Resumen de Colaboraciones y Artículos

Correcting oral errors
by Paul Seligson

Most teachers agree we should respond positively to errors because they’re evidence of learning taking place. But most language teachers probably correct their students too much and in a limited number of ways. Here’s what the experts say: Correction has little effect on language acquisition. (Krashen), or The provision of negative feedback does not appear to lead to accurate performance, at least not immediately. (Ellis) Personally, the more I teach, the more varied my correction techniques but at the same time, the less I force students to repeat corrected forms. Hence the checklists of techniques and priorities below, intended to help you respond in a more varied, personal way.

Language learners want to speak correctly as fast as possible. However, we’re often too insistent on everything being correct and thus, ironically, slowing language learning down. By not moving on to something new until the latest items have been fully assimilated/produced, we prevent students from communicating as much as they could if we more readily allowed things like, I’m not agree, Menorca is a island beautiful or I had much luck, all of which are perfectly understandable. I’d like to see ELT give much greater priority to fluency and teachers stop correcting so much, or at least stop correcting individual errors so often with the whole class as and when they come up. It’s generally better to deal only with major whole class errors in this way or intervene immediately only when students are incomprehensible.

I regularly get students to talk in the past as soon as they know a few verbs, well before our books/syllabuses suggest we allow them to. They can ask and answer (with or without do), e.g. (Do) You see the match yesterday? Yes, it’s very good. Where (do) you go at the weekend? I stay here all weekend all totally comprehensible. Yet we force then to wait until the second semester or Year 2, only talking about the past after they’ve had the 3rd person S ground into them. If your learners forget the 3rd person S, so what? My son still does and he’s nearly 5 years old, but I’ve never corrected him. He’ll get there when he needs to. It’s one of the last things native speakers acquire but one of the first we insist on as teachers which is inappropriate as it rarely affects meaning or blocks comprehension. Remember, by definition, the communicative approach should prioritise successful communication over ‘failed’ grammar.

We also need to re-consider the models of English both we and our students aspire to. None of them will ever be native speakers, so we should be much more upfront about this, stop advocating the native speaker as the ‘perfect model’ and define a more relevant, realistic goal they can both understand and aim for. In future, native speaker English may well be seen as a quaint archaic dialect! Obviously not yet, but is it so far away? Just look at the emergence of Spanglish in the USA and its impact on American English.

As a former school owner, I preferred good non-native speaker teachers to inexperienced native speakers, as they were better professionals and a much more appropriate, realistic and achievable model for students to aspire to. So, perhaps a well-defined SpanEnglish aiming for ‘optimum global intelligibility’ would be a more appropriate model?

I’m sure the future will bring ever less teaching of native-like idiomatic English, at least for productive use. Over 80% of the English spoken today doesn’t involve a native speaker as an interlocutor. The emergence of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has enormous implications for the way we teach, but doesn’t yet seem to have changed the way many teachers think about mistakes, nor how they correct them. EFL teachers cannot ignore this.

ELF is by definition a ‘pidgin’ language, i.e. a third language used as a bridge between people who don’t share a common first language. Pidgins tend to simplify and regularise both lexis and grammar (see e.g. the songs of Bob Marley or the improvements Americans are making to British English spelling and grammar). The English we teach will become more pidgin-like to recognise the most common language forms used by non-native ELF-users, including a lot of forms now considered to be errors. The problem is that we don’t yet know enough about emerging Global English to be able to describe or syllabus it, so the status quo continues. Not for long however, e.g. the University of Vienna’s voice corpus is beginning to produce valuable ELF data which will shape syllabuses of the future.

A useful suggestion for mono-lingual classes as most usually are still in Spain is for you to record two students from an Intermediate class performing an activity from your Elementary coursebook, e.g. a roleplay. Then play this recording as a listening model for the lower group for them to then try to do the same thing. It’s very motivating and sometimes the elementary group produce something as good or better than the students a year ahead of them! By showing students that the most realistic model to which they can aspire is to be a higher level Spanish speaker ...

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Simon Andrewes is a freelance teacher working in Granada. He has 25 years tefl experience, 15 of them in Spain. He was President of GRETA for 3 years and is now the GRETA Conference Coordinator. He has had articles in English Teaching Professional, IATEFL Issues, TESOL-Spain Newsletter, GRETA revista para profesores de ingles, and on the BBC Teaching English website.

