes. Of course, the auditory learners, the ones who listen and learn, they are helped very much by a more oral approach. Kinaesthetic students also like doing things, so they like repeating, they like being involved in the little discussion groups, so they’re OK. Tactile learners, they like making, and making includes producing something in writing, so you’re not helping them. And again at the bottom of the list, the individual workers, the students who really like to sit quietly, work on their own. They need a little time to do that. If you have no class time, let them do it as homework, and to give them time to think about what they’re doing.

Now another aspect I promised you about the imbalance, the imbalanced approach, is the neglect of form and I want to mention some observations about the lack of the focus on form.

There was no explicit focus, no direct focus on grammar forms or functions in these lessons. There was no focus on sentence structure, nothing on spelling, nothing on phonetic representation of sounds. I want to think a little bit about: What is form?

[I don’t know if you can see that clearly}. For me, there are at least these four aspects of form which you should focus on. And I’ve put phonology but we’re speaking about the sound system, the sound system. We had a lesson yesterday on pronunciation so that teacher was focusing on phonology or on the sound sytem. I think spelling is really important too if the learners are going to write. You need to look at that. And, of course, the ones we always think about are on the right hand side, grammar, and maybe a little bit less, sentence structure. People always speak about form meaning grammar. No it’s not just grammar, sentence structure is really important. And if I come to you this morning and I use… back to front, if I put my words into the wrong order, you don’t understand me. If I put my clauses, my…my parts of sentences, into the wrong order, it’s difficult to follow. So think of grammar and sentence structure as connected but not the same. [I’m to flick through that. I’m going to go to this one]

I’ve just taken a simple example of a word…the word house to give you the form aspects. This is very basic and [I…I…] I hope this is just reminding you [of…of …] of what I’m speaking about. In terms of spelling and phonetics, we have a big difference here and we had an example yesterday, a teacher trying to get the children to use the word house and to pronounce the vowel sound properly. English has what we call a deep orthography. I have this on a slide in a moment. A deep orthography. And my impression is that Chinese is a shallow orthography but I’m not yet too sure. Deep? English is deep because we have a very complicated, very complex relationship between sound and the written, spelt form of the word, as we saw yesterday, a simple example, the letter s. Why does it have two sounds? It’s difficult for learners. Why does the ‘ed’ on the end of a word have 3 different sounds /ɪd/, /d/ and /t/? And we have to teach learners the difference at a certain level, maybe not at the beginning. OK. This means English has a deep orthography and I think you need to introduce your learners to the spelling and the sound system as early as you can. And in terms of grammar, I would want to look at the fact that house is the normal everyday word but we also have a verb form to house, to house. And this may not be for the primary learners but perhaps for the top junior or the senior learners It’s not only a noun, it’s also… it has a verb use as well. And to demonstrate that a couple of simple sentences, I live in a small house, which you could… just use that primary learners and get them to think about the noun and how the noun is used with adjectives before, to describe the house. And you could give a more… little bit more difficult example for the more advanced learners: The new flats house 200 people.  So are just different aspects of form. And I felt the teachers in Tianjin and the teachers in Wenzhou were missing all of these things because they didn’t really focus on form at all.

Phonological features, sound features… I’m not sure I’ve got time to go through this. Very quickly… I think we all think of phonology or sound as being just the phonetic representation, but we can also focus on the form of the spoken language, the sounds, by looking at syllable stress, word or syllable stress in multi-syllable, many syllabled… you know… more than two syllabled words. And I’ve got a simple example: photograph – with a first syllable stress, photographer – with second syllable stress….I’m sorry I didn’t have my phonetic… software here, so I’ve just put it with the spelling but you can see the shift of stress from first to second syllable. This is also to do with form, this is also form. It’s the sound and how the sounds are expressed. And the other thing that teachers very much ignore, I think,  is sentence stress, and the fact that I can have a sentence with the same grammar, same sentence structure, same vocabulary, exactly the same, but if I move the sentence stress I change the meaning completely. This is also connected with form. She lives in a house – if I stress the house, it means she doesn’t live in a flat or she doesn’t live somewhere else. She lives in a house, stressing not him, not myself, but this other person. So it’s quite important and we haven’t time.  Intonation. I have not heard, I’ve now seen 14 lessons in China . I have yet heard one teacher make reference to intonation. So important when you are trying to communicate orally. So with all the work I’ve seen on oral English, where is the intonation? And yesterday, we had some of the students shouting answers in the first class. When you shout, your intonation becomes artificial. If I come and shout into the microphone to you this morning, I think you will be confused, because my word stress, my sentence stress, my intonation is going away. And this is one good reason why you should not encourage your students to shout. What’s going to happen when they visit Britain for the first time, or America, somewhere, and they come off the plane and they say: ‘Where is the arrival lounge?’ and people will just put their hands over their ears and they won’t maybe get a clear message from this. OK. Intonation has a grammatical function. Don’t forget that. When we fall at the end, we have affirmation, we have a statement. When we rise at the end, even with the same sentence structure… let’s look at this one: She lives in a house↓, the voice falling. She lives in a house↓. She lives in a house↑. Question. Now children are very quick to listen and learn. They have enormous powers to mimic, to copy these patterns of intonation. I know as teachers it’s difficult, we all run away from phonology. But believe me, even native speaker teachers run away from teaching pronunciation. Can you believe that? In my department in the university in Wales , we were about 10 teachers. There was only one teacher who immediately volunteered to teach pronunciation to all the classes. Why? Because she’s young and inexperienced. Does that make sense? She’s young and inexperienced. She’s young so she thinks she can do anything because when we’re young, we do. And she’s inexperienced. She has not had the bad experiences, the difficult classes teaching pronunciation. But it doesn’t mean we should not try, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to do it. OK. Now… [My time is running away with me, as usual].

Now I want to mention an example of an opportunity to develop what I call knowledge about language, knowledge about language. There was a lesson in…. I can’t remember… Wenzhou or Tianjin , and the lesson was called ‘A chair is made of wood.’ And the presentation with the teacher at the beginning was: ‘Look at my sweater. What’s it made of?’ What’s it made of?

And she drilled the children, drilled, repetition with: ‘The window is made of glass/ My sweater is made of wool/ The table is made of wood.’ Now, through the class, there was much repetition of this language so that the children at the end were able to say: ‘It is made of….’ or ‘Something is made of… something.’ OK. They were able to do that. But I think there was a big opportunity, two missed opportunities, because all the class was focused on oral repetition, nothing on form.

I think there was an opportunity to speak and develop knowledge about countable and uncountable use of nouns, asking the learners, for example, ‘What is the difference between the correct and incorrect forms: The windows are made of glass or The windows are made of glasses? That’s not correct. Why? Why is it not? What is the logic? Because we also in English have a plural for glasses. We can say The glasses are empty/ The glasses are broken.  What is happening here? Now I haven’t time to develop the idea but if any of you want to email me and…you know… ask me: ‘Where were you going with this?’/ ‘ What would you do?’ , then please email. I’ll put my email address up the end. I think you can learners to discuss and to develop their understanding of these quite difficult ideas in English…countable and uncoun.…. not… can I please stress to you we do not in English have many nouns that are uncountable. There are some but there are not many. Most of the nouns that we think are uncountable can be used in either a countable or an uncountable way, so we should think of the use of these nouns. [Thank you very much. I will just keep going to the end. Thank you.] OK. So I think you need to give your learners opportunities to discuss and perhaps write down some examples of these…these differences and let them explore what they know about it. Have they ever heard anybody going into a place… or maybe watching a video and somebody says ‘I’ll have two coffees’ and yet all the books will tell them that coffee is uncountable. But we do this. I will go maybe to a café, or I would go maybe to a restaurant and say: ‘Can I have two coffees?’ So these are differences in the way that we use nouns and there’s a reason. We need to explore and explain for learners.

