Module Two

Assignment 9.2: Course Planning

2008-07-06T14:51:00.000-07:00

Introduction
The course was planned for a group of five pre-Entry learners at South Tyneside College. The class met three times a week, with each session lasting three hours. The Scheme of Work covers the first six weeks of the course including time spent on diagnostic assessment. After the first four sessions, tutorials were held with each learner during which I elicited responses to the topics covered in the Scheme of Work.

Rationale: Learner Needs and Weaknesses

The diagnostic assessment identified some literacy needs in three of the learners and a wide mix of abilities, both as a group and individually. All of the students were able to provide basic personal information (orally and, to some extent, in written form), to write the letters of the alphabet in both upper and lower case, to extract basic vocabulary relating to days of the week, transport and places of work from a short listening, and to recognise, if not spell, some common classroom objects. Weaknesses included an inability to form sentences using basic grammatical structures (be, have), to ask for clarification or repetition or to use capital letters appropriately. With the exception of Young-suh, the learners’ speaking ability was of a higher level than their reading or writing. In particular, Mohammed and Abdus were able to speak at length about familiar topics such as family and place of work. The initial emphasis of the course will, as a result of this and feedback received from the learners following diagnostic assessment, be on punctuating written work (including capitalisation and the spelling of familiar words), reviewing basic grammatical structures (written and oral), and learning functional expressions used when asking speakers to clarify or repeat information.

Reading skills such as whole word recognition and reading simple sentences will be incorporated into classroom activities. Likewise, listening practice will initially comprise the learners being able to understand and respond to social interaction occurring in pair and group work.

Despite not forming a major part of the diagnostic assessment, the learners had clearly apparent difficulties with areas of phonology, including intonation, word stress and phonemes. Therefore, pronunciation work including drilling and minimal pair discretion exercises will be included in the Scheme of Work.

Pacing is extremely important with basic learners, particularly in mixed-ability classes. Progress will be influenced by previous educational experience, literacy skills (including L1) and confidence in using language. Accordingly, course planning needs to incorporate time for reviewing and reinforcing topics. Above all, pacing should be responsive to the needs and abilities of the learners.

Although it is often difficult to consult low-level learners on their precise language needs, it is obviously important that classroom topics include practical skills to aid their social integration, enabling learners to communicate more effectively outside of class. For this reason there will be a lot of work on communicative exchanges involving basic personal information. As three of the students are asylum seekers with children, specific attention is needed on form filling and understanding written information in addition to oral work.

Finally, as the class are generally below Entry 1 level, Skills for Life materials will have to be adapted, and supplemented or replaced by the tutor’s own materials.

Rationale: Theories of Language Acquisition

Although they have lived in the UK for over ten years, Mohammed and Abdus have had very little formal education in the English language. Much of what they know has therefore been acquired naturally via out-of-classroom interaction as opposed to being consciously studied – what Krashen calls the Acquisition-Learning distinction (Krashen, 1983). To a lesser extent, this is also true of the other three learners. In Krashen’s view, classroom work should be communicative, low in stress, comprehensible and relevant to the learners. The focus should be on acquiring “conversational competence”, enabling learners to work independently outside of the classroom. Correction and the study of grammar are largely to be avoided.

However, as seen in the evaluation sessions, students often hold far more traditional views about the learning process, valuing dictation, oral drills, immediate correction of mistakes and the explicit teaching of grammar rules. Evidence of fossilized errors was provided during diagnostic assessment by both Abdus and Mohammed, who are able to communicate effectively with native speakers at work but are keenly aware of their grammatical limitations. The best approach is therefore likely to be one that prioritizes the learners’ individual needs rather than any one methodology. In the words of Lightblown and Spada, "accuracy, fluency and overall communicative skills are probably best developed through instruction that is primarily meaning-based but in which guidance is provided through timely form-focused activities and correction in context" (Lightbown and Spada, 1993)

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment was checked in a number of ways, starting with the monitoring and marking of classroom activities and homework. Given the small size and low-level of the class, I was able to monitor individual students while they were working and use this as a basis for assessment, feedback and further planning. Feedback slots and informal testing were built into lesson plans and the Scheme of Work. Short spelling tests, for instance, often with the words to be tested given as homework, were used to reinforce prior work and provide the learners with a sense of achievement. Speaking was assessed using tutor-designed board games and questionnaires, or extended with written activities that allowed scope for further checking of progress. Activities at the beginning of each lesson were planned to link back to topics studied in the previous session, providing an opportunity for assessment and review. Where possible, learners were encouraged to assess their own progress in conversations with the tutor.

A more formal kind of assessment takes place in tutorials, when measurable targets are negotiated with each learner. In practice this is not always possible in classes where students have low-level speaking skills or little experience of formal education, as they are unable to identify or articulate their specific needs. Official tutorials are scheduled once per term, during which ILP targets are checked and evidence of learning collected.

Evaluation After 10 Hours’ Teaching

The original scheme of work was composed in response to areas of weakness identified in the diagnostic assessment and included topics standard to the initial stages of the Entry 1 Skills for Life materials. While the work covered was appropriate to the level of the learners the pacing of the first sessions was too slow for the stronger students, with an over-emphasis on accuracy and the review of basic structures. It was apparent that, with appropriate support, the learners could move at a faster pace.

After four sessions the dynamic of the group altered due to the arrival of two new learners. The first, Wannida, a 46-year-old Thai woman who had lived in the UK for two years, fitted into the existing class profile in that she was able to compose legible text, respond to questions and give basic information. However, the second, Rubi, was a much less confident speaker and was unwilling to work with the two male Bengali learners, meaning whole class activities had to be adapted.

Coupled with this, Mohammed and Abdus requested more basic literacy work, in particular more emphasis on spelling and sentence construction. Mohammed also asked for more dictation work in class, both on individual words and whole sentences. Young-suh and Min-jae both expressed an interest in using computers to help their writing.

Following these changes and requests, as well as ongoing classroom assessment, the initial Scheme of Work was amended accordingly.

Suggested Changes in Response to Evaluation

First and foremost, a greater amount of differentiation has to be built into the remainder of the course. While Rubi and Halima still need work on basic functional structures, the focus for Mohammed and Abdus will move more towards reading and writing. In order to achieve this, lesson plans could be adapted to include initial speaking practice for the whole class followed by written extension exercises for Mohammed and Abdus while the remainder of the students concentrate on oral work. An alternative to whole class mingling exercises would be to divide the learners into two groups for speaking activities, with Min-jae or Wannida joining Abdus and Mohammed. Less time should be spent on simple oral drills – remedial work can be done with individual learners where necessary.

A separate session teaching basic computer vocabulary, showing the learners how to log-on to the system and practising some simple word processing skills would be a suitable addition to the Scheme of Work, having the benefit of varying written practice and allowing greater differentiation due to the number of online resources available for stronger learners.

As tutors become more aware of their learners’ needs and interests, language experience lessons, where the tutor copies down a learner-generated text and divides it into individual words for the learner(s) to reconstruct could also be used to provide motivating and meaningful literacy work. More emphasis on reading could be provided by the use of written texts prepared as a result of interviews with the learners. Listening scripts could be produced by recording learner responses to questions asked by the tutor or classmates. This would have been a good way to utilise the stronger speaking skills of Abdus and Mohammed.

Conclusion

Initially, the biggest factors influencing course planning are the requirement to map Schemes of Work to core curriculum descriptors and, in LSC-funded institutions, the need for tutors to use the nationally produced Skills for Life materials. These materials have the advantage of being pre-mapped to the core curriculum but are also based very heavily around chunks of functional language and lack any substantive grammar input or supplemental activities. As with all mass produced materials they are often unsuitable for particular groups of students and need to be adapted or supplemented to varying degrees by individual tutors. Thus, schemes of work, while broadly following the standard curriculum, will differ markedly in the time and focus given to individual topics, skills and language points.

The main requirement of good course planning is that it should be flexible and responsive to the needs of the learners, individually and as a group, both in terms of the work to be covered and the methodology and materials to be used. A Scheme of Work provides a guide to what the tutor would like to achieve at the outset of a course but is best viewed as a starting point to be informed by what happens in the classroom thereafter. Overall, I believe that schemes of work should serve as the basis of a flexible learning programme, with the teacher amending, adding or replacing work as new interests, gaps or strengths in knowledge are identified during lesson activities, formative assessment, tutorials and discussions with learners.

Bibliography

Ellis, Rod (1997) -Second Language Acquisition, Oxford University Press

Lightbown and Spada (1993) – How Languages Are Learned, Oxford University Press.

Scrivener, Jim (1994) – Inside Teaching, Heinemann

Krashen, S and T Terrell. (1983) The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom, Pergamon

DfES (2003) - Skills for Life, DfES Publications
Richards, J. C. and T. S. Rodgers (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language
Teaching, Cambridge University Press

Krashen, S and O’Neill, R - On Learning and Acquisition
http://www.eslminiconf.net/april/oneillreply.html

Word Count: 1,779

Assignment 6.2: Providing Specialist Support

2008-06-23T10:20:00.000-07:00

Introduction

The government’s Skills for Life strategy requires that all adult learners should be “guaranteed good teaching and support, no matter what their starting points are or where their learning takes place” (Adult Literacy Core Curriculum). A central recommendation of Freedom to Learn (2000) was that specialist guidance should be made available to assist Basic Skills tutors in making the core curricula fully accessible to all learners. This led to the passing of legislation such as the Learning and Skills Act (2000), the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act (2001) and the publication of Access to All, which sought to provide practical advice to tutors working with learners who have Dyslexia, learning or physical disabilities, mental health and well-being issues, Autism or Asperger Syndrome and people who have sight or hearing difficulties. An ESOL specific version of Access to All was published in 2006.