Cross-Curricular Activities in ESO

by Simon Andrewes

Which subject do you prefer, Geography or Maths?
If you prefer Mathematics, answer the quiz in Appendix A. If you prefer Geography, try the one in Appendix B.
Now you have got a slight “taste” of a cross-curricular activity in the English classroom. The Maths Test, for your information, was set by a group of 13 year old ESO students . The activity arose out of a feature in “It’s Magazine” related to World Mathematical Year (WMY2000) and European Science and Technology Week (November 2000). On the whole, adult teachers of English have a lot more difficulty with it than your average well maths-trained 13-year-old. So if you want to check your answers, ask an ESO student!
The America Quiz was set by a class of 14/15 year olds. The information had been taken from their Ciencias Sociales textbook. (Although I helped while the students were preparing these quizzes, I didn’t want to interfere more than necessarily in their formulations of the questions. So I didn’t insist on “the names of four NBA teams” rather than “four names of NBA teams” even though I had explained the former was the usual English structure. I also rather like the idea of a river being born eternally – “where is the Missouri River born”; it’s much more poetic than the matter-of-fact English “source of the Nile” formula.) If you are not sure of some of the answers, you had better look them up in the Ciencias Sociales text book.

What is the value of cross-curricular activities in general?
a) They break down the compartmentalisation of knowledge, that syndrome where the student learns to wipe the mental slate clean of all previous knowledge in order to concentrate on the next particular intake of information.
b) They often engage students’ interest highly, especially if, for example, the students have had a voice in choosing the topic of the activity.
c) They involve the students in the use of English to communicate something of themselves, something which they consider meaningful. They are oriented towards content rather than towards form.
d) They may allow students to contribute something and participate actively even though they are not particularly good at English as a school subject.
e) They reinforce and/or revise knowledge about the real world learnt in other subjects.

What is the value of this kind of cross-curricular activity in particular?
a) They should be appropriate for the age of the students as they are taken from the course books of other school subjects that they are doing at the moment.
b) They promote learner independence as well as peer co-operation. The students have to learn to work as a group and take control over their own joint learning process.
c) The activities allow for the fact that our students have a perfectly efficient means of communication in their mother tongue and aim at bridging the gap between it and the foreign language, developing competence in both languages.
d) The use of L1 sources has the advantage that students have to work with the language and cannot simply “copy and paste” from the internet, a CD-Rom, or other reference material.
e) Students get the chance to activate language that they have learnt, but at the same time they are likely to be stretched and encouraged to go a little beyond what they already know.

Suggested procedure for tackling cross-curricular activities.
1. Students form groups according to the subject they are going to research and teach. Groups will probably be formed according to the interest the student has in the subject chosen.
2. The group consults the text book for the subject they have chosen.
3. The group decides what they are going to teach in English. They must specifically decide how they are going to organise the teaching strategically (who does what) and linguistically (what vocabulary and structure they need for the task).
4. As well as preparing the teaching, they must also prepare a test on the main items that they are going to

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Articles...

Abbie Carpenter has been teaching for 4 and a half years, and working predominantly with younger learners for the past 2 and a half. She has taught in Japan, Poland, Portugal and Spain, and is currently in Milan teaching 4-year-olds and business English.

Magic Paper

by Abbie Carpenter

‘Magic paper’ is something I discovered working in Portugal – it wasn’t my idea, but I’ve used it a lot, and now find it an indispensable resource in the classroom. A big thank you to whoever invented it. It’s wipe-clean paper which you can use over and over again, and use in lots of different ways with classes of all ages and sizes.

How to make it
Take some card - A4 size is good. Cover both sides of it in transparent sticky-backed plastic, off a roll or with a laminating machine. Find enough board pens (the kind you can buy for white boards in the 60 centimos shops) so that there’s one for each piece of paper. Equip yourself with tissues or loo roll and hand it out so the kids can clean the plastic paper as they need to. That’s it!

What can you do with it?
I would suggest pairing the students for the following activities, or organising them into small groups. Then they can help each other get to the right answer, and it’s more fun. You'll probably need to tell them explicitly to take it in turns to do the writing or drawing, or the stronger or bossier student won’t let go of the pen.