Now the second missed opportunity, and I really feel this strongly, is that this was a lesson about materials. I didn’t tell you that… I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you...that the…the aim of the lesson was for the teacher to teach the children how to say ‘Something is made of a material’, she wanted them to learn material words, words like glass, plastic, wood, wool. This was a vocabulary focus. But she’s using a passive verb form…because we do. ‘It is made of…’ She didn’t focus on that at all. And I think you could – this is just one idea – you could ask the learners, ‘OK, what’s the difference between make and made? What is the difference?’ And they, hopefully, will say ‘Made is past tense, it’s the past tense of make’. And then you can say to them, ‘Well, is this a past tense? [Is…] if I say to you, My sweater is made of wool, is that past?’ And hopefully they will say, ‘No, no, because it is, it is made.’ OK, so what is happening here? It gives you a chance to focus on the structure, the form of the passive voice, and to let them see actually made is not the past tense in this little sentence, it’s the past participle that you’re using. Now because make, make is one of those verbs where the second and third part are the same, you don’t have… this is not demonstrated. It’s not shown to them. You need to give some more examples and so you can give them a simple example: Rice is eaten, and they can see there, eat/ ate/ eaten, you’re using the third part of the verb. And you can also focus on the function of the verb to be and how that works in all passive verb forms. It’s the verb to be, the part of the verb to be, which carries the tense. And this is a big opportunity missed. So you could give them some examples: This table was made in  Mongolia /This book was written by a Chinese man.  Lots of examples. Let them practise the third part of the verb and to see that it’s the verb to be that is changing in the passive. Because actually it’s not so difficult once you realize that. And the other thing I find with students is they really don’t get the...the form-function difference between active and passive. And I’m not sure because I don’t understand enough Chinese, I’m not sure how you use the passive in Chinese, but certainly in other languages there are many different variations of how the passive is formed. And it’s very interesting to look at those differences so let them look at the difference between English and Chinese and see if you can see some differences and similarities there. Now again, I could speak to you probably for 2 or 3 hours about this kind of thing but we need to move and I want to focus on what communicative competence means. OK.

This is just…taken from an old source…a linguist called Hymes. We think of communicative language teaching… “speak, speak, speak, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap….” No. I think the form needs to be there and Hymes in communicative competence, the definition, it includes knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, including phonological rules. He was a very strict teacher. And I haven’t spoken to you at all this morning about the phonological rules and sound changes, like assimilation, catenation, lots of things, too complicated for young learners anyway, really, I think, some of them… but assimilation maybe...well, we haven’t so much time. He says you need all these things, so why are we not focusing on form? And then he says you need the rules of speaking. Now again I feel that this is missing in the classes I observed. The discussion, I’m going to speak in a moment about the discussion phase, and I’ll come back to this, because speaking is not just talking:Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap…” and the other person is just going “Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap…”. This is not communication. And Hymes also says you need to know how to use and respond to different types of speech acts. And we saw an example of that yesterday: ‘I’d like something”/ “Here you are” …you know... so the “Here you are” is responding to a request: “I’d like…’ - ‘I’d like a coke”/ “Here you are”. This type of thing. And there was a little bit of that happening. OK. We’re moving into pragmatics there really. So that’s Hymes.

Now I want to move to the second main aspect of my observations, connected to the first part, but it’s a little bit different because here I want to look at the specific focus on speaking. What were the teachers doing for speaking and listening. And I’ve broken it into two… difficult to separate speaking and listening, but the first observation on the speaking was there was too much time spent on controlled speaking practice. Much too much time. There was no effective free practice or production phase that I could see. There was too much emphasis on speed and no time given to exploring or explaining errors. I have…I have mentioned that already. Now I will stop for a second and speak about speed. What is this emphasis which we saw again yesterday? Wh…why is there such an emphasis on speed? There were a few teachers yesterday who said to their students: ‘Quickly, quickly’/’I’ll give you…I’ll give you one minute.’ And the part that I really found… quite interesting – I don’t know if I’ve got my notebook – anyway, I’ll try and do it from memory. There was part of the lesson where the children were given 20 seconds – do you remember? They had 20 seconds to say as many ‘I like’s as possible: ‘I like coke/ I like tea/ I like this/ I like that’, and the teacher counted and then noted. The first child made I think about nine, was it eight or nine sentences? And then there was a faster one, which was something like nineteen or seventeen, but most of them were not complete. Most of them were…were ‘mm’, ‘ah’, or something indistinct, not clear. And yet this child was given more praise. It was ‘Oh, very good, very good. You’re the winner’, I think was something said. Now we need to be careful as teachers that we don’t lose sight of what it is we want the children to achieve. And later I want to speak about learning centredness, learning, again one of Profgessor Bao’s central…central columns of the Four-in-One. Learning centredness. What are the children learning? What are they learning when they are speak… speed speaking? I’d call it speed speaking. Lalalalalalalala… There was no communication. The child was not even completing the utterance, the sentence. I don’t know what’s happening there. But please try not to lose sight of the fact that we’re, as teachers, we’re trying to get the students to learn and not just to become little performers..of what? Nothing meaningful. And you know that one of the central things in Communicative Language Teaching, which I would support very much, and which is relevant to every context – to Europe, to China, to everywhere – one of the central, the central pillars of Communicative Language Teaching is meaningfulness. It’s a focus on meaning and being relevant to the learners. So, I think, check yourselves in your classes. Am I giving them meaningful language input? Am I expecting them to give me meaningful output? And if you can honestly say to yourself, ‘Yes’, then you’re doing a good job. You’re..you’re…you’re certainly moving towards that. If you can say, ‘No, this is not really meaningful’, then, I think, put it away. Do something else. The other aspect which I have spoken about earlier is if you are going at speed, you are ignoring errors, and you should use the errors, exploit – my word, exploit – use the errors to your advantage. And you see because they are the learners’ errors, they are generated, produced by the learners, they are meaningful. OK? Come back to that idea of meaningful. If the learner says something really ridiculous, something it’s maybe really stupid in some way, as long as you can help the student to see why it’s not good English, how to change it, how maybe not to make the same mistake again, this is learning. This is learning. Moving like an express train through the stages of your lesson is not teaching and it’s not giving the learners enough opportunity to learn, I think.

Another one of my problems is loud responses. Why does it need…? …and I’ve spoken already about the problems of intonation when you are speaking loudly. But also in the real world, I think in some cultures we speak more loudly than in others, and in the British culture, loud speaking is not part of the culture. Maybe more in Aybe it’s coming from the US … I think it’s better to get them to be more normal in the level and certainly not the shouting, the level of shouting we saw in the first class yesterday. I think that’s not helpful. OK. [I need to put up…] 

I’ve got a small example of an error that wasn’t picked up in a meaningful way. And this was in a different lesson, not the ‘Made of…’ lesson. This was in a lesson which… the aim of the lesson was to teach the children how to communicate about occupations, this was what the teacher wrote in the programme, to be able to speak about occupations. No, ‘careers’, actually, which was not a good word, but she meant occupations.  And she presented models and the learners repeated, much as we saw yesterday. And it started with actions, which was good…y’ know… ‘Drive, drive, drive the bus’/ ‘Drive, drive, drive the taxi’, and the children were making… ‘Ride the motorbike’, this sort of thing. And then it moved into a kind of chant, ‘Driver, driver, he is a driver. He likes… blue cars.’ And then she had the children substituting the colours. So we had ‘red’ and ‘green’ and so on.

And there were also other verbs like ‘farm’…’farmer’. ‘He is a farmer, farmer, he is a farmer. He likes …’ … I can’t remember.  OK. Now the children in this drill…there was one little boy who said (these were primary children), he said, ‘Driver, driver, he is a driver. He likes green driver.’ And the teacher corrected and […whew!]...moved, quick oral correction… and gone. There was no focus on why, which would have been a good chance to look at form. Again, perhaps, we’re back at form.