The core principle of Access to All is this: “all learners are entitled to a learning environment that matches their individual requirements. For this to occur there has to be a match between how the learner learns and how he or she is taught.” With this in mind, both providers and tutors have a responsibility to review and monitor learning and understanding, base learning approaches on individual learning styles and motivation, and negotiate and follow the learner’s own educational priorities.

All post-16 education providers must also now adhere to the code of practice established by the Disabled Rights Commission in the wake of the Disability Discrimination Act (2006). It is the legal duty of such institutions to provide education of an equal standard to all students regardless of disability. The Commission reported that the main issues affecting learners were in relation to classroom practice, exams and assessment, materials and the provision of learning support.

Learner In Need of Specialist Support

The subject of this assignment is Hamed, a 42-year-old Afghan learner who has been studying in a pre-Entry level group at ______________ College. Hamed arrived in the UK two years ago having had no formal education in his home country. Despite regularly attending classes he has been unable to advance levels or even take an exam owing to learning difficulties which leave him unable to work independently and in need of direct individual supervision. In common with many pre-Entry learners, Hamed has a distinctly spiky profile. While his speaking and listening skills show signs of progress, he continues to struggle greatly with reading and writing. A major area of concern is his inability to retain information – although he can produce legible handwriting and can copy basic information, he cannot recall the spelling of familiar words or produce even simple sentences.

Institutional Provision

When conducting initial and diagnostic assessments with ESOL students it is extremely difficult to distinguish between low-level language ability and wider learning difficulties. Although the standard enrolment form includes a question about learning and health problems, there is no separate assessment for dyslexia or conditions that may slow down or restrict learning. Furthermore, many low-level learners, particularly those who arrive from countries where special needs support remains undeveloped, are unable to articulate, or are sometimes completely unaware of, their learning difficulties. Indeed, government research has found “no direct translation for the term learning difficulty” among many Turkish, Eritrean and South Asian communities (Learning and Skills Development Agency, 2004). More commonly used terms were translated as ‘slow’ and ‘stupid’. Faced with such prejudices, many ESOL learners are understandably reluctant to admit to learning problems in an initial assessment or the early stages of a course.

Compounding these problems, class tutors who are not specialists in the area are often slow to request support, particularly when teaching large, mixed-ability classes. In Hamed’s case, it took several weeks before he was placed with a Learning Support Assistant. During this time it was assumed that Hamed’s lack of progress was due to his unfamiliarity with formal education and poor receptive skills.

__________ College has an Additional Learning Support Team to assist students with Learning Difficulties. For ESOL learners, initial needs assessments are left to the class teacher who can then request extra help such as a learning support assistant, the loan of specialist equipment and the granting of special exam considerations. In practice, I have found that there are not enough learning support assistants to cover every student with suspected difficulties, which results in assistants being asked to attend to extra learners in addition to the person they were initially allocated to help. Technical equipment such as talking dictionaries, individual cassette players with headphones and audio-visual resources have to be shared between several classes and are not always available when needed, requiring a large amount of pre-planning. There is currently no provision for interpreters to be present at initial assessments. Although low-level students are often accompanied by friends or family members, they may feel uncomfortable discussing their learning support needs.

With regard to exams, students with specific learning difficulties are able to apply for up to an extra 25% of the time ordinarily allowed for a paper. This, however, is not of help to all students. Hamed, for example, is easily tired and becomes unable to concentrate when given practice exam papers. In this instance, a more appropriate form of support would be to offer the students a supervised break during the examination.

A further area of concern is the physical environment for learners, whose classrooms are scattered around other departments and lack adequate signposting or specialist facilities for ESOL classes. Although the college is in the process of building entirely new premises, there are currently several difficulties in providing an adequate learning (hearing loops for a deaf student, for instance, could only be provided once a week, and then only by relocating the entire class to the other side of the college premises).

The Teacher’s Role in Providing Support

The role of the teacher in providing support is spelled out in Access for All, which requires tutors to “produce learning programmes that maximise the opportunities for acquisition of…skills for each individual learner.” In practice, teachers who have little experience of teaching learners with specialist support needs are initially reliant on pre-existing frameworks – the assessment advice and suggested classroom activities (listed by individual level descriptor) provided with the ESOL core curriculum, for instance. It is of vital importance that teachers are trained in dealing with specific issues and are informed of the help available and how to utilize it. In the words of the Further Education Funding Council, “teacher expectations and attitudes are as influential as technical equipment and individual ability”. (Tomlinson, 1996)

In practical terms there are number of things a teacher can do to assist students with Learning Difficulties. First and foremost, it is important to use contexts and activities that are relevant and motivating to the learner. Where possible, teachers should find out about the students’ previous learning experience and activities that have been enjoyable or helpful. The use of visual aids such as photographs and computer programmes (where available) can also be highly beneficial. A common failing of teachers (including myself) is to work more with the support assistant than the learner. Part of the support process is to give the student as much opportunity as possible to work with the teacher and other students, rather than relaying instructions and then leaving the learner to work alone. Differentiated activities enable stronger students to work unsupervised while the teacher spends time with learners who are having difficulties; as often as I can, I try to involve Hamed in small group and whole class work.

Task variation is also important for learners like Hamed, who are too often left to merely copy letters and sentences. I do a lot of work with letter tiles and matching games, which provide kinaesthetic as well as visual practice.

Reflections on Continuing Development

The first recommendation for my continuing development in providing learners with support would be to undertake specific SENDA training in order to broaden my knowledge of general support issues and the options available to help students. Additionally, I would welcome the chance to observe teachers who have more experience dealing with specialist support. In particular, it would be helpful to observe methods of preparing and delivering classroom activities and utilising support assistants during tasks. With regard to resource development, and in collaboration with other staff members, it would be helpful to produce a menu of suggested classroom activities for students with Learning Difficulties using the Core Curriculum advice as a starting point. Finally, I believe that specialist provision should be made available for low-level ESOL learners who have specific literacy needs (perhaps in addition to normal lessons). It would be a useful experience to visit and learn from institutions that already offer this service.

My experiences with Hamed have informed my current practice but there is still plenty of scope for further development, especially in regard to the use of Language Experience texts in class to motivate and involve learners, differentiating activities so that learners do not feel excluded and providing a variety of tasks to reinforce things that Hamed has recently covered in class. Thinking more proactively, I would also welcome specific training in helping learners with hearing problems, well-being issues (victims of torture and emotional distress) and identifying Dyslexia in second language learners.

Conclusion

As a large institution __________ College has a number of strategies for dealing with students who have learning difficulties. However, many of these were designed with native speakers rather than second language learners in mind. At present, for low-level learners such as Hamed there is too much emphasis placed on the individual teacher to adapt classroom practice and planning and not enough institutional support provided to correctly diagnose and assess ESOL students with learning difficulties, or to ensure their full participation in learning and development.

Bibliography

www.lifelonglearning.dfee.gov.uk/freedomtolearn/front.html

www.drc.org.uk/library/publications/education/code_of_practice_post_16.aspx

http://www.dfes.gov.uk/curriculum_esol/access/

http://www.csie.org.uk/ (the Centre for Studies on Inclusive Education)

www.csie.org.uk/publications/tomlinson-96.pdf (Tomlinson Report, 1996)

Word Count: 1,637

Assignment 8.3: Developing Numeracy Skills

2008-05-14T12:34:00.000-07:00

Introduction to Numeracy

In response to The Leitch Review of Skills (2006), which reported that half of all adults in the UK have “difficulty with number and one seventh (5 million) are not functionally literate,” the British government’s target is for 90% of adults to have obtained a Level 2 Numeracy qualification by 2020. As part of this strategy numeracy is no longer seen as something to be left to specialised providers alone: best practice now promotes embedding of numeracy work into ESOL course and lesson planning. The challenge for language teachers, some of whom may lack confidence in their own numeracy abilities, is to ensure tasks are "relevant, contextualized, and essentially linked to overall literacy". (Stoudt, 1994)

Outside the classroom, our students’ problems with numeracy can pose as many difficulties as their struggles with the language. In everyday tasks such as shopping, calculating bills and expenses, budgeting and telling the time, learners need numeracy every bit as much as literacy skills.

Numeracy Issues Affecting ESOL Learners

Numeracy is intrinsic to ESOL classes at all levels. Page numbers are part of basic classroom language; pre-Entry classes include oral and written work on numerals in addresses, telephone numbers, dates and telling the time; elementary learners are taught quantifiers when studying countable and uncountable nouns, and practise reading public transport timetables and mail-order catalogues; our higher-level students work on understanding statistics in informative writing.

In common with all numeracy learners, ESOL students are affected by social and personal factors such as education, age and confidence – particularly in the case of those students with no formal education in their first language.

Breaking the Language Barriers (2000) identified a number of additional, and at times very specific, even highly numerate ESOL learners have to overcome, for instance “the need to learn English mathematical terms and conventions…and the complexity of the language surrounding assessment tasks and tests”: a learner may well understand the numeric form of 2 + 2 = 4 but not the English expression two plus two equals four. In many cultures, large numbers such as 10,000 are divided using points rather than commas; where English uses points to divide pounds and pence, many languages use commas. Learners from the Indian subcontinent group numbers by two decimal places not three (ten million is written as 1,00,00,000) and count in lakhs (one hundred thousands) and crores (ten millions). Similarly, Chinese and Korean students would expect the number 1,000,000 to be prefaced by one hundred (representing blocks of ten thousand) rather than one.

