Relative pronouns: one aspect that textbooks often don’t cover

(Not that I have noticed, anyway.)

Most coursebooks will contain, in some form, the following information about relative pronouns:

So far, so good . . . until a student brings up a case like the following:

The year 1840 was the final year of convict transportation to Sydney, which by this time had a population of 35,000. (formatting added)

Wikipedia

Sydney is a “place”, so–the student will reason–the pronoun in the relative clause highlighted above should be where, right? Wrong . . . but before we examine why, let’s first have a look at a sentence which uses the relative pronoun where appropriately.

So the greatest sporting event on the planet did not take itself too seriously: that was never going to be the way in Sydney, where men dance with lawnmowers and a merry cynicism is bred in the bone. (formatting added)

Where Am I And Who’s Winning?

It all depends upon how we conceptualise “Sydney.” In the second example, we’re thinking of Sydney as the location of an action: an action takes place there (namely, men dancing with lawnmowers and a merry cynicism being bred in the bone–sounds like the place to be).

In the Wikipedia extract, however, Sydney is not a location but a “thing” that can be the subject or object of an action. In this case, “Sydney” is the subject, represented in the relative clause by which, and the “action” is “had a population of 35,000.” (Not the most accurate nomenclature, I know, but there’s no need to go into action verbs vs state verbs here.)

In short, if Sydney is the setting of the story, we use where; but if Sydney is a character in the story, we use that or which.

It’s not that difficult to explain to students–I recommend using several examples to highlight the contrast–but I’ve yet to come across a textbook that addresses this point. Perhaps textbook writers are worried about confusing learners; or perhaps I just haven’t encountered enough textbooks.

 

 

 

 

 

A spectre is haunting my iPad cart . . .

. . . a spectral iPhone. There is no iPhone connected to the trolley.

And the MacBook has been stuck on that screen for a long time. That can’t be good.

Maybe if I go to class, I’ll come back and find that all is well . . .

 

 

Creating Kahoot! Games

Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) has put together a quick and helpful video on creating a Kahoot! quiz. (The only thing I would add is to remember to save your work after making each new question.)

More of Byrne’s video tutorials can be found on his YouTube channel.

Using mobile devices for warmers, fillers and coolers

An essential part of what I do is finding ways to incorporate e-learning and m-learning into the main syllabus, but Peter Pun’s (ELT Planning) post on breaktime games using an interactive whiteboard has got me thinking about how mobile devices can also play a role in the warmer, filler and cooler stages of a lesson.

These “breaktime” stages are helpful not only for re-energising students or revivifying a flagging lesson, or as simple punctuation points between lessons; they also link back to previous input (e.g. by recycling vocabulary) or forward to out-of-class study. Online ELT games can be a useful vehicle for self-directed study, and you could help familiarise students with this by having them try out these games in class on their mobile devices. I like Macmillan Dictionaries’ suite of language games; see Pun’s post and comments for more games to try out.

Macmillan Dictionaries’ Irregular Verb Wheel Game

A note of caution: you’d want to make sure you choose games that function just as well on mobile platforms as on desktop. (I found this out the hard way when I tried using a game I’d created in Classtools.)

An alternative to Kahoot!: Quizziz

Tony Vincent (Learning in Hand) compares Kahoot! with other classroom quiz games, with a particular focus on Quizziz.

Kahoot! (which I use on a weekly basis) allows students to participate in an online multiple-choice quiz using a mobile device. The teacher projects the questions and options, and the students play by pressing the button on their device screen that corresponds with their chosen answer. After a time limit is reached or all participants have selected their answers, the correct answer is shown and the class moves on to the next question.

Quizziz (which I’ve never used before) appears to be similar in most respects, but the main difference is that participants can see the questions and answer choices on their mobile devices, and they don’t have to wait for their classmates before proceeding to the next question.

Despite being very similar applications, Vincent maintains that they can both play a role in your classroom. Whereas Kahoot! is a great tool for unit review (not to suggest that it doesn’t have other uses), because everybody moves at the same pace and there are opportunities for the teacher to explain or clarify between each question, the self-paced nature of Quizziz allows it to be used for homework/flipped-classroom activities. Nonetheless, students don’t always appreciate such nuances, so you’d have to be very careful about when to incorporate Kahoot! and Quizziz activities into your programme if you’re going to use both.

I’ve developed several “rules of thumb” for using Kahoot! in the ELT classroom, and I imagine most of them would apply to Quizziz:

1. 25 questions max. Any more than this, and students start to become bored, drift off, complain about their time being wasted, and so on.
2. Use “Team Mode” in larger classes. Kahoot! displays a running leaderboard that only includes the top 5 or 6 players; this can be demotivating for those not performing as well.
3. Design your multiple choice options to target common errors. You can then discuss these with the class and get them to show their understanding of the language point by explaining why certain answers are incorrect.
4. Ensure your students are clear on the aim of the activity. What makes it a language activity as opposed to a simple game? How is it helping them develop their language skills?
5. Play it on a scheduled day of the week, at a scheduled time–and no more than once a week. Variety being the spice of life &c.