The exploitation of that - they could have been asked, ‘Why is green not…?’…She could have said to him, ‘Well not green. Green driver? Why? What is the problem there?’ And if he doesn’t know, maybe some other child can suggest and say, ‘Well, people are not colour. We don’t usually say, “He is an orange man” or ”She is a red woman” ’. So you could just explore a little bit when we use colour and when we don’t use colour, and maybe to think of more suitable adjectives. That’s the first thing. And then the other one is actually the grammar…if we...if we look back at the grammar of the sentence: ‘He likes green driver.’ OK, the child has moved away from ‘He likes green cars’, from a plural generalization to a singular. Again, the teacher could have picked up on that and could have asked [you know], ‘Why do we use plurals?’ ‘If you use a singular, do you need to use an article?’ ‘Do you use…need to say, He likes a green car?’  And what’s the difference between saying, ’He likes a green car’ and ‘He likes green cars’? Well, there is a difference because one is a generalization. And if I say to you, ‘Oh I like…I like a red car’, then maybe you’re going to say to me: ‘Which one?  Where did you see it?’ because it sounds like it’s a specific, a specific car. So these are things could have been explored a little bit. I’m not saying, I don’t want to suggest you suddenly turn the whole lesson into a grammar focus lesson. But to miss opportunities…I think there the vocabulary problem is the more important. It’s the one I would have focused on and said [you know], ‘Can I say, “You’re a yellow boy?”? And why?’ I think it showed the child did not really understand what he was saying. He didn’t understand the language, so is it meaningful for him? No! What does the teacher do? Make it meaningful? No, not really. She moved…gone. OK. I think more written examples can help confusion like that as well. [I’ll go on.]

Now in this lesson, there was also problem of matching aims and content, and I want to just focus, very quickly, on the fact that in the same lesson we had the teacher saying, ‘I’m going to teach them how to speak about occupations, that’s my aim’ and yet we had the imperative of the verb at the beginning, ‘Drive, drive, drive the bus’, we had the ‘driver’ - those are fine to work together. We had, then, ‘like’ with an object: ‘He likes green cars’. And later in the lesson, we had ‘like’ with an ‘-ing’ form: ‘I like driving’, ‘I like swimming.’ Actually, it was third person, and I think the teacher could have used some first person reference there. ‘What do you like?’ ‘I like…’. Now, I just would question with... with primary learners, is it…is it helpful to have all of the verb… different verb forms working in a lesson which is vocabulary… maybe vocabulary based. well that was her aim… not suggesting it would be my aim.

Now, moving on to discussion. When do we use discussion? And how do we use it? I observed that the discussion elements in these lessons were not productive, They were not…not meaningful, really. Why? The teachers didn’t clarify the topic of discussion or the focus of discussion. ‘Discuss, discuss.’ Often the children were looking around, they were looking at each other, looking behind… ‘What am I supposed to be discussing?’ This is a big problem if you don’t clarify, to make clear the focus. And the teachers’ instructions… I mentioned yesterday in my comments, the importance of instructions. How many of us as teachers have had problems sometimes with a class that does not understand us. It will happen. It will happen sometimes. But you need to be careful with the language that you’re using, which may be why…may be the reason why yesterday we saw some excessive, I think - a bit little too much sometimes - switching to Chinese. But there was an occasion where a class was told more than once to ‘discuss’ when the teacher didn’t mean discuss, the teacher meant practise. And yesterday we saw in the class with ‘Here you are’/’Thank you’/’You’re welcome’, I noticed that the teacher did say to the children, ‘Now practice the dialogue’. Practice the dialogue. If..if she says to them ‘Discuss, discuss it’, if they understand the meaning of discuss, to share ideas about something, they are confused. I would be confused. So be careful [you know] with your language of instruction. This is just one example. And the other problem is that you need to give quality support, you need high levels of support for young learners with a low level. Even the older and more advanced learners will need good support for discussion. They need vocabulary, they need to… you need to check that they have the necessary grammar structures to use. And…I think monitoring also…I’ll come to in a moment…. to check that they are OK and that they have enough support. Don’t expect learners to do something that you...you’re giving them something more difficult than...than their level of language. And you know sometimes we forget because the...the intellectual level [you know], the mental level of their approach is very high, they’re very intelligent, they’re very able, but we sometimes forget that their language level… I’ve done it myself with adult learners, I would say. I’ve given them topics for discussion… so you know I’m talking to you from experience, I’m talking to you from, partly from my bad teaching, yeah?... you know I’m coming as a… I have been in my….long teaching career, my 20 years, on occasions, a bad teacher. Not intentionally, but coming away from a lesson and knowing that the learners were frustrated, the learners were not able to express their ideas because they just didn’t have enough preparation from me before they started. Now you’re in a different…slightly different situation because your learners all speak the same language, so if they get stuck they can go back to Chinese. Again, are they learning English? No, not really, so you need to…If you want them to discuss in English, give them enough support to do that. With my learners I was in a more...in a way a more dangerous situation because I had many different nationalities and you would find that is…if they can’t communicate, it’s frustrating and the lesson …{snort!}…just comes to a sticky end, really. OK. So give them enough support.

Time again. Don’t rush them in discussion. You can’t discuss something…there was one teacher who said: ‘I will give you two minutes to discuss. Go!’ You know this is very difficult. It gives no time for thinking, no time to…to explore. And actually the sad thing was her learners were just getting going, getting involved in the discussion, when, ‘Right, OK. Stop!’ and they all…you know. I wouldn’t do that, because of experience. If you have discussion phase, a discussion stage in your lesson which is going well, let it go, for a little bit longer, because it means if they are really speaking English with each other and they seem to be enjoying… { there is a break in the recording; reconstruction follows in square brackets}

[…the interaction, then this is meaningful and beneficial for learning and motivation. Another observation was that learners were not well prepared.] They were unsure what to say and how to say it. It’s the same point again. And I think monitoring in the classes in Wenzhou and Tianjin some of the teachers stayed at the front of the class and the students were supposed to be discussing. What’s the point of that? OK. Monitor. What do I mean monitor? Listen, help…. maybe you don’t want to correct every mistake at that stage but you can make a note, you can have a little notebook, maybe write down the most important problems. But if it’s a miscommunication, if the speaker is not understood by the other learners, yes, you need to step in and help or maybe correct then. But don’t leave your learners. Again, I speak from a learner’s perspective on this. I was learning Welsh for a year in a class where my teacher did this: ‘Discuss’ - and then she went and sat in a corner. What did I learn? I learnt that my partner had bad Welsh like me. …do you understand? I learnt that my speaking partner like me also had bad Welsh.... her language skills or his language skills, they changed, were also bad like mine. But did I learn? I don’t think I learnt very much about speaking skills in those classes. And I would call her over and say, ‘How do you say this?’ and she would sort of be a little bit…oh, you’re disturbing my time, I’m having a rest. So I think, don’t be like that.

I think the other big problem which I… again in yesterday’s lessons there wasn’t much discussion, but there was one class where they were practising and coming back and practising, consolidation and feedback is a bit different. After discussion, I think you need to have some focus on what was discussed. Let the class have some group focus about the discussion, not simply group work and then …[whew] - moving on to the next stage. Because it’s more meaningful if they can share…maybe one person from each group to report to the class. OK. What was the…your discussion about? What was the main point? Or what were the main ideas in your group? And I know you have big classes many of you but you can perhaps make a note of the groups and in one class get some of the groups to report back and in the next class, then it could be different groups, so you share the focus of responsibility for that. OK.