Another example of (British) English mathematical conventions is the writing of dates with the day and month preceding the year, which would appear back-to-front for speakers of many languages (including American English). For learners from countries such as Iran and China, the New Year does not start on January 1st. Time, too, is subject to cultural differences. Not all students will recognise the use of the twenty four hour clock in transport timetables, or the concept of counting up to the next hour (7.45 becoming quarter to eight).

Embedding Numeracy in ESOL

Text 1: Bus Timetable (Entry Level 2 / 3)

Learners are required to read and listen for times using the twenty-four hour clock (MSS1/L1.2), find and recognise bus numbers in tables arranged in rows and columns (HD1/E2.1) and calculate costs (MSS1/E2.2). Potential problems for learners with poor numeracy skills include converting the twenty-four clock into am and pm, being able to pronounce and understand oral representations of the time, calculating fares for more than one person (or between different stops) and locating information by reading bus numbers horizontally at the same time as finding times listed vertically.

Pre-reading: Elicit nearby tourist attractions. Students discuss places they have visited. Feedback – show pictures of Hadrian’s Wall. Ask students if they’ve ever been there. If not, would they like to go? Elicit kinds of public transport we could use to travel to the wall.

Gist reading: Tell students I’m planning a class trip to Hadrian’s Wall next Wednesday. Elicit what time students need to leave and return to pick up children and prepare for work. Hand out bus timetable. Students read and find out whether it’s possible to visit a place on the wall and return within the necessary time. In the feedback, elicit pronunciation of twenty-four hour clock times such as eighteen oh-five.

Detailed reading: Present questions in true or false, multiple choice or read and find the answer form. Students could be asked to find out times of specific buses, fares for individuals and groups, days and times where buses operate or not, or the distance between different stops.

Post-reading: Students roleplay asking for bus information using functional expressions such as What time is the first / next / last bus to…..? How much is it to…..? and What number bus goes to…..?

Text 2: Extracting Data From Pie Chart (Level 1 / 2)

Learners practise extracting data from graphic representations (in this case a pie chart) and texts (N1/L1.1; N2/E3.2; HD1/E3.1), converting numbers into different forms such as fractions and percentages (N1/L1.1; N2/L1.1, and presenting findings in written and numeric form (HD1/E3.3; HD1/E3.4). Students with poor numeracy skills would find the volume of numeric terms in the text difficult to decipher, especially when asked to convert the figures in the guided practice. For instance, the phrase 89% are in bed by 1am becomes Only one in ten people go to bed later than 1am in the practice exercise. Weaker students might also be confused by the combination of the text and pie chart. While the graphic representation may help learners in the presentation, dividing a circle into approximate areas could pose difficulties in the production stage. Prior to this, students would also need help when translating the results of the interviews into percentages and fractions.

Lead-in In pairs, students discuss how they usually spend their time. What do you usually do in your free time? What would you like to do more often? Feedback and ask students how they think British people spend their time. Hand out questionnaires. Students predict answers in pairs.

Presentation Put simple pie chart on board. Elicit how information is displayed. Hand out text. Students find the answers to the questions using the text and pie chart. Check answers open-class.

Guided Practice Board first sentence and elicit thirty-three per cent. Ask students if they know any other way of expressing this percentage (one third). Students work in pairs to complete the sentence with the correct phrases, referring back to the text and pie chart if necessary.

Freer Practice Put the students into small groups and ask them to design their own questionnaire on free time habits. Interview classmates and write out findings in a short text and/or pie chart.

Text 3: Describing Changes (Level 1)

Learners listen for expressions used to describe changes in data (N2/L1.8), extract information from bar charts (HD1/E3.1; HD1/L1.1) and practise describing changes in written form(HD1/L1.2; N2/L1.8). Learners with poor numeracy skills would find it difficult to extract information from the bar charts and understand the numerical relationships between different dates and points. Unless need to be able to understand the individual pieces of data before they begin to compare them.

Lead-in: Students discuss the qualities they would look for in a husband/wife. Conduct feedback and elicit opinions about what makes a happy marriage. Tell students the UK has the highest divorce rate in Britain. Why do they think this is?

1st Listening: Listen to four people explaining why the divorce rate is so high. Are there ideas the same as yours? Compare with your partners.

2nd Listening: Hand out gapped sentences. Students predict missing words then listen and check. Conduct feedback and highlight use of increasing to describe change.

Presentation: Elicit which of the words and phrases in the gaps mean to increase and which have the opposite meaning. Hand out table with more expressions. In pairs, students fill in the chart. Conduct feedback and drill pronunciation.

Guided Practice: Focus on bar chart showing divorce rate. Elicit past tense of verbs in the chart. Ask students to quickly describe what they can see. Focus on written description. Students work in pairs to complete the text. Feedback and highlight prepositions: in 1961; from 1961 to 1981; increased by 10%.

Less Guided Practice: Hand out bar chart showing marriage rate in same period. Students compose a short text describing the changes, using previous exercise as a model.

Freer Practice: Elicit other possible changes (birth rate; unemployment; population). Students research Britain or their own country on the internet and compose a short text and/or bar chart to present their findings.

Text 4: Daily Routines (Pre-Entry / Entry 1)

Learners practise asking about, listening to and writing down the times of day they do regular actions (MSS1/E1.2; HD1/E1.3; N1/E1.2; N1/E2.2). Learners with poor numeracy might be unable to pronounce, write or understand their partner’s pronunciation of the numerals. In mixed-ability classes, stronger students might present the time as seven-thirty or half past seven, confusing weaker students. The ordering of events in terms of clock time could also lead to confusion.

Lead-in: Show students pictures of common activities (getting up; having breakfast; going to school). Elicit vocabulary.

Presentation: Hand out pictures to students and ask them to order in terms of the time of day they do each action. Conduct feedback.
Board clock and elicit times. Tell students I get up at seven o’clock and drill pronunciation. Ask students what time they get up. Continue with other actions.

Guided Practice: Students interview partners. Conduct feedback.

Less Guided Practice: Students mingle and ask classmates questions to complete questionnaire.

Evaluation of Lesson

The lesson was taught to a Level 1 class. The learners had strong literacy skills and all had studied Numeracy previously, either at school in their own countries or in the UK as part of Basic Skills courses.

The lead-in generated interest in the topic and a number of successful predictions, which made the listening tasks much more achievable. The students were able to correctly categorize and pronounce the expressions from the listening. However, when focusing on the bar graph I did not sufficiently highlight the fact that each number referred to thousands of units. Some of the students therefore interpreted the data as 140 rather than 140,000. I dealt with this in the feedback, having already elicited the use of about, over and nearly to give approximations. Although I was worried that the less-guided practice would seem repetitive, the students found the task challenging – particularly when combining prepositions with numerals and the phrases describing change (went down by 10,000; reached a peak of 380,000). This also gave me the opportunity to reinforce the use of commas instead of points to separate large numbers.

The freer practice was perhaps a little too free: it would have been better to have set one topic, such as population change, and discussed some ideas open class before the students went off to do more research, or to have formed groups and given specific countries to search for information on before writing up the findings individually. The students were able to compose texts using some of the numerical expressions we had learned, but not all were able to produce work of sufficient length due to problems finding specific data.

Conclusion

Numeracy is an essential part of everyday life for ESOL students, whether shopping for food, using public transport, finding a telephone number or calculating bills. Although traditionally overlooked, numeracy plays a significant part in existing ESOL resources and classroom work. By paying greater attention to the things we already do, and embedding numeracy work by teaching mathematical skills as well as the language used to perform them, we can equip our learners with a wider range of literacies.

Bibliography

Adult Numeracy Core Curriculum - DfES (2001)
Enhancing numeracy skills in adult literacy programs: Challenges and new directions - NCAL Connections, Philadelphia, PA: National Center on Adult Literacy. Stoudt, A. (1994, June).
Breaking the Language Barriers - DfEE (2000)
The Leitch Review of Skills - HM Treasury (2004)

Word count: 1,953

Assignment 7.1 Discourse Analysis

2008-04-05T06:19:00.000-07:00

Text Analysis I

Written Text

The selected text (Appendix 1) is taken from The Daily Mirror, a popular British tabloid (or ‘red-top,’ to distinguish lower-end titles from compact-sized broadsheets such as The Independent) newspaper. In common with many red-top titles, much of the content of the newspaper is sensationalist, with a predominance of celebrity stories relating to sport and television. The text itself is 378-words long and reports on a severe weather warning issued by a government agency.

Genre

Tricia Hedge (Hedge, 1988) classifies writing into six types (Personal; Public; Study; Creative; Social; Institutional). As a newspaper article, the genre in this case is public. Further to this, Scott Thornbury (Thornbury, 1997) notes six features (purpose, content, status, style, grammar, lexis and layout) which should be considered in regard to genre. In relation to this, the purpose of the text is to inform the public about the prospect of severe weather conditions, and to give a factual account of the preparations being made.

The article is structured in a common tabloid style: short paragraphs, the first of which, written in bold, contains sensationalist information. Direct speech is preceded by the name and occupation of the speaker and a full colon, rather than the commas preferred in more formal written texts such as broadsheet articles.

The layout of the text contains a number of features common to tabloid newspapers: the large-sized headline is a continuation of a sentence at the top of the page (As 90mph winds near coast, Britain is warned….GET SET FOR A BATTERING); three photographs (one taking up almost half of the page) give a strong visual accompaniment to the article, each with text captions inlaid over the top or underneath; an information bubble in the middle of the text gives background details in the form of bullet points. The writer’s name is boxed and listed in the middle of the text.

The article also contains a number of proper nouns pertaining to the meteorological agencies from whom the quotes and forecasts are derived: Meteogroup UK (51), The Environment Agency (58) and Norwich Union (75)

Features of Written Discourse

Cohesion

Grammatical Cohesion

Anaphoric Reference

Line 2 – It refers to Britain (1)

Line 54 - Us refers to Britain and by extension its people (1)

Line 67 - They refers to the strong winds, waves and high tides (66).