HOW TO BE A BORING TEACHER

“Whenever our students get bored, their creativity levels go through the roof, and they come up with a million creative uses for their pens, pencils, books, classmates, the floor and the ceiling in the classroom.” Or they reach for their phones . . .

ELT-CATION

Recent research suggests that boredom might have many benefits, including increased creativity. A researcher from the University of Central Lancashire carried out the following experiment. She split students into two groups and had one group carry out a humdrum task of copying phone numbers from a phone book and then asked both groups to come up with as many creative uses for two plastic cups as possible…Do you have any doubts as to who got their creative juices flowing at the speed of light?

What the researcher calls an ‘experiment’ is everyday classroom experience for many teachers. Whenever our students get bored, their creativity levels go through the roof, and they come up with a million creative uses for their pens, pencils, books, classmates, the floor and the ceiling in the classroom. However, we’d never plan a boring task. Never. It’s the topic, which is boring.

Asserting that we have…

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Google Cardboard: the dawn of VR in ELT

“Google Cardboard” by othree available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/othree/14519574116/. Full terms at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
I was recently given a Google Cardboard viewer and finally got around to trying it out today. The basic idea is that once you download the Cardboard app onto your smartphone, you insert the phone into the rear of the cardboard device pictured above and you have yourself an inexpensive VR device. The app then links you to the 360° YouTube channel containing dozens of immersive videos.

The verdict? Amazing! . . . although it does take your eyes a few moments to adjust to the binary images in order to resolve them into the one image (a bit like a Magic Eye painting).

British Council has a post outlining a number of suggestions on how the viewer can be used as a supplementary resource in the EFL classroom (assuming you can get a class set: the viewers retail for about $15). Cambridge English is trialing the technology as a means of alleviating candidates’ anxieties about the day of the exam. Once 360° cameras become more affordable and widespread, I can see schools and universities using VR for virtual campus tours and course inductions.

Motivating learners: the ARCS model

I love it when I come across something on Feedly or Twitter that gets me to think about teaching and planning in a different way. In this post, Geoffroy Lahon-Grimaud summarises the ARCS (“Attention”, “Relevance”, “Confidence”, “Satisfaction”) model as a way to keep learners motivated and engaged.

This is not a TED Talk

Via Slidemagic, which points out that in spite of the parody this video can actually teach you (and, by extension, your students) a lot about paralanguage when giving presentations.

There’s no sense in flogging a dead lesson plan

Via GIPHY
No matter how experienced a teacher you may be, there are those classes that are simply going to be a struggle to manage. Here’s what Larry Ferlazzo does when things are getting out of hand:

I will jettison my lesson plan and redirect students into some less intensive learning activity that I know they will want to do (a game, get into their book discussion groups) and then make arrangements with teachers of the most egregious offenders to pull them out for several minutes the next day during my free period so I can have a one-on-one reflective conversation with them. For example, we’ll talk about what their goals are and how their behavior is hurting or helping to achieve them — if they want to be an Ultimate Fighter, not being able to show self-control is going to create problems. We’ll revisit some of the life skill lessons we’ve done and talk about what they think might help them develop more self-control (change seats, take their work outside if they feel they are “losing it,” get a stress ball, etc.).

Working in adult ELT poses different (and doubtless less intense) classroom management challenges than working in a high school. But even adult ELT students find it difficult to maintain focus or self-control at times, and there are days–invariably afternoons in 30+ degree heat with a poorly-functioning air conditioner–when all this lack of focus reaches a critical mass. And at this point, as Ferlazzo notes, teachers are faced with a choice: punish the offenders (and presumably push on with the lesson), or adopt the more effective redirect-and-reflect strategy. With adult learners, those one-on-one discussions are great for drawing connections between their long-term academic/career/migration goals and something like classroom etiquette and homework.

[EDIT: The original post contained a reflection on a lesson gone awry, but I’ve chosen to store that elsewhere and focus in this blog on useful “takeaways.” I may include reflections at a future point when I feel more confident :)]

[Note: I’ll use the second person and imperative in the following and future”Takeaways” sections, but the primary audience is myself.]

Takeaways

1. Jettison the plan if it’s not working, and do something more enjoyable/engaging–but still relevant.
2. Get students to reflect upon their goals and what they’re doing to achieve them. This means you as a teacher need to know what your students goals are. To add a blended learning component to this, have students share their reflections on a discussion board or blog.
3. Anticipate whether your students will find the lesson enjoyable/engaging/useful. Visualising the lesson (a method of planning suggested on the TEFL Show podcast-–I think in this episode) might help here.