Listening observations not too many. [I’m going to speed up now. I’m going to go very quickly.] I think there was too much input from the teacher and the potential for using native speaker materials could be used more. And yesterday we saw it used more, it was in the lessons here. It was used a lot more. But, as I think Professor Bao noted, the quality of some of the recordings [were…] wasn’t very good and that is not so helpful. And I think that there’s another problem. The taped materials that are being used are sometimes not used in a challenging way. The learners would benefit more from a combination of easy listening tasks and more difficult. Now yesterday we saw another example actually with the lesson I liked very much, the last one and I remember I noted in my notebook that the listening – and also my colleague, Gai Liwa, the Director of our centre in Beijing, she whispered to me ‘It’s long’, the recording was long of ‘Imagine.’ Now that may be, that the recording was too long, but with that length you could have had more vocabulary extension because there were a limited number of words. I think the students could have coped with more words missing out of that text, so it’s an example perhaps of the teacher having good material, good plan, everything working very well, but maybe there weren’t enough words missing. The other thing may be to go through the words at the beginning in the list and make sure they understand them is one good technique but it also makes it easier for them because they know the words that are missing. It depends on the level. I think those students could have coped with not seeing the words before she played the recording with the gaps and tried to fill them. Try and fill and then maybe give them the support if they’re finding it difficult. But I think to vary…yes, we want to give them things that are easy and they can do but also to challenge because the brighter students, the brighter students, the better students will be bored with those activities and you need to cater for both, I think. Try to stretch them.

The other thing is… and again …this is…I prepared this before yesterday, so this is interesting because this is another point... it connects with the ‘Imagine’, the listening, lesson five yesterday.  Very structured listening… and you see the gap fill with eight words missing, very easy. OK. Do that but also have some tasks that are not so limiting and not so structured. So with a listening I would also do something structured and something… maybe for global listening so they would have to listen for some ideas as well as listening just for odd words. But it was a vocabulary class, so that was yesterday’s…worked well.

What are the implications for speaking and listening? Quality. I want to come to the central, another central pillar of 4-in-1, the quality and the consistency of the teaching approach, I think must be…must be improved. Currently, there is a hotchpotch, now this is a good word, hotchpotch. What does it mean? A bit from here, a bit from there, but things that don’t fit. It’s different to eclectic. An eclectic approach, yes… you can take the best and match the things together. A hotchpotch means things are not matching, they’re not connecting. Some of the things from audio-lingualism, this modeling, drilling, over and over and over, and some of the things from CLT, the discussion is coming from CLT. And those things are not connecting well and they don’t serve either approach, they serve neither approach well. They don’t…I think they don’t give credit to..to the good things that are in those approaches.

And this brings me to really one of my main… I think maybe the main point of this morning – the quality of the teaching aims and the preparation of the materials and activities and tasks to achieve the aims. That’s very important. You can have aims and you can have excellent materials, excellent activities. Do they connect? I think sometimes as teachers we d… we start with the aims and then we forget them. By the time we’ve developed our materials for the class, or we’re looking at the textbook too much maybe, we forget what the real aim of the lesson is. So I think if there’s one idea that you take away from this morning it is to marry, you know marry, to put together the aims and the content and the materials that you’re using, and also the tasks to exploit your good materials. And the other implication is similar to the writing comment that I made, learners are not having opportunities, they’re not being given, opportunities for creative language use with the speaking, because they are not having a freer…except the discussion phase, which is badly managed, they’re not having an opportunity for free expression. [Now, I’m going to whizz through…I’m sorry, I am running over…I had permission from a certain gentleman but I’m sure you’re all cold and tired by now.]

The last aspect of my presentation this morning is the centredness of the classrooms. Observations: largely teacher centred, still, in spite of all the drilling – the language input, the models, the control of everything is coming very strongly from  the teachers. But another important aspect is that personality and popularity of the teacher seems to be quite central and that came across in a…maybe only one, I think, of the classes I saw yesterday. But maybe a little bit also at the end, although it was a joke, you know – ‘Am I beautiful?’ This...this kind of thing. For me, as a teacher, it is not relevant whether your students think you are beautiful or they think you are maybe… friendly, yes, but the friendship element that I saw in these classes, ‘I am your friend?’/ ‘Do you want to be my friend?’/ ‘Oh, you’re great, you got it correct. You are my friend.’ [You know.] I don’t understand what this is about. [You know.] I think we want to be friendly, we want to approachable, we want to be able to connect emotionally with our students and be sensitive to them, but we are not there, we are not being paid to be the friends, like the little boy next or the little girl next to the student. No, the teacher has a different role. And I think another observation yesterday was that in the first class the teacher with the [sort of] emphasis on almost a theatrical kind of approach and performance, the pronunciation of English changes quite a lot: ‘This is for you_oo/ This is for you_oo’…and it… everything is changing from the approach of being more of a personality, not just the teacher there. Yes, we want to be enthusiastic and we want to be encouraging but try to make that a different relationship to this ‘buddy-buddy’… And I do have a big problem with the idea that if a student makes a mistake the student is not the teacher’s friend. That… that…that can’t work. That…that should not enter into our classroom. All the students are learners - and I’ll come to this point in a moment - mistakes are part of learning. We must not make students feel that they are…you know… they are…they are worse or they are less than another person because they make a mistake. So that’s the teacher centred.

It was also performance centred. And I’ve mentioned this a little bit with the speed speaking was a kind of performance. And I think this is supposed to be student centred. I think the teachers think this is making their class student centred. For me, it’s not. It’s shifting the emphasis to performance. And what do I mean ‘performance’? Well, it’s this parroting of language. I used the word yesterday…to parrot is to imitate like a parrot. And I think it’s not only ‘imitate’, it means to imitate without understanding. So, when a parrot, the bird, the beautiful bird, says: ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’ or says ‘It’s cold today’, does the parrot really understand what humans mean by those…those..those sentences. Possibly. But probably not. So, that’s why ‘parrot’ is a particular word. It means repeating but not [not] necessarily understanding. There was also in terms of performance, the idea of rewards and we saw a little bit of that yesterday. Personally, I don’t…I don’t like…I don’t like material…you know…material rewards. In the UK , we have a system of stars. Students get…the young ones in the primary schools will get silver or gold or red little [stick…] stickers in their book if they do a good piece of writing. I’m not going to say I like or…I’m not sure about that. But what I don’t like is: ‘Here is a candy’ or ‘Here is a postcard’, ‘Here is a …something for you because you’re correct’. And the other child who gets… who makes a mistake, the child who gets it wrong, ‘No, the reward is not going to you. You don’t get the reward. You’re not good enough.’ Don’t…I don’t like that at all. Because those children who get the sweets, get the cards, get the presents will always get them [you know]. They’re the succeeders. They’re going to be the ones in every language class, they will do better than the weaker learners. So what are you doing? You’re reinforcing ‘I am better’ for the good students and ‘I am rubbish’ [you know], ‘I am no good’ for the ones who can’t get everything  right. And that’s not helping you. That could be part of the reason why some classes…some teachers in one of the conferences told me, ‘You know our biggest problem is the students are not interested in learning.’ I can’t believe that. Because I have a lot of experience with Chinese learners in the UK and a lot of experience now with living here for five months. Chinese people are interested in lots of different things. There is not….you cannot say that Chinese children are not interested in learning languages. They’re clever, they are alive, they have a lot of enthusiasm. I saw them running out of here yesterday, some of them, and they’re talking and they’re so full of energy. Now, if we as teachers can’t connect, you know we have a thing ‘to plug in’. If we cannot ‘plug in’ our English classes to their enthusiasm for life, for learning, for new things, then I think we need to look at us, and not maybe just say there is no interest in it. But the reward system will not help you there, I think, in the long-term. It may be a quick fix in that class but it’s not a long-term strategy for success.  