Cataphoric Reference

It (81)– refers to flying objects causing damage (81)

Exophoric Reference

Line 3 – the worst storm in 20 years refers to the Great Storm of October 1987 (see detail in information bubble).

Conjunctions

Line 5 – and adds torrential rain and hail to the 90mph winds.

Line 11 – and extends the pummeling from mammoth winds faced by coastal areas to include the latest severe flood alert.

Line 50 - but links the whole of the UK to the specific regions (the west country and southern England) mentioned in the previous line.

Line 24 – as links the cause and effect of the coming storm and the cancelled ferry sailings.

Ellipsis

Line 64 – The (Environmental) Agency’s … (see 58)

Lexical Cohesion

Lexical Sets

The most notable lexical set relates to the weather: the worst storm (line 3), battered by…winds (4), torrential rain and hail (4), mammoth waves (9), severe flood alert (10), low pressure system (22) and high tides (66).

A further set is based around the preparations for and likely effects of the storm on the British population: battened down the hatches (1), bring chaos to the country (6), flights…delayed or cancelled (30), evacuated…by emergency services (35), precautions…to minimise damage (73).

Finally, there is a geographic set, including Britain(1), the UK (4) and southern England(49).

Repetition

Repetition of extreme adjective - severe flood alert (12); severe delays (17).

Repetition of superlative - the worst storm (3); possibly the worst storm since 1987 (27)

Register

Befitting tabloid journalism, the register is informal, as evidenced by the use of the phrasal verb get set in the headline. However, there are also examples of slightly more formal language, such as precautions to minimise damage, signifying the Mirror’s assumed readership: the educated, politically left-of-centre working class. Although broadly factual, the text does include a number of subjectively emphasised lexis (mammoth, devastated, battered and torrential).

The passive is a feature of written English and, particularly, of texts related to people and objects affected by severe weather conditions. Examples include, is set to be battered by 90mph winds (4), were put on severe flood alert (11), were advised to leave (38) and it is predicted winds will ease (55).

Text Analysis II

Spoken Text

The text (Appendix 2) was sourced from the BBC Voices website. Four work colleagues talk about the tendency of young people to reverse the meaning of words. Three of the participants are in their mid-40s and in managerial positions within the company. All three come from County Durham, two from Bishop Auckland (A and C) and the other from Chester-le-Street (B). The fourth (D), a salesman from Cramlington in Northumberland, is 20. The text is approximately 254-words long and is divided into eight turns.

Genre

Given the number and relationship of the participants, the short duration of each turn and the fact that the speakers are attempting any formal task beyond responding to an initial prompt, the genre can be appropriately described as a casual conversation (Cook, 1989). In the main, the turns follow each other naturally and without contradiction or discord between the speakers. Interruptions or overlapping speech serve to re-affirm, clarify or show interest in the previous utterance.

Features of Spoken Discourse

As opposed to written discourse, which provides scope for prior-formulation and drafting, spoken discourse is often unplanned, unpredictable and seemingly disorganized, featuring grammatical errors, unfinished utterances, overlaps, repetition, repair language and reformulation, discourse markers and fillers. As a consequence of this, spoken discourse will commonly have a lower density of information than written discourse of the same length, and when transcribing spoken discourse, punctuation and sentence boundaries are not always apparent.

Lack of Sentence Definition

I cannot think of the word right now, but like phrasal use or even me daughters used to use words that I thought were… /ɑ:/…it was…...minging ….and I…mean it ‘s good sometimes…. (Line 5 – 6)

Overlaps and Interruptions

In the conversation genre spoken discourse is interactive, with participants interrupting, overlapping, responding to or completing points made by other speakers. There are several examples in the extract, notably:

Line 9 – A: Hellish, aye that’s the word I was………..
C: II Hellish
B: II Yeah

Line 5-7 – A: …..… /ɑ:/…it was…...minging. And I…..
B: I think I know what you mean…..
A: II mean it’s good sometimes.
B: …Is it…. do you mean when you say something’s hellish?

False Starts and Self-Correction

On occasion the speakers abandon a line of thought or reformulate utterances in mid-sentence:

Is it…do you mean when you say…. (Line 7)
It means like…it means… (Line 16)

Discourse Markers and Fillers

Common to most, if not all, spoken discourse, a number of discourse markers and phatic fillers were used to introduce points, cover pauses, signify attention to the speaker and provide thinking time:

…but don’t you find…. (Line 1)

/həm / (Lines 2 and 4)

….that I thought were… /ɑ:/…it was…...minging. (Line 5)

My cousins just use it as like…as something… (Line 16)

Aye (Line 8)

Yeah (Line 17)

Repetition

…kids’ll use (Line 1)
….like phrasal use or even me daughters used to use (Line 5)

…it was like hell, it’d be fairer to hell…it was hell like… (Line 14)

..the way she looks at it is it’s…. (Line 13)

Vague Language

Due to the real-time nature of spoken discourse, vague language is used to convey approximate meaning in cases where the speaker is unable to find the most accurate word.

I cannot think of the word right now but like phrasal use (Line 5)

…something you say before anything else (Line 16)

Contractions

..that’s the word.. (9)

It’d be… (14)

…they’ll say it’s hellish good… (16)

Lack of Complex Clauses and Conjunctions

The utterances are linked by simple conjunctions, most commonly and, but and so:

Like what was crap years ago is now good and what was good is now bad (3)

Aye, that’s right…but me mam… (13)

….so it makes it their own (1)

Cohesion

Grammatical Cohesion

Anaphoric Reference

Numerous anaphoric references are used to bind the discourse together. Among the many examples are:

Line 1 - Makes it their own. It refers to the opposite word; their refers to kids.

Line 5 – It was minging. It refers to the word ( 5)

Line 6 – It’s good sometimes. It refers to minging (5)

Line 14 - But that’s probably what it was. It refers to bad (13)

Line 16 – They’ll refers to the cousins (16)

Exophoric Reference

Hellish for us (lines 10 and 12). Us refers to people of the speaker’s age group and background.

You must go on there (Line 12). There refers to a fairground ride.

Lexical Cohesion

Lexical Set

There is a lexical set based on partial synonyms for the original meaning of hellish: crap (3); minging (5); horrible (10); awful (11); bad (13).

Parallelism

It’s hellish, you must go on there…I must see that film, it’s hellish… (Line 12)

Reformulation

Because of the speaker’s apparent difficulty in completing line 16, the word extremity is reformulated as the phrase from one extreme to the other (18).

Register

The register is informal as illustrated by the numerous interrupted turns, none of which are marked with apologies or requests for permission (Excuse me…; If I could just interrupt….). The informality is further denoted by the use of the word crap (3), which would be considered offensive in more formal contexts. The speakers use a number of colloquialisms and dialect words such as aye, yeah and me daughters (5).

Phonology

Pitch and Volume

The start of each turn is commonly marked with a higher pitch. Speakers signal the end of their turn or invite a helpful interruption with a falling tone. In line 16, the speaker’s tone falls as he searches for the word extremity, encouraging the definition from speaker C at the end of the transcript.

Changes in pitch also mark the beginning and end of a train of thought:

Aye, that’s right…but me mam, the way she looks at it is it’s bad….and now hellish is good.

In this example, the pitch rises on the words but and and, while falling on right and bad.

Changes in volume are used to signify that a speaker is starting a turn, rather than adding support, clarification or agreement. In line 7, the volume of Is it…do you mean is noticeably higher than I think I know what you mean in the previous line.

Contrastive Stress

In spoken discourse, stress is used to provide emphasis and clarity. In the following example, the pronoun is stressed to emphasise the meaning of the word hellish to the speaker’s contemporaries:

…hellish for us was something horrible (10)

Conclusion

Both texts contain features that make them immediately recognisable as examples of written or spoken discourse – the phatic fillers and false starts in the spoken text, for instance. Looking at both together, we can discern many of the differences between the two forms – not least the lack of clause complexity, unclear sentence definition and real time, interactive nature of spoken discourse – in addition to the similar characteristics (as in cohesive devices such as referencing, lexical sets and conjunctions) that help bind both spoken and written texts together.

Word Count: 1,912

Assignment 8.2: Basic Literacy

2008-03-17T12:35:00.000-07:00

Identification of Language Learner with Literacy Needs

The subject of this assignment is Abdus Shahid, a 35-year-old pre-Entry learner from Bangladesh. He has lived in the UK for ten years and has studied ESOL at South Tyneside College for around nine months. Although Abdus’s speaking skills are of upper-E1 level, his initial assessment showed up basic literacy needs in both writing and reading. In his general classes, he has been concentrating on reading short texts about jobs and families.

Learner Profile: Background and Contexts

Abdus attended a religious school in Bangladesh where he was taught to read and write in Bengali and Arabic. Raised in a rural part of the country, he had never studied English prior to arriving in the UK. As part of his job in a takeaway restaurant, Abdus is required to speak English when taking orders from customers and communicating with kitchen staff. However, his work does not require a high level of literacy: brief notes (such as Ch Tka for chicken tikka) are usually sufficient. His spoken responses, though not always grammatically accurate, are effective for communication on a wide number of topics, from his childhood to recent DIY problems.

Abdus has considerable problems with the written form of English. Although he is able to form upper and lower case letters, he is uncertain about their use. This is partly due to the influence of his first language, in which capital letters are not distinguished (Swan, 2001) and partly, perhaps, through lack of familiarity: his children, schooled in Britain, do most of his writing at home. Problems identified by the learner included writing addresses, spelling common words like the name of his street, and knowing when to use upper case letters.