Vocabulary checking
These exercises are good for revising vocabulary quickly. Once you’ve introduced a set of words, you can check that students know the meanings of the words, and how to spell them easily. The slower the students are to produce answers, the less well they know the vocabulary – it’s a useful way for the teacher to see how much more work she needs to do with the words. I also sometimes do these activities before a test using the words that are going to be tested. This focuses the students on what they’re doing to be tested on and gives them a chance to practise the words.
• You draw a picture or give a short description of a word; the students have to write the word and hold up their paper for you to check.
• You say a word; the students draw a picture to illustrate what you’ve said. Again you look and check.
• Instant anagrams, without making a worksheet – hand out the magic paper, write an anagram on the board and students race to work out what the word is and spell it.
• If you have a set of words that are all connected, you can do a more extended picture dictation. ‘In my bedroom there’s a big bed. Next to the bed there’s a small table,’ and so on. I’d suggest that you draw simultaneously on your own piece of magic paper, so you can show students what they’re meant to be doing if necessary.
• Simple dictation of words and phrases works well on magic paper because kids can change what they’ve written easily. You can guide the students to the correct spelling and forms, by indicating that they’ve made a mistake and letting them try to correct it themselves. They work on getting it right question by question, rather than getting bogged down in a difficult exercise which the teacher corrects altogether at the end.
• This is a memory game that you can use either to expose the students to a set of words or again to check students can spell the words. Put pictures of the words you’re studying on the board and let students look at them for a minute. Turn them back to front, and then nominate the cards in turn. Students write down what they think is on the card and show you - points for whoever remembers and spells correctly. Alternatively number the cards, say one of the words in the vocabulary set and students write down the number of the word – good for young children who are not such strong writers or spellers.
• Pictionary: The students are grouped. One member of each team comes to the teacher and is told or shown a word. At a signal they start drawing - they are not allowed to speak. The first team to guess what their teammate is drawing wins the round.

Working with grammatical forms
I like doing grammatical exercises with magic paper. Students write their answers, hold them up and you can correct them on the spot, encourage students to spot and correct each other’s mistakes and get a good idea of the mistakes they are making or problems they are having. You can respond to errors as soon as they are made and offer explanations immediately so students can relate them to their mistakes.
• Write a sentence or question on the board with a word missing; students write down the missing word. This is good for practising auxiliary verbs, pronouns and past tense verbs.
• Write prompts on the board Yesterday/I/go/cinema; students form and write the sentence.

It continues in page 25 from the magazine

Teachers at work in Córdoba...

Juana Frías Luna. C.E.I.P. Alvaro Cecilia Moreno de Fernán Núñez y Mª Concepción Santamaría Diago del C.E.I.P. Genil de La Montiela, maestras de inglés de Primaria.

Dear penfriend,
by Juana Frías Luna

Todos estaremos de acuerdo en que el inglés resulta una asignatura muy atractiva para nuestro alumnado, hasta que llega el momento en que tienen que abrir los cuadernos para escribir. El aspecto oral de la lengua (Listening y speaking) trae consigo actividades muy gratificantes y por tanto muy solicitadas, pero siempre escuchamos un ¡oooh! perezoso cuando pedimos a los alumnos que produzcan algo escrito.

Dos maestras de inglés de los Centros “C.P.I.P. Genil” de la Montiela y “C.P.I.P. Álvaro Cecilia Moreno” de Fernán-Núñez; buscando una forma de trabajar la comunicación escrita nos planteamos la posibilidad de que los niños y las niñas de estos colegios se escribieran entre sí cartas sencillas y breves. En ellas lo fundamental era que el mensaje resultase comprensible. Esta actividad se inició para complementar el curriculum y motivarles a la hora de escribir en inglés, pero el resultado desbordó nuestras expectativas iniciales.

Puesto que el tercer ciclo suponía el momento ideal para sentar los fundamentos de la comunicación escrita, propusimos a las criaturas de 5º del “C.P.I.P. Genil “ de la Montiela que escribieran cartas a los compañeros y compañeras del mismo nivel del “C.P.I.P. Alvaro Cecilia Moreno” de Fernán-Núñez. No manifestaron al principio mucho entusiasmo, pues les asustaba un poco el tener que expresarse en el idioma extranjero.

Las cartas las escribieron utilizando al máximo el léxico y las formas lingüísticas trabajadas en clase. Siempre empleando elementos de coordinación elemental. Las frases eran claras y sencillas. En la primera carta se presentaban, presentaban a su familia, hablaban de su clase; también expresaban sus gustos en cuanto a deportes, comida, colores y animales. Agradecidos y ansiosos de responder a lo que sus compañeros les preguntaban, una vez intercambiadas las primeras noticias, se dispusieron a contestar. En la segunda carta hablaron de sus habilidades, aficiones, horarios, asignaturas, su bici y se pidieron una foto. Una vez recopiladas todas las cartas, la maestra las enviaba al otro Centro participante de la actividad.

Con la primera carta llegó un regalo (marcador de lectura elaborado por ellos). Esto dio lugar a que cada carta, a partir de entonces, fuese acompañada de una sorpresa (dibujo, juego didáctico, foto,...) siempre fruto de su trabajo personal.

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