And connected with this, peer praise, peer praise: ‘Isn’t he great?’, ‘Oh, he’s great!’,  ‘Give him clap’. The same point [the same point]…the same students every class will get the applause, usually, and… just be careful, I think, with too much praise for the good students and not enough encouragement, not enough real encouragement for those weaker ones. And something comes to mind about a teacher yesterday who said repeatedly: ‘Sit down, think it over.’ There was a little bit of…not enough encouragement maybe for…for the students in that response. I just felt that that response….Also maybe ‘Think it over’ is not such a good thing in a language class because it has a slightly different meaning, it’s like a problem in your life, you ‘think it over’. I think she really meant ‘Think again’, ‘You need to think again …you need to reflect on that.’ OK.

Implications of the centredness of the classroom [I think]. Where is the focus on learning, this central part of the 4-in-1? Where has the learning gone, if it’s performance centred, teacher centred, reward centred, personality centred. Where is the learning? Where is the focus on errors and correction as natural features? I promised I’d come back to that. And I want to focus for a second on something which is in the theory, the learning theory. You know when a learner of any language is learning, we can speak about learner interlanguage and errors are part of the natural process. [OK.] What is interlanguage?

Well, interlanguage is, according to Corder, who was the man who did this definition, it’s the ‘…series of interlocking systems which form the learner’s built-in syllabus, language syllabus’. And in that sense we can…we can say that IL, interlanguage, is a continuum. I did this line…so it’s a continuous process…it’s used to mean the continuous process of the language development of the learner. And on the line I’ve got native language is NL, so Chinese at one end starting. The learner starts right at the beginning of the language learning, only the native language is used, and moving through different stages of the interlanguage to the target language, which is TL. ‘ Foss IL ’ on the diagram is when we get stuck at a certain stage, so that maybe the development never will reach the target language. And in fact it’s very difficult to reach the native language proficiency.

So it’s used for the continuum and it’s also used to mean any stage of the development: ‘Interlanguage is the structured system which a learner constructs at any stage.’ So if we go back to the… [sorry…the d..d..should go back]… we go back to this one (slide 28),  IL(1) is one stage, IL(2) is another stage. This is just a theoretical diagram really, to represent…But it means you take your learners at any point in their learning, their interlanguage could be analysed and it’s the language which is developing. Yes, the native language has a role and the target language, they’re moving… towards that. OK.

Why do I mention this? Well, I want to quickly go through. There are three processes which are involved – three of five, but two of them are not relevant this morning. The first process that’s important in interlanguage development is language transfer – it’s the transfer of the Chinese into the English learning. You know that. And the second, over-generalisation of the target language, of English rules, as they develop. And the third point is that rules will enter into the learner’s interlanguage as a result of instruction. This is the theoretical view. Now I’m mentioning it…this is from Selinker…One and two... the important thing with one and two is that both language transfer and over-generalisation are natural parts of language learning. They will…those will happen with all your learners - and at different stages of their interlanguage development. The important point is the word ‘naturally’: these are natural processes of learning and they will naturally lead to errors. Some of them are logical - the over-generalisation is logical, rational. The interference from the first language is maybe partly conscious, partly subconscious… works in a complicated way. But neither of those things should be regarded as bad. Incorrect production? Yes, you will get incorrect production. What I don’t want you to think about is incorrect is bad. Incorrect is part of a process and you need...you mustn’t -I hate to say ‘mustn’t’ but I really believe this strongly - you mustn’t let your learners think they are bad students. I have heard this from a lot of learners in my time: ‘I’m a bad student.’ No, maybe you’re not as fast as somebody else at changing your interlanguage, maybe you develop at a different stage, but it’s important to know learning is a process with natural error…errors as part of that process. And the third point there which connects with the form focus that we had earlier is, I think,  the idea that rules will come into the interlanguage and help that…that development.

I think the centredness, and I am coming to the end [I promise now], the centredness… learners are not being given time to think about what they know and what they don’t know, what language they can use and cannot, how to improve their knowledge and use of English.

And for me, these things are central to learning, so that, overall, I would say this excessive focus on rewards is giving the learners a false impression. As I say, if we go back to the previous slide (slide 31), they need to know what they know and what they don’t. They need to know what they can use and can’t, and then how to change the things that they have problems with. Those are central to their development of the interlanguage, so don’t have excessive focus on rewards and correction. It does make them confused, I think. And the other aspect is that the learners are not being given the form focus and support… in the lessons that I observed in Tianjin and Wenzhou , and maybe the first one yesterday. And a lot of error correction in other lessons yesterday as well …that form could be used a bit more there. So, overall, my impression was that learning was not central in the lessons I saw in October. And relating it again to 4-in-1, learning should be central, the process should be central. Interlanguage development, errors, those things are important, form is important, the quality of your approach is important.

So, in conclusion [ha, finally, you… I hear you say] to promote holistic development, that means developing all skills, developing all the knowledge, developing the sub-skills of your learners and to develop this… I know in the 4-in-1 Professor Bao uses the word ‘faculty’ at the top of one of the pyramids is this ‘language faculty’…I’ve put it in a plural here… to develop their language faculties should re-evaluate and improve the quality of their approach in terms of: aims, methods, materials, activities; the integration, bringing together the skills so that you try – as much as you can – in every lesson to have a little bit of five different things going on: speaking, listening, reading, writing, translation. And I didn’t emphasise but I would have the writing…I would have the translation connected more with writing, where in the classes we saw yesterday, the translation was all oral. There wasn’t any focus on ‘OK, now write it down. You know..give…here is the Chinese, give me the English. Write it down.’ I didn’t see that at all. You need the sub-skills integration, sub-skills I think of…vocabulary, grammar, emphasis on some of those elements of phonology, the elements of pronunciation. And also classroom management…the quality of classroom management could be better without the rewards, without the ‘I am your friend’, ‘Oh, you’re so great.’ I think…that style, for me, doesn’t work very well.

And, finally, my little diagram about four…in a way, my four-in-one, which connects with [I hope with] what you understand as 4-in-1, is that if we can have the teaching approach quality oriented… maybe, you need another circle outside, with quality all around that, learning centred and form focused, then this will lead to, this will allow you to develop EFL faculties in a holistic and, I hope, effective way. And the skills and sub-skills will be included in that development, and also, at the bottom on the right I’ve put KAL, knowledge about language [knowledge about language] and KLL, knowledge about language learning, which I know is important, and my colleague, Gai Liwa, she has worked... done research on learning strategies [you know]: learners learning how they can learn better. So I would include the use of the notebook, the use of the vocabulary and grammar notebooks…. learning about how to keep a record of their work and what to do with it; learning to redraft their essays; learning to use correction and use their errors. This…this is learning about learning, really. It’s a big area…I haven’t got time. But those are my four…  four things, bringing together: quality, learning centredness, form focus, and then we can hope to holistically develop our students. I’d be very happy if you want to email me for the …I think we’re going to send you the Powerpoint slides and if you have any comments, any queries, anything you’d like to discuss through email with me, then please make a note of my email, and this will be with the presentation slides that you’re going to receive, I think, as well. So thank you very, very much for your attention this morning. You’ve been a great, great audience. Thank you.

merica , maybe it’s coming from the US … I think it’s better to get them to be more normal in the level and certainly not the shouting, the level of shouting we saw in the first class yesterday. I think that’s not helpful. OK. [I need to put up…] 

I’ve got a small example of an error that wasn’t picked up in a meaningful way. And this was in a different lesson, not the ‘Made of…’ lesson. This was in a lesson which… the aim of the lesson was to teach the children how to communicate about occupations, this was what the teacher wrote in the programme, to be able to speak about occupations. No, ‘careers’, actually, which was not a good word, but she meant occupations.  And she presented models and the learners repeated, much as we saw yesterday. And it started with actions, which was good…y’ know… ‘Drive, drive, drive the bus’/ ‘Drive, drive, drive the taxi’, and the children were making… ‘Ride the motorbike’, this sort of thing. And then it moved into a kind of chant, ‘Driver, driver, he is a driver. He likes… blue cars.’ And then she had the children substituting the colours. So we had ‘red’ and ‘green’ and so on.