Diagnostic Assessment (Appendix 1)

After a brief oral interview in which some basic personal details were elicited, Abus was shown the My name is Mohammed Topal text (Appendix 1.1) and asked to read through silently. He successfully answered four of the five comprehension questions. His response of Elif to the question What’s his name? may have been caused by initial unfamiliarity with the proper noun, as he was later able to extract the correct answer when asked to find Mohammed’s wife’s name. He was unable to recognise the number of sentences in the text (answering 27) and, though able to pick out upper case letters by sight, he couldn’t give any reasons for their usage other than in a person’s name. Asked to point to words in the next, Abus was able to locate factory in addition to short high-frequency words (name, married, children), indicating some awareness of sound-letter correspondence. When subsequently reading the text aloud, Abdus struggled with contracted forms – pronouncing I’ve /aɪvi:/ and omitting the possessive s in my wife’s name – and mispronounced live (/ laɪv /), suggesting a use of logographic rather than alphabetic reading strategies. (Uta Frith,1985). In common with many speakers of the mainly phonemic South Indian languages, Abdus is often over-faithful to written forms, hence the full pronunciation of the –ed ending in lived. (Swan, 2001)

In the next stage, I elicited the word signs and asked Abdus to match common visual signs with their written equivalents, which he managed to complete without any difficulty.

Abdus identified the birthday card and predicted a limited number of expressions common to the genre (lots of love). His reading of cursive script was generally sound, and his slight difficulties could be attributed to lack of clarity in the handwriting. Similarly, when shown the calendar, Abdus quickly and confidently found the month, date (given as an ordinal number) and day of his birthday.

In the final stage, Abdus was given a simple form to fill in and then asked to write a sentence. Although he was able to fill in the sections appropriately, his writing showed a number of spelling mistakes – Suht Shiil for South Shields; Tny for Tyne; Rod for Road. In writing the sentence, Abdus wrote in the middle of the line and, possibly influenced by the example in the form, used only upper case.

Areas for Development (Agreed with Learner)

Compose a simple text, spelling key words correctly (Ww/E1.1; Wt/E1.1); Punctuate a simple sentence with a capital letter and full stop (Ws/E1.1; Ws/E1.2); Use a capital letter for the personal pronoun I (Ws.E1.3); Learn strategies for decoding simple, regular words (Rw/E1.2; Ww.E1.3)

Design and Deliver Lessons for the Learner

Composing a Simple Text (Appendix 2)

Following a brief introduction to raise interest in the topic, I asked Abdus to predict what kind of information he would expect to find in a text about one of my friends and noted down his guesses as questions. Abdus read the text to find the answers and was then asked to count the number of sentences. This led into an eliciting of the use of upper case letters to begin a sentence and, after some prompting, he was able to recognise the lack of upper case letters in the text. After demonstrating the task with the opening line, and differentiating the first paragraph by noting down the number of errors in each line, Abdus started underlining letters that should have been written in upper case.

After providing feedback, during which Abdus was asked to justify his choices, the learner wrote out the upper case letters above the lines, while I monitored the sizing and formation. We then returned to the use of upper case letters, elicited by references to the text and examples on the board, after which we read through some basic rules together.

In the controlled practice stage, I handed out sentences and asked Abdus to correct the mistakes. Before writing, he was asked to give reasons for his choices. We then found similar examples of upper case usage in the initial text.

Abdus wrote out a brief text on lined paper. At this stage I monitored without assisting. Abdus made an error in the second paragraph, which he self-corrected. His spacing was slightly erratic but he made a noticeable effort to write on the lines of the paper ensure his upper case letters were larger in size.

Finally, we focused on some basic sound-spelling rules, eliciting other words with the /ɑ:/ sound matched to –ar spelling and /əʊ/ to –oa.

Language Experience (Appendix 3)

The model of the lesson followed that suggested by Spiegel and Sunderland (Teaching Basic Literacy, 2006). After introducing the topic by asking Abdus how long he’d lived in South Shields and identifying some local landmarks through pictures in a tourist guide, we composed a text together describing why Abdus liked living in the town. Abdus then read the text aloud. He initially found it difficult to pronounce there, which I dealt with by drilling. He was asked to identify specific the number of sentences, capital letters and full stops.

I then cut the text up into four separate sentences and asked Abus to put them back in order. He managed to do this easily, then read the text aloud for a second time. Cutting the first sentence up into individual words, I asked Abdus to reconstruct it. He moved on to reconstructing the two subsequent sentences, starting by placing the full stops at one end and words beginning with upper case letters at the other. He finished by reading the text aloud one final time.

Abdus was then asked to copy out the text on lined paper. As he was copying the spelling and capitalization directly from the cut-up text, I monitored the size, spacing and positioning of the words. Although all three were slightly erratic, his writing showed an improvement from the sample in his diagnostic test. In particular, his writing was noticeably faster.

Evaluation of Lessons

The first lesson achieved its aims of enabling Abdus to write a simple text spelling familiar words correctly. The lesson was appropriately paced and was challenging without being de-motivating for the learner. The lead-in could have been improved by more patient eliciting – Abdus got slightly off topic with his answers and I fed-in more language that I had originally intended.

Unfortunately, the text in the language experience lesson failed to give Abdus a real sense of ownership, mainly due to the fact that I rushed the introduction and therefore did not make the text truly meaningful or relevant to the learner (Spiegel and Sunderland, 2006). Despite this, Abdus was motivated by the text reconstruction process (particularly its kinesthetic aspect) and was clearly using strategies picked up in the first lesson: placing words starting with upper case letters at one end and full stops at the other before commencing work on the rest of the sentence. Although the copying of the text provided practice in sizing capital letters and writing with appropriate spacing, owing to the reasons above it felt too similar to the final exercise of the first lesson.

By the end of the two lessons, Abdus’s writing was noticeably quicker, and he was able to self-correct an erroneous use of the upper case in I’m. His feedback – “I understand more now. I need more practice later” – was positive and, as a result, we arranged a further lesson for a later date.

In future, Abdus needs to continue learning sound-spelling strategies, increase his exposure to written texts (which will enable him to move onto a more orthographic acquisition of lexis (Frith)), and practise writing on lined paper, paying attention to his use of sentences and the differentiation of upper and lower case letters in both size and positioning.

Areas for Development: Personal and within Institution

Institutionally, I believe there is a need for specialist literacy classes as part of the ESOL provision at South Tyneside College. Presently, students such as Abdus with spiky profiles are placed in pre-Entry classes alongside students who have only basic oral ability. As a result, Abdus feels his classes are “too easy” whilst simultaneously repeating the same fossilized errors when asked to produce a written text. Further to this, I feel a specialised diagnostic assessment should be created for students who display strong oral but weak literacy skills, incorporating student needs and enabling specific diagnosis of literacy requirements mapped to all relevant areas of the core curriculum.

Personally, I feel my knowledge of basic literacy – a subject I knew almost nothing about before starting this assignment – has improved a great deal. In the past, I was prone to using bottom-up approaches, presenting sounds in isolation without developing meaningful contexts. The personalized format of the Language Experience lesson is something I would particularly like to use in future classroom practice. To further my experience of this and other aspects of basic literacy, I have agreed to give Abdus lessons dedicated to filling in forms and the use of spelling strategies. Ultimately, I would be interested in taking a Literacy Subject Specialist Certificate.

Bibliography

Spiegel, M. and Sunderland, H. (2006). Teaching Basic Literacy to ESOL Learners. London, L.L.U.
Swan, M. and Smith B. (2001) Learner English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
Frith, U. (1985) Beneath the Surface of Developmental Dyslexia. In Patterson, K.E. Marshall, J.C. and Coltheart, M (Eds) Surface Dyslexia: neurophyscological and cognitive studies of phonological reading. London. Laurence Erlbaum Associates.
Wikipedia entry on Bengali:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language#Writing_system

Word Count: 1,821

An Apology

2008-03-09T08:20:00.000-07:00

Fellow Module Twoers:

It has reached my notice that some of you have stumbled across this site while attempting to locate plagiaristic-style material for the dull series of essays we candidate drones are forced to complete. One. After. Another.

Please accept my sincere apologies. It's all crap. Except for the Moser one, which is officially quite good.

The Module Two Malaise

2008-03-08T03:42:00.000-08:00

I've been struck down by the Module Two Malaise, commonly seen round about the time of a candidate's first returned assignment. Abort, re-submit, fail...

Symptoms include no longer bothering to fill in the dense blue book, falling asleep in input sessions, and deciding to put all remaining work off until the end of July...except, of course, for the dreaded EXTERNAL ASSIGNMENTS.

Basic Literacy (8.something). Tomorrow, I promise.

Assignment 9.1

2007-12-29T09:49:00.000-08:00

Diagnostic Assessment of Learners' Needs

Introduction and Class Profile

The diagnostic assessment was carried out in October 2007 with a group of five learners at South Tyneside College, who had all been initially assessed at upper pre-Entry level. The class was multi-lingual, comprising of a married North Korean couple, a Somalian and two Bangladeshis. All were literate in their respective first languages.

Mohammed is a 36-year-old Bangladeshi who has lived in Britain for fourteen years. Although he has very weak written skills, his job requires him to speak some English and he has already passed the Entry 1 Speaking and Listening Exam.

Abdus is 35 and also from Bangladesh. In common with Mohammed he has lived in Britain for over ten years, works in a restaurant and is required to communicate in English. He has previously studied at Entry 1 level but wants to improve his writing skills, which are significantly weaker than his speaking ability.

Min-jae and Young-suh are both 50 and from North Korea. They arrived in Britain six months ago unable to speak any English, although they have since participated in an intensive summer-long course.

Halima is a 46-year-old Somalian. She has lived in the UK for five years and has previously studied at pre-Entry level.

The Diagnostic Test

The first part of the assessment covered listening, reading and writing skills. Afterwards, the students’ speaking ability was assessed individually in short interviews with the teacher. The diagnostic test was adapted from one developed by Hackney Community College for use with Entry 1 students. As the students had been initially assessed at near Entry 1 level, and would be working towards Entry 1 targets, I chose the assessment to give an indication of their current abilities in relation to a number of core curriculum standards. I omitted the final part of the assessment (where students are given a page to write about themselves) as the learners’ ability to give personal information orally and on a basic form was already been assessed.
.
Speaking and listening skills assessed: Lr/E1.2 listen for detail to extract specific information; Sc/E1.4 make statements of fact clearly; Lr/E1.4 listen and respond to requests for personal information.

Students are given seven questions, each with three or four pictures representing possible answers. The teacher reads a short narrative including one of the words, which the students must circle.

Students were given a short interview in which they were asked for details about themselves (What’s your address? When were you born? Where do you come from? When did you come to England?), their occupation, family members and reasons for learning English.

Reading: Rt/E1.1 follow a short narrative; Rw/E1.2 decode simple words; Rw/E1.3 recognise the letters of the alphabet in both lower and upper case.

Students read a short text giving personal information about a man and his family and write the answers to five comprehension questions, using full sentences if possible.
Students read two appointment slips for a doctor’s surgery and copy information about times, days and dates into a chart.

Writing: Ws/E1.1 construct a simple sentence; Ws/ E1.2 punctuate a simple sentence with a capital letter and full stop; Ww/E1.1 spell correctly some personal key words; Ww/E1.2 write the letters of the alphabet using upper and lower case.

Students copy information from the board onto the front page of the assessment and write their own names.
Students have to fill in a basic form asking for personal information.
Students look at a picture of a classroom and write down five of the objects they can see.

Students’ Strengths and Weaknesses

At the beginning of the assessment, Mohammed was able to recognise and use both upper and lower case letters when copying from the board. He had no problems with the listening test, correctly answering six out of seven questions (his one mistake was due to a lexical problem in discerning between a flat and a bungalow). In the reading and writing sections, he was able to recognise and copy the necessary details from the doctor’s slip and extract the main lexical information from the reading passage. However, in answering the questions he was unable to write in full sentences, or to use capital letters or full stops correctly. Similarly, while he completed the form asking for personal details appropriately, his use of upper and lower case letters was fairly random in all but nationality and post code.

Although he struggled with sentence formation and capitalisation, Mohammed’s spelling was one of his strengths, as evidenced by words such as mirror and carpet in the classroom objects section.

During the interview, Mohammed answered all the questions without the need for prompting or re-phrasing, and was able to give further information about his place of work and the names and educational background of his children.

Abdus’s reading and writing was markedly weaker than his speaking. In the interview he was able to give personal details, and extend answers to talk about feelings and opinions when asked about his family and occupation. In the listening, he extracted simple words relating to transport, numbers, days of the week and places of work, though not types of housing.

His use of capitalisation is random, as seen in the sentence I am WORK IN FACTORY HACKNEY. He also mixes upper and lower case letters when writing the personal pronoun I, commonly adds the verb am after I when talking about habits and regular actions (a tendency also evident in the interview), and was unable to punctuate sentences with full stops. He scored no marks in the reading, despite assistance.

Young-suh’s written work shows some knowledge of sentence structure and basic grammar (He is 28 years old), the use of upper and lower case letters (Korean), punctuation (I’ve) and the spelling of familiar words (South Shields; table). She is able to write legibly and makes attempts to use an ordinal number (21th) when writing her date of birth. In addition to being able to follow the narrative at the end of the assessment, she extracted all of the information from the doctor’s appointment slip. Her listening work showed some confusion between the numbers 14 and 40.

In the interview, she was able to understand and respond to all the questions, though she displayed several phonological problems related to her first language: lack of intonation, inserting vowel sounds after words ending in consonants (for instance yes /jesə/), and the substitution of /b/ for /v/ and /p/ for /f/.

With the exception of the question on house types (which none of the students answered correctly), Min-jae was able to hear and extract all of the key information in the listening assessment. His speaking ability was broadly similar to Young-suh’s, transferring the same phonological features from his first language. In the interview, he required no rephrasing or prompting but was often unable to give more than a few words in reply to questions. He did, however, display an awareness of short answer forms in responses such as Yes, I do and No, I can’t.

In the reading and writing sections, he made attempts at more difficult lexical items (bucket; watch; desk). His spelling was relatively weak. He was able to extract most of the information from the narrative, but unable to answer the questions in full sentences.

Halima struggled with the listening. Although she was able to answer questions on times, transport and days of the week, she couldn’t pick out the word stress in the number 14 or discern the phonological difference between the letters D and E. Her writing showed some basic spelling mistakes (tow children), although she was largely able to use upper and lower case letters appropriately. Her reading skills were slightly stronger than Abdus’s, extracting the day of the doctor’s appointment but not the time or date. She was able to capitalise, structure (spacing and capital letters in the post code) and spell her address with only minor problems.

In the interview, Halima was able to give basic answers to questions about herself and her family, but unable to extend answers to express feelings or opinions. She required some prompting and rephrasing on the questions relating to her place of birth and reasons for studying English.

Appropriate Language Learning Outcomes

Halima, Mohammed and Abdus have literacy needs relating particularly to their writing skills. Learning aims for all three would include spelling familiar words correctly (Ww/E1.1), writing letters in upper and lower case (Ww/E1.2), and constructing and punctuating a simple sentence (Ws/E1.1; Ws/E1.2; Ws/E1.3).

Writing targets for Young-suh and Min-jae would include spelling and the construction of simple sentences. A further aim would be to write a simple composition (Wt/E1.1) on a familiar topic such as a family member.

With regard to reading skills, reading and recognising simple sentences (Rs/E1.1) might be an appropriate precursor to written work for Abdus and Halima, who both struggled to recognise key words in the assessment. The students were all able to follow most of the short narrative (Rt/E1.1) in the diagnostic, but further practice is needed in word order and basic grammatical structures.

The students’ ability to ask questions was not assessed. Weaknesses identified in the interview were in asking for clarification (Sc/E1.3), using stress, intonation and the sounds of English to be understood in simple exchanges (Sc/E1.1) and expressing feelings and opinions (Sd/E1.1). The students’ ability to engage in discussions was appropriate for the level and they were all able to make simple statements of fact (Sc/E1.4). Differentiated targets for Mohammed and Abdus could include making requests (Sc/E1.2) and giving descriptions (Sc/E1.4) of their workplace and local area.

As the students were able to extract specific detail and respond to requests for personal information, appropriate learning targets could be taking part in social conversations and a limited number of formal exchanges (Lr/E1.5).

In a short follow-up interview given after the assessment the learners identified learning targets such as improving pronunciation, using basic grammar while speaking and being able to write in full sentences, using capital letters and full stops.

Evaluation of Diagnostic Assessment

Although the assessment gave a broad indication of the students’ abilities in all four skills it had a number of shortcomings, primarily the over emphasis on reading and writing. One major improvement would be for pairs of students to interview each other as a follow-up to the initial speaking assessment, testing their ability to ask questions to obtain information (Sc/E1.3) and to take part in social interaction (Lr/E1.5).

In the listening, the first question was clearly not appropriate for the level. A better test of their lexical knowledge would have been circle an item of furniture. One positive aspect of the assessment was the testing of the students’ ability to identify word stress to aid understanding (Lr/E1.2) and to discriminate between sounds.

In the reading and writing sections I felt the doctor’s appointment slip was an unnecessary duplication of the comprehension questions on the final page, both assessing the students’ abilities to extract information from written texts. In retrospect, I should have asked the students to write a short text about themselves, which would have assessed their ability to compose simple texts (Wt/E1.1) and also tested their use of basic verb forms without giving them scope to merely copy from an existing text. The remaining sections – classroom objects and filling in personal details on a basic form – were, I felt, appropriate for the level.

Finally, in addition to the suggested extension to the speaking assessment, the initial interview itself was too focused on the students’ ability to provide basic personal information. After some initial requests for personal details, the interview could be extended to check understanding of imperatives and simple instructions (Lr/E1.3) and to give descriptions (Sc/E1.4) rather than just state facts, for instance asking students to describe their house or how they travel to class.

Word Count: 1,959

Assignment 7.2

2007-12-19T10:00:00.000-08:00

Introduction

The language point chosen for this assignment was the use of the past simple, past continuous and past perfect in narrative tenses. In order to assess the students’ existing knowledge, I began the lesson with a dictogloss activity, following up with an inductive presentation of the target language based on the dictogloss text. This was the first time I had ever used a dictogloss in class.

Language Analysis

Meaning

Narrative tenses are used when talking about events, situations and experiences which occurred in the past. The three most common narrative tenses are the past simple, the past continuous and the past perfect simple.

The past simple is used to talk about (i) completed actions that occurred at a definite past time, (ii) events which take place consecutively or in chronological order, (iii) to express past habits, and for (iv) occurrences which interrupt longer actions in progress around a specific time in the past:

(i, ii) I woke up and I felt much better and I started to write….

(iii) They played in the Cavern Club before they were famous.

(iv) I was working at my office when he rang.

The past continuous is used to describe the background situation in which the events of the narrative occurred, for longer actions in progress at a point in time, and for repeated or temporary situations. In combination with the past simple, its use is commonly linked to interrupted or unfinished actions.