And there were also other verbs like ‘farm’…’farmer’. ‘He is a farmer, farmer, he is a farmer. He likes …’ … I can’t remember.  OK. Now the children in this drill…there was one little boy who said (these were primary children), he said, ‘Driver, driver, he is a driver. He likes green driver.’ And the teacher corrected and […whew!]...moved, quick oral correction… and gone. There was no focus on why, which would have been a good chance to look at form. Again, perhaps, we’re back at form.

The exploitation of that - they could have been asked, ‘Why is green not…?’…She could have said to him, ‘Well not green. Green driver? Why? What is the problem there?’ And if he doesn’t know, maybe some other child can suggest and say, ‘Well, people are not colour. We don’t usually say, “He is an orange man” or ”She is a red woman” ’. So you could just explore a little bit when we use colour and when we don’t use colour, and maybe to think of more suitable adjectives. That’s the first thing. And then the other one is actually the grammar…if we...if we look back at the grammar of the sentence: ‘He likes green driver.’ OK, the child has moved away from ‘He likes green cars’, from a plural generalization to a singular. Again, the teacher could have picked up on that and could have asked [you know], ‘Why do we use plurals?’ ‘If you use a singular, do you need to use an article?’ ‘Do you use…need to say, He likes a green car?’  And what’s the difference between saying, ’He likes a green car’ and ‘He likes green cars’? Well, there is a difference because one is a generalization. And if I say to you, ‘Oh I like…I like a red car’, then maybe you’re going to say to me: ‘Which one?  Where did you see it?’ because it sounds like it’s a specific, a specific car. So these are things could have been explored a little bit. I’m not saying, I don’t want to suggest you suddenly turn the whole lesson into a grammar focus lesson. But to miss opportunities…I think there the vocabulary problem is the more important. It’s the one I would have focused on and said [you know], ‘Can I say, “You’re a yellow boy?”? And why?’ I think it showed the child did not really understand what he was saying. He didn’t understand the language, so is it meaningful for him? No! What does the teacher do? Make it meaningful? No, not really. She moved…gone. OK. I think more written examples can help confusion like that as well. [I’ll go on.]

Now in this lesson, there was also problem of matching aims and content, and I want to just focus, very quickly, on the fact that in the same lesson we had the teacher saying, ‘I’m going to teach them how to speak about occupations, that’s my aim’ and yet we had the imperative of the verb at the beginning, ‘Drive, drive, drive the bus’, we had the ‘driver’ - those are fine to work together. We had, then, ‘like’ with an object: ‘He likes green cars’. And later in the lesson, we had ‘like’ with an ‘-ing’ form: ‘I like driving’, ‘I like swimming.’ Actually, it was third person, and I think the teacher could have used some first person reference there. ‘What do you like?’ ‘I like…’. Now, I just would question with... with primary learners, is it…is it helpful to have all of the verb… different verb forms working in a lesson which is vocabulary… maybe vocabulary based. well that was her aim… not suggesting it would be my aim.

Now, moving on to discussion. When do we use discussion? And how do we use it? I observed that the discussion elements in these lessons were not productive, They were not…not meaningful, really. Why? The teachers didn’t clarify the topic of discussion or the focus of discussion. ‘Discuss, discuss.’ Often the children were looking around, they were looking at each other, looking behind… ‘What am I supposed to be discussing?’ This is a big problem if you don’t clarify, to make clear the focus. And the teachers’ instructions… I mentioned yesterday in my comments, the importance of instructions. How many of us as teachers have had problems sometimes with a class that does not understand us. It will happen. It will happen sometimes. But you need to be careful with the language that you’re using, which may be why…may be the reason why yesterday we saw some excessive, I think - a bit little too much sometimes - switching to Chinese. But there was an occasion where a class was told more than once to ‘discuss’ when the teacher didn’t mean discuss, the teacher meant practise. And yesterday we saw in the class with ‘Here you are’/’Thank you’/’You’re welcome’, I noticed that the teacher did say to the children, ‘Now practice the dialogue’. Practice the dialogue. If..if she says to them ‘Discuss, discuss it’, if they understand the meaning of discuss, to share ideas about something, they are confused. I would be confused. So be careful [you know] with your language of instruction. This is just one example. And the other problem is that you need to give quality support, you need high levels of support for young learners with a low level. Even the older and more advanced learners will need good support for discussion. They need vocabulary, they need to… you need to check that they have the necessary grammar structures to use. And…I think monitoring also…I’ll come to in a moment…. to check that they are OK and that they have enough support. Don’t expect learners to do something that you...you’re giving them something more difficult than...than their level of language. And you know sometimes we forget because the...the intellectual level [you know], the mental level of their approach is very high, they’re very intelligent, they’re very able, but we sometimes forget that their language level… I’ve done it myself with adult learners, I would say. I’ve given them topics for discussion… so you know I’m talking to you from experience, I’m talking to you from, partly from my bad teaching, yeah?... you know I’m coming as a… I have been in my….long teaching career, my 20 years, on occasions, a bad teacher. Not intentionally, but coming away from a lesson and knowing that the learners were frustrated, the learners were not able to express their ideas because they just didn’t have enough preparation from me before they started. Now you’re in a different…slightly different situation because your learners all speak the same language, so if they get stuck they can go back to Chinese. Again, are they learning English? No, not really, so you need to…If you want them to discuss in English, give them enough support to do that. With my learners I was in a more...in a way a more dangerous situation because I had many different nationalities and you would find that is…if they can’t communicate, it’s frustrating and the lesson …{snort!}…just comes to a sticky end, really. OK. So give them enough support.

Time again. Don’t rush them in discussion. You can’t discuss something…there was one teacher who said: ‘I will give you two minutes to discuss. Go!’ You know this is very difficult. It gives no time for thinking, no time to…to explore. And actually the sad thing was her learners were just getting going, getting involved in the discussion, when, ‘Right, OK. Stop!’ and they all…you know. I wouldn’t do that, because of experience. If you have discussion phase, a discussion stage in your lesson which is going well, let it go, for a little bit longer, because it means if they are really speaking English with each other and they seem to be enjoying… { there is a break in the recording; reconstruction follows in square brackets}

[…the interaction, then this is meaningful and beneficial for learning and motivation. Another observation was that learners were not well prepared.] They were unsure what to say and how to say it. It’s the same point again. And I think monitoring in the classes in Wenzhou and Tianjin some of the teachers stayed at the front of the class and the students were supposed to be discussing. What’s the point of that? OK. Monitor. What do I mean monitor? Listen, help…. maybe you don’t want to correct every mistake at that stage but you can make a note, you can have a little notebook, maybe write down the most important problems. But if it’s a miscommunication, if the speaker is not understood by the other learners, yes, you need to step in and help or maybe correct then. But don’t leave your learners. Again, I speak from a learner’s perspective on this. I was learning Welsh for a year in a class where my teacher did this: ‘Discuss’ - and then she went and sat in a corner. What did I learn? I learnt that my partner had bad Welsh like me. …do you understand? I learnt that my speaking partner like me also had bad Welsh.... her language skills or his language skills, they changed, were also bad like mine. But did I learn? I don’t think I learnt very much about speaking skills in those classes. And I would call her over and say, ‘How do you say this?’ and she would sort of be a little bit…oh, you’re disturbing my time, I’m having a rest. So I think, don’t be like that.

I think the other big problem which I… again in yesterday’s lessons there wasn’t much discussion, but there was one class where they were practising and coming back and practising, consolidation and feedback is a bit different. After discussion, I think you need to have some focus on what was discussed. Let the class have some group focus about the discussion, not simply group work and then …[whew] - moving on to the next stage. Because it’s more meaningful if they can share…maybe one person from each group to report to the class. OK. What was the…your discussion about? What was the main point? Or what were the main ideas in your group? And I know you have big classes many of you but you can perhaps make a note of the groups and in one class get some of the groups to report back and in the next class, then it could be different groups, so you share the focus of responsibility for that. OK.

Listening observations not too many. [I’m going to speed up now. I’m going to go very quickly.] I think there was too much input from the teacher and the potential for using native speaker materials could be used more. And yesterday we saw it used more, it was in the lessons here. It was used a lot more. But, as I think Professor Bao noted, the quality of some of the recordings [were…] wasn’t very good and that is not so helpful. And I think that there’s another problem. The taped materials that are being used are sometimes not used in a challenging way. The learners would benefit more from a combination of easy listening tasks and more difficult. Now yesterday we saw another example actually with the lesson I liked very much, the last one and I remember I noted in my notebook that the listening – and also my colleague, Gai Liwa, the Director of our centre in Beijing, she whispered to me ‘It’s long’, the recording was long of ‘Imagine.’ Now that may be, that the recording was too long, but with that length you could have had more vocabulary extension because there were a limited number of words. I think the students could have coped with more words missing out of that text, so it’s an example perhaps of the teacher having good material, good plan, everything working very well, but maybe there weren’t enough words missing. The other thing may be to go through the words at the beginning in the list and make sure they understand them is one good technique but it also makes it easier for them because they know the words that are missing. It depends on the level. I think those students could have coped with not seeing the words before she played the recording with the gaps and tried to fill them. Try and fill and then maybe give them the support if they’re finding it difficult. But I think to vary…yes, we want to give them things that are easy and they can do but also to challenge because the brighter students, the brighter students, the better students will be bored with those activities and you need to cater for both, I think. Try to stretch them.

The other thing is… and again …this is…I prepared this before yesterday, so this is interesting because this is another point... it connects with the ‘Imagine’, the listening, lesson five yesterday.  Very structured listening… and you see the gap fill with eight words missing, very easy. OK. Do that but also have some tasks that are not so limiting and not so structured. So with a listening I would also do something structured and something… maybe for global listening so they would have to listen for some ideas as well as listening just for odd words. But it was a vocabulary class, so that was yesterday’s…worked well.

What are the implications for speaking and listening? Quality. I want to come to the central, another central pillar of 4-in-1, the quality and the consistency of the teaching approach, I think must be…must be improved. Currently, there is a hotchpotch, now this is a good word, hotchpotch. What does it mean? A bit from here, a bit from there, but things that don’t fit. It’s different to eclectic. An eclectic approach, yes… you can take the best and match the things together. A hotchpotch means things are not matching, they’re not connecting. Some of the things from audio-lingualism, this modeling, drilling, over and over and over, and some of the things from CLT, the discussion is coming from CLT. And those things are not connecting well and they don’t serve either approach, they serve neither approach well. They don’t…I think they don’t give credit to..to the good things that are in those approaches.

And this brings me to really one of my main… I think maybe the main point of this morning – the quality of the teaching aims and the preparation of the materials and activities and tasks to achieve the aims. That’s very important. You can have aims and you can have excellent materials, excellent activities. Do they connect? I think sometimes as teachers we d… we start with the aims and then we forget them. By the time we’ve developed our materials for the class, or we’re looking at the textbook too much maybe, we forget what the real aim of the lesson is. So I think if there’s one idea that you take away from this morning it is to marry, you know marry, to put together the aims and the content and the materials that you’re using, and also the tasks to exploit your good materials. And the other implication is similar to the writing comment that I made, learners are not having opportunities, they’re not being given, opportunities for creative language use with the speaking, because they are not having a freer…except the discussion phase, which is badly managed, they’re not having an opportunity for free expression. [Now, I’m going to whizz through…I’m sorry, I am running over…I had permission from a certain gentleman but I’m sure you’re all cold and tired by now.]

The last aspect of my presentation this morning is the centredness of the classrooms. Observations: largely teacher centred, still, in spite of all the drilling – the language input, the models, the control of everything is coming very strongly from  the teachers. But another important aspect is that personality and popularity of the teacher seems to be quite central and that came across in a…maybe only one, I think, of the classes I saw yesterday. But maybe a little bit also at the end, although it was a joke, you know – ‘Am I beautiful?’ This...this kind of thing. For me, as a teacher, it is not relevant whether your students think you are beautiful or they think you are maybe… friendly, yes, but the friendship element that I saw in these classes, ‘I am your friend?’/ ‘Do you want to be my friend?’/ ‘Oh, you’re great, you got it correct. You are my friend.’ [You know.] I don’t understand what this is about. [You know.] I think we want to be friendly, we want to approachable, we want to be able to connect emotionally with our students and be sensitive to them, but we are not there, we are not being paid to be the friends, like the little boy next or the little girl next to the student. No, the teacher has a different role. And I think another observation yesterday was that in the first class the teacher with the [sort of] emphasis on almost a theatrical kind of approach and performance, the pronunciation of English changes quite a lot: ‘This is for you_oo/ This is for you_oo’…and it… everything is changing from the approach of being more of a personality, not just the teacher there. Yes, we want to be enthusiastic and we want to be encouraging but try to make that a different relationship to this ‘buddy-buddy’… And I do have a big problem with the idea that if a student makes a mistake the student is not the teacher’s friend. That… that…that can’t work. That…that should not enter into our classroom. All the students are learners - and I’ll come to this point in a moment - mistakes are part of learning. We must not make students feel that they are…you know… they are…they are worse or they are less than another person because they make a mistake. So that’s the teacher centred.

It was also performance centred. And I’ve mentioned this a little bit with the speed speaking was a kind of performance. And I think this is supposed to be student centred. I think the teachers think this is making their class student centred. For me, it’s not. It’s shifting the emphasis to performance. And what do I mean ‘performance’? Well, it’s this parroting of language. I used the word yesterday…to parrot is to imitate like a parrot. And I think it’s not only ‘imitate’, it means to imitate without understanding. So, when a parrot, the bird, the beautiful bird, says: ‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’ or says ‘It’s cold today’, does the parrot really understand what humans mean by those…those..those sentences. Possibly. But probably not. So, that’s why ‘parrot’ is a particular word. It means repeating but not [not] necessarily understanding. There was also in terms of performance, the idea of rewards and we saw a little bit of that yesterday. Personally, I don’t…I don’t like…I don’t like material…you know…material rewards. In the UK , we have a system of stars. Students get…the young ones in the primary schools will get silver or gold or red little [stick…] stickers in their book if they do a good piece of writing. I’m not going to say I like or…I’m not sure about that. But what I don’t like is: ‘Here is a candy’ or ‘Here is a postcard’, ‘Here is a …something for you because you’re correct’. And the other child who gets… who makes a mistake, the child who gets it wrong, ‘No, the reward is not going to you. You don’t get the reward. You’re not good enough.’ Don’t…I don’t like that at all. Because those children who get the sweets, get the cards, get the presents will always get them [you know]. They’re the succeeders. They’re going to be the ones in every language class, they will do better than the weaker learners. So what are you doing? You’re reinforcing ‘I am better’ for the good students and ‘I am rubbish’ [you know], ‘I am no good’ for the ones who can’t get everything  right. And that’s not helping you. That could be part of the reason why some classes…some teachers in one of the conferences told me, ‘You know our biggest problem is the students are not interested in learning.’ I can’t believe that. Because I have a lot of experience with Chinese learners in the UK and a lot of experience now with living here for five months. Chinese people are interested in lots of different things. There is not….you cannot say that Chinese children are not interested in learning languages. They’re clever, they are alive, they have a lot of enthusiasm. I saw them running out of here yesterday, some of them, and they’re talking and they’re so full of energy. Now, if we as teachers can’t connect, you know we have a thing ‘to plug in’. If we cannot ‘plug in’ our English classes to their enthusiasm for life, for learning, for new things, then I think we need to look at us, and not maybe just say there is no interest in it. But the reward system will not help you there, I think, in the long-term. It may be a quick fix in that class but it’s not a long-term strategy for success.  