One night, when the Beatles were breaking up and I was feeling depressed…

I was living in Hamburg (= for a short time)

The past perfect simple is used to talk about something in the past which happened prior to another action or event, showing which of the two actions occurred first and emphasizing that one action finished before the second commenced. However, the past simple is more commonly used when the sequence of actions is already clear – when the second action follows as a result of the first, for instance, or when time conjunctions such as until, before and after illustrate the sequence without requiring the use of the past perfect. In such cases, the past perfect can be used to provide greater emphasis on the completion of the first action:

As soon as they saved up enough money they got married.

As soon as they had saved up enough money they got married.

There is a tendency for students to over-use the past perfect in situations where the past simple can be more naturally used with time conjunctions, or when the sequence of events is not in doubt. When teaching narrative tenses, it is therefore important that learners understand the past simple is by far the most common narrative tense, due to its range of uses and less complicated structure.

Form

1 Affirmative sentences in the past simple are formed using the subject + past tense verb. Regular past tense verbs are made by adding –ed to the infinitive.

When I woke up I felt much better and I started to write Let it Be.

Negative sentences are formed using didn’t + infinitive or wasn’t / weren’t + noun phrase / adjective.

Interrogatives are formed using (question word +) auxiliary + subject + infinitive for object questions:

Where did you go? Did you have fun?

In subject questions (when the subject is also the question word) word order is the same as in affirmative statements:

Who was the lead singer of the Beatles?

Short answers are formed by using yes / no + subject + auxiliary (Yes, I did)

2 Positive sentences in the past continuous are formed using subject + was / were +
present participle.

I was feeling depressed because the Beatles were breaking-up.

As with the past simple, the negative is formed using wasn’t / weren’t.

I wasn’t watching TV

Interrogatives are formed using (question word +) was / were + verb + ing:

What were you doing?

3 The past perfect simple is formed using subject + had + past participle:

I saw my mother, who had died when I was 14.

Negative sentences are formed using hadn’t + past participle.

Interrogatives are formed with (question word +) had + subject + past participle:

(Why) Had they left?

Phonological Features

The main phonological feature of the past perfect is the reduction of had to the weak form /d/. Similarly, in the past continuous were is reduced to /wə/ and was to /wəz/.

In the past simple, the regular –ed ending is pronounced as the syllable /ɪd/ when it follows /t/ and /d/ sounds (needed; wanted), /d/ after all other voiced sounds and /t/ after unvoiced sounds. One common error, particularly among speakers of phonetic languages, is to erroneously apply the first rule to verbs such as worked
( / wɜ:kɪd / rather than / wɜ:kt / ).

Stress may be applied to auxiliaries or main verbs in cases where they serve to emphasize statements or carry new information:

She wasn’t very happy. / w ɒ z /

I had seen her before. / hæd /

Class Profile

The lesson was taught to a Level 1 class at South Tyneside College which meets for three three-hour sessions each week. Of the twelve students present, approximately half were Iranian, with the remainder a mix of nationalities including Angolan, Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Polish. With a few exceptions, the grammatical knowledge of the students is relatively weak given the level of the class. The regular teacher had been preparing for the Cambridge Speaking & Listening exam, in which the students’ oral use of narrative tenses will be assessed. The class had previously studied the use of the present perfect simple to talk about past experiences and the difference between the past simple and past continuous.

Using a Dictogloss

Dictogloss is an activity in which short pieces of language are read out at normal speed to students, who take down the key words and then attempt to reconstruct the passage using their short term memory, their general understanding of the text, and notes they take while listening. A dictogloss commonly uses the following procedure:

Preparation: introduce the topic and key vocabulary.

Dictation: Read the text aloud at normal or near-normal speed, allowing students to orally reconstruct in small groups afterwards. On the second reading, students note down key words.

Analysis: Students attempt to reconstruct the text in their own words, first in pairs and subsequently in larger groups. The students will be utilizing their existing grammatical and lexical knowledge, practising their ability to record and extract the main ideas in a text, working collaboratively to produce a legible written record, proof-reading and revising work, and as a by-product justifying their opinions and asking questions to check and clarify information.

Feedback / Correction / Evaluation The completed texts are checked for meaning and accuracy.

As befitting its origins as a grammar teaching methodology, one of the primary benefits of a dictogloss is to reveal gaps in the students’ prior-knowledge and inter-language – hence its popularity as a diagnostic tool. Increasingly, however, the technique is being used as a more learner-centred form of dictation, leading in to work on areas such as pronunciation, lexis, functional exponents and spelling. Unlike traditional dictation exercises, in a dictogloss the emphasis is on the students’ ability to communicate in order to re-convey the meaning of the text, as opposed to re-producing it word for word. Tasks can be graded by giving ‘skeleton texts’ (the key nouns, for example) to the students before the first reading, by variations in the reading speed, or by decreasing the length of the text to be reconstructed (with the caveat that all texts should be of sufficient length that the students are not able to store it word-for-word in their short-term memory).

Lesson Self-Evaluation

Despite some problems with the presentation stage, the aim of the lesson – to revise the use of narrative tenses when orally relaying past experiences – was achieved.

The warmer served its purpose in getting the students to talk about famous people, and the lead-in, though not as active as I had anticipated, successfully elicited the name of Paul McCartney and resulted in a brief student-led discussion of Let it Be and the assassination of John Lennon, activating schemata and stimulating interest in the dictogloss topic.

The dictogloss itself threw up several interesting language issues. Each of the eventual three groups was able to successfully recreate the essential meaning of the text, and all of the final drafts included examples of the past simple and past continuous (I was feeling depressed; The Beatles were breaking (up). However, in all three cases the past simple was substituted for the past perfect in the sentence ... I saw my mum, who (had) died when I was 14. This omission could be attributed either to a gap in knowledge or a misunderstanding about the chronology of events in the narrative: subsequent concept checking showed that, for the majority of the class, knowledge of the past perfect was confined to an awareness of form rather than usage.

The dictogloss activity worked well as a diagnostic tool, highlighting pronunciation errors in the past simple and the need to revise the use of the past perfect. The pacing was adequate and the groupings had a good mix of abilities, resulting in a fun and challenging activity which succeeded in motivating the students for the presentation stage. The analysis stage didn’t work quite as well, mainly because I didn’t spend sufficient time focusing on the completed texts before moving on to the presentation. As a result, the next stage felt repetitive. An alternative would have been to use the students’ texts as a basis for an inductive presentation, perhaps highlighting a few key sentences such as the use of the past perfect on the board.

The checking of form was good, with the structure displayed on the board and the meaning concept checked with reference back to the dictogloss. The drilling of weak forms in the past perfect and past continuous (the past simple had been covered during the dictogloss analysis) included both choral and individual drilling, although I could have made more use of stronger students to model the sounds after my initial demonstration and choral practice.

The guided practice activities successfully re-enforced the structure and meaning of the target language, but perhaps relied too heavily on the students’ reading skills, especially when combined with the dictogloss. I chose to switch the pairings after the first guided practice, which improved the dynamics of the later activities.

The less-guided activity worked well. The topic, modeled with a personal story, was one the students were able to speak at length about, and the grid helped them to structure their narratives using all three tenses.

The free-er practice exercises provided an enjoyable and active end to the lesson, enabling the students to personalize the target language and moving away from the earlier dependence on reading skills.

Conclusion

Narrative tenses are often a problematic language area to cover with students at Level 1. Potential difficulties include the pronunciation of weak forms, the structural organization of narratives, and confusion between the meaning and use of the three main tenses, in particular the past perfect to look backwards from a point in the past. The dictogloss provided a good initial summary of the students’ abilities, exposing a lack of knowledge about the past perfect and allowing them to revise the difference in meaning between the past simple and past continuous.

Set-up correctly, a dictogloss is a useful and enjoyable method of presenting new language, as well as checking existing knowledge. It allows students to practise their proof-reading, writing, speaking and listening skills, gives the teacher an opportunity to diagnose gaps in knowledge, and raises the students’ awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses, aiding the process of reflective learning. It also utilizes many of Krashen’s theories on language acquisition, providing interest in the subject by means of a problem-solving activity, using language as the medium of instruction and exposing learners to language that is slightly beyond their current level of comprehension in a fun, low-stress manner. (Krashen, 1998)

Bibliography

Resource Books for Teachers: Grammar Dictation – Ruth Wajnryb (OUP, 1990)

How to Teach Grammar – Scott Thornbury (Longman, 1999)

Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition – Stephen Krashen (Prentice Hall, 1987)

Word Count: 2,018

Assignment 8.1

2007-12-09T12:04:00.000-08:00

Developing Language Skills for Teachers and Learners

Selected Authentic Texts

Text 1: Tourist Information Leaflets (Entry 3 / Level 1)

Language Skills: Using organisational features to locate information (Rt/E3.5, Rt/L1.4); scan texts to find information (Rt/E3.7); obtain specific information through detailed reading (Rt/E3.8, Rt/L1.5); identify main points and specific detail (Rt/L1.3).

Pre-reading task: Elicit tourist attraction. Students discuss places they’ve visited in the local area.

1st Reading: Elicit questions people ask before they visit an attraction onto board. Students read leaflets and find as many answers as they are able to. Swap information in groups.

2nd Reading: Students read again to find one thing they like and don’t like about each attraction.

Post-reading: In groups, students compare the attractions and choose one place they’d like to visit.

Text 2: Article from GNER magazine – A Guided Walk around Newcastle (Level 1/ Level 2)

Language Skills: Identify the main points and specific detail, and infer meaning from images which is not explicit in the text (Rt/L1.3); use knowledge and experience to try out plausible meanings and check for sense (Rs/L1.1, Rs/L2.1); practise reading for detail (Rt/L2.3).

Lead-in Ask students if they’ve ever been to Newcastle. Do you like it? Tell your partner. Feedback and elicit things to do and places to visit in the city.