And connected with this, peer praise, peer praise: ‘Isn’t he great?’, ‘Oh, he’s great!’,  ‘Give him clap’. The same point [the same point]…the same students every class will get the applause, usually, and… just be careful, I think, with too much praise for the good students and not enough encouragement, not enough real encouragement for those weaker ones. And something comes to mind about a teacher yesterday who said repeatedly: ‘Sit down, think it over.’ There was a little bit of…not enough encouragement maybe for…for the students in that response. I just felt that that response….Also maybe ‘Think it over’ is not such a good thing in a language class because it has a slightly different meaning, it’s like a problem in your life, you ‘think it over’. I think she really meant ‘Think again’, ‘You need to think again …you need to reflect on that.’ OK.

Implications of the centredness of the classroom [I think]. Where is the focus on learning, this central part of the 4-in-1? Where has the learning gone, if it’s performance centred, teacher centred, reward centred, personality centred. Where is the learning? Where is the focus on errors and correction as natural features? I promised I’d come back to that. And I want to focus for a second on something which is in the theory, the learning theory. You know when a learner of any language is learning, we can speak about learner interlanguage and errors are part of the natural process. [OK.] What is interlanguage?

Well, interlanguage is, according to Corder, who was the man who did this definition, it’s the ‘…series of interlocking systems which form the learner’s built-in syllabus, language syllabus’. And in that sense we can…we can say that IL, interlanguage, is a continuum. I did this line…so it’s a continuous process…it’s used to mean the continuous process of the language development of the learner. And on the line I’ve got native language is NL, so Chinese at one end starting. The learner starts right at the beginning of the language learning, only the native language is used, and moving through different stages of the interlanguage to the target language, which is TL. ‘ Foss IL ’ on the diagram is when we get stuck at a certain stage, so that maybe the development never will reach the target language. And in fact it’s very difficult to reach the native language proficiency.

So it’s used for the continuum and it’s also used to mean any stage of the development: ‘Interlanguage is the structured system which a learner constructs at any stage.’ So if we go back to the… [sorry…the d..d..should go back]… we go back to this one (slide 28),  IL(1) is one stage, IL(2) is another stage. This is just a theoretical diagram really, to represent…But it means you take your learners at any point in their learning, their interlanguage could be analysed and it’s the language which is developing. Yes, the native language has a role and the target language, they’re moving… towards that. OK.

Why do I mention this? Well, I want to quickly go through. There are three processes which are involved – three of five, but two of them are not relevant this morning. The first process that’s important in interlanguage development is language transfer – it’s the transfer of the Chinese into the English learning. You know that. And the second, over-generalisation of the target language, of English rules, as they develop. And the third point is that rules will enter into the learner’s interlanguage as a result of instruction. This is the theoretical view. Now I’m mentioning it…this is from Selinker…One and two... the important thing with one and two is that both language transfer and over-generalisation are natural parts of language learning. They will…those will happen with all your learners - and at different stages of their interlanguage development. The important point is the word ‘naturally’: these are natural processes of learning and they will naturally lead to errors. Some of them are logical - the over-generalisation is logical, rational. The interference from the first language is maybe partly conscious, partly subconscious… works in a complicated way. But neither of those things should be regarded as bad. Incorrect production? Yes, you will get incorrect production. What I don’t want you to think about is incorrect is bad. Incorrect is part of a process and you need...you mustn’t -I hate to say ‘mustn’t’ but I really believe this strongly - you mustn’t let your learners think they are bad students. I have heard this from a lot of learners in my time: ‘I’m a bad student.’ No, maybe you’re not as fast as somebody else at changing your interlanguage, maybe you develop at a different stage, but it’s important to know learning is a process with natural error…errors as part of that process. And the third point there which connects with the form focus that we had earlier is, I think,  the idea that rules will come into the interlanguage and help that…that development.

I think the centredness, and I am coming to the end [I promise now], the centredness… learners are not being given time to think about what they know and what they don’t know, what language they can use and cannot, how to improve their knowledge and use of English.

And for me, these things are central to learning, so that, overall, I would say this excessive focus on rewards is giving the learners a false impression. As I say, if we go back to the previous slide (slide 31), they need to know what they know and what they don’t. They need to know what they can use and can’t, and then how to change the things that they have problems with. Those are central to their development of the interlanguage, so don’t have excessive focus on rewards and correction. It does make them confused, I think. And the other aspect is that the learners are not being given the form focus and support… in the lessons that I observed in Tianjin and Wenzhou , and maybe the first one yesterday. And a lot of error correction in other lessons yesterday as well …that form could be used a bit more there. So, overall, my impression was that learning was not central in the lessons I saw in October. And relating it again to 4-in-1, learning should be central, the process should be central. Interlanguage development, errors, those things are important, form is important, the quality of your approach is important.

So, in conclusion [ha, finally, you… I hear you say] to promote holistic development, that means developing all skills, developing all the knowledge, developing the sub-skills of your learners and to develop this… I know in the 4-in-1 Professor Bao uses the word ‘faculty’ at the top of one of the pyramids is this ‘language faculty’…I’ve put it in a plural here… to develop their language faculties should re-evaluate and improve the quality of their approach in terms of: aims, methods, materials, activities; the integration, bringing together the skills so that you try – as much as you can – in every lesson to have a little bit of five different things going on: speaking, listening, reading, writing, translation. And I didn’t emphasise but I would have the writing…I would have the translation connected more with writing, where in the classes we saw yesterday, the translation was all oral. There wasn’t any focus on ‘OK, now write it down. You know..give…here is the Chinese, give me the English. Write it down.’ I didn’t see that at all. You need the sub-skills integration, sub-skills I think of…vocabulary, grammar, emphasis on some of those elements of phonology, the elements of pronunciation. And also classroom management…the quality of classroom management could be better without the rewards, without the ‘I am your friend’, ‘Oh, you’re so great.’ I think…that style, for me, doesn’t work very well.

And, finally, my little diagram about four…in a way, my four-in-one, which connects with [I hope with] what you understand as 4-in-1, is that if we can have the teaching approach quality oriented… maybe, you need another circle outside, with quality all around that, learning centred and form focused, then this will lead to, this will allow you to develop EFL faculties in a holistic and, I hope, effective way. And the skills and sub-skills will be included in that development, and also, at the bottom on the right I’ve put KAL, knowledge about language [knowledge about language] and KLL, knowledge about language learning, which I know is important, and my colleague, Gai Liwa, she has worked... done research on learning strategies [you know]: learners learning how they can learn better. So I would include the use of the notebook, the use of the vocabulary and grammar notebooks…. learning about how to keep a record of their work and what to do with it; learning to redraft their essays; learning to use correction and use their errors. This…this is learning about learning, really. It’s a big area…I haven’t got time. But those are my four…  four things, bringing together: quality, learning centredness, form focus, and then we can hope to holistically develop our students. I’d be very happy if you want to email me for the …I think we’re going to send you the Powerpoint slides and if you have any comments, any queries, anything you’d like to discuss through email with me, then please make a note of my email, and this will be with the presentation slides that you’re going to receive, I think, as well. So thank you very, very much for your attention this morning. You’ve been a great, great audience. Thank you.

 
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