Pre-reading task Tell students they’re going to go on a guided walk around the city. Brainstorm common ways of giving directions. Hand out large maps from tourist office with route sketched in. In pairs, students orally direct themselves along the route.

Ist Reading Hand out jumbled-up description of walk. Using the directions from the pre-reading task to help, pairs put the stages of the walk in the correct order.

2nd Reading Hand out complete text. Students match definitions and synonyms to selected expressions (or match expressions to a jumbled-up glossary).

Post–reading: Students design a short guided walk around their hometown (or a place they know well).

Text 3: Bus Timetable (Entry 2)

Language Skills: Practise gist, skim and detailed reading skills (Rt/E2.1); identify common source of information (Rt/E2.3)

Pre-reading task Brainstorm kinds of public transport. Students talk about what kinds of transport they use and why. Feedback – ask students how they get to college.

Gist reading Elicit what time the lesson starts. Hand out bus timetable. Students read quickly and find out whether a student could take this bus to an ESOL lesson at college.

Detailed Reading A number of specific questions could be asked, either in true or false, multiple-choice or read and find the answer form. Students could be asked to find information about destinations, times of specific buses, prices, etc.

Post-reading task Students do a roleplay a practise planning a journey, asking about available buses, times, prices, etc. Students could also talk about a journey they take by public transport – where they get on and off, what number bus or what time metro they take, etc.

Text 4: Imagine (Level 1)

Language Skills: Practise listening for specific information (Lr/L1.1); follow and contribute to discussions (Lr/L1.6).

Pre-listening Students answer questions about music. Feedback and use as lead-in to The Beatles, John Lennon, etc.

Listening Hand out gapped text or change some lyrics. Students listen and change / correct.

Post-listening Students discuss whether they agree with Lennon’s idea of the perfect world. Groups decide on what they’d like to do to improve the world.

Lesson Evaluation (Tourist Information Leaflets)

The lesson was taught to a Level 1 class comprising 12 students from a mixture of nationalities (Iranian, Sri Lankan, Polish, Bangladeshi and Moroccan). The students were preparing for the Cambridge Speaking and Listening exam, in which candidates are often asked to discuss visitor attractions. The main focus of the lesson was to be able to understand and use a number of functional expressions for changing the subject, checking information and showing interest while listening. Subsidiary aims included giving gist and detailed reading practice while revising the subject of places to visit and planning days out.

The warmer and pre-reading tasks achieved the purpose of getting the students interested in the topic of travel plans, and leading-in to the introduction of the leaflets. The reading tasks were sufficiently challenging – the students were able to locate most of the answers to the questions I’d elicited on to the board.

In my opinion, the aim of the lesson was met: the students were all able to use at least some of the functional expressions in the practice activities, particularly when showing interest and changing the subject. The activities were varied and challenging, and allowed sufficient scope for the students to use a range of expressions. The listening itself – three native speakers discussing the attractions in the leaflets given to the students – was more difficult than I intended owing to the sound quality and the size of the room. However, giving the students the functional expressions prior to the listening, and encouraging peer-teaching, helped the students achieve the task. In the speaking activities, the tourist information was slightly rushed as I wanted to give the students free-er speaking practice. In future, I would give the students more time to prepare questions and locate information.

Despite the relative success of the lesson, in retrospect the listening and functional expressions might have been better used as a separate follow-up lesson to the tourist information leaflets. A reading lesson based on the leaflets could be expanded with each group given different leaflets and, after comparing information about their attractions, deciding on one place to visit, listing reasons and then attempting to persuade students from other groups. A subsequent activity could be to actually plan a visit to the attraction the students eventually decide on, perhaps using the internet.

Appendix

Authentic materials – written texts

A major advantage of ESOL teaching in the UK is the wide availability of authentic written materials at a teacher’s disposal. Printed materials include newspaper and magazine articles, advertisements (including residential property listings, lonely hearts and classified ads), public transport timetables, shop and mail order catalogues, tourist information leaflets, TV listings, maps, junk mail, tickets, posters, signs and notices, postcards, brochures, personal letters, official documents, short stories, novels, film and book reviews, cartoon strips and newspaper weather reports. In addition, the internet provides a wealth of authentic materials, including personal blogs, emails, online articles and the websites of newspapers, magazines and broadcasting companies such as the BBC.

Authentic materials – spoken language and listening texts

The internet also provides a large and ever-growing selection of authentic spoken language. Examples include song lyrics, podcasts, streamed broadcasts, audio and video news reports, and video footage from sites such as YouTube. A further important source of authentic spoken material is the radio, in the form of reportage, news broadcasts, phone-ins, weather forecasts, quiz shows, sports commentary and topical discussions – most of which can also be recorded from TV. Furthermore, advances in technology mean that language teachers can now record a wide sample of spoken discourse – from conversations to public address announcements – using voice recording devices, such as those built-into many Mp3 players.

Bibliography

Learning Teaching – Jim Scrivener (Heinemann, 1994)

Inside Teaching – Tim Bowen and Jonathan Marks (Heinemann, 1994)

The Practice of English Language Teaching – Jeremy Harmer (Longman, 2001)

Assignment 11.1

2007-12-02T09:07:00.000-08:00

“Little Words, Big Grammar” – the natural way to teach grammar.

In the introduction to his book Natural Grammar, Scott Thornbury quotes Professor John Sinclair: “Learners would do well to learn the common words of the language very thoroughly, because they carry the main patterns of the language. “ As language teachers, we expend a great deal of classroom time drilling the difference between going to and will, the use of the first versus the second conditional, and the importance of verb backshift in reported speech. What we often overlook, however, is the vital importance of those couple of hundred little words that make up over fifty percent of all written and spoken language (and, by inference, the same amount of all written and spoken grammar).

“Words have grammar,” says Thornbury; it’s difficult to argue when the verb get, for example, connects to ten distinct patterns, from get + adverbial (What time did you get home?) for talking about arriving at places to get + noun phrase + noun phrase (Can you get me a coffee?), used to talk about giving and fetching things for other people. To take another example, will has four distinct patterns, including:

1 will / won’t + bare infinitive – used to make offers and promises, requests or orders, statements and predictions about future events and to talk about predictable behaviour, such as habits.

2 will + have + past participle – to predict something that will be finished at a certain time.

By teaching these patterns together, we will be equipping our students to use the most commonly occurring words in the English language and, as a bonus, teaching them grammar for free. For, as Thornbury and Sinclair have argued, whenever we use a word we are obliged to choose from the set selection of grammar patterns that accompanies it.

The traditional way of teaching grammar – often overly concerned with prescriptive rules and written language – can lead to confusion and the fossilization of errors: how many of us have come across an intermediate level student who still remembers being taught that going to and will are synonymous, or that we use going to for things we’re sure about and will for things we aren’t? Writing on One Stop English, Adrian Tennant concludes: “Instead of looking at grammar as a set of abstract rules and then examining how words fit into these patterns, we may well be better off starting from words and looking at the grammar they generate. By doing this we may well avoid the typical problem of only taking one meaning or use of a word and being guilty of oversimplification.”

When building a house, you start with the foundations. Learning a language is no different. As we have seen, grammar does not exist in isolation: in its most basic form – its foundations - it is no more or less than the patterns formed by the combination of words. We would do well to concentrate on these building blocks.

Word Count = 494 words.

Bibliography:

Adrian Tennent – Approaches to Grammar Teaching

http://www.onestopenglish.com/section.asp?docid=144972

Scott Thornbury – Natural Grammar (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Assignment 6.1: Pass

2007-11-10T03:06:00.001-08:00

Tutor Comments:

Concise, well-signposted with clear headings. Easy to read and comprehensive!
All assessment criteria has been met; however, you need to add a bibliography referencing your very relevant sources.

Oops!

Assignment 6.1

2007-10-12T00:43:00.000-07:00

The current national context of post-compulsory education and ESOL

The Moser Report (1999) identified approximately “one adult in five” as being “not functionally literate” and a far greater number (roughly 40%) as having basic numeracy problems. In his findings, Moser reported inconsistencies in Basic Skills teaching, which was described as being variable in both quality and quantity, and recommended a National Strategy be implemented to tackle identified shortcomings in ten key areas, including the adoption of national targets, a standardised curriculum, teacher training, improved inspections and planning of delivery and a new system of qualifications.

ESOL was of peripheral concern to Moser, who recommended that an ESOL-specific report be commissioned. This resulted in Breaking the Language Barriers (2000), which reported on the needs of learners for whom English was not a first language. This report made a further series of recommendations, among which were a request that FENTO “develop…initial training and qualifications framework for new entrants to ESOL teaching,” and a call for the production of support materials for ESOL tutors.

Many of the reports’ recommendations were implemented in the Skills for Life Strategy (2001), which set national standards for adult literacy, numeracy and language learning. The ESOL national curriculum was published in the same year, followed in 2002 by curriculum training and the Skills for Life materials. Further to this, Subject Specifications for Basic Skills and ESOL teachers were developed in 2003, and ESOL Skills for Life exams began the following year. The initial target of 750,000 adult learners to obtain an Entry 3 level qualification by 2004 was met, and a new national target was set of 1.5 million to achieve the same by 2007. The role of FE institutions in achieving these goals is crucial, both in terms of providing courses for learners and, as in the case of Newcastle College, training provision for teachers.

The local context: South Tyneside College

South Tyneside College is a relatively small ESOL provider, with a single class at each of the five levels of the National Qualifications Framework. As with all FE institutions, the college has adopted the standardised Skills for Life materials and exams, and teachers are expected to complete termly Individual Learning Plans and Schemes of Work mapped to the curriculum. In line with the Moser Report’s recommendations, community-based provision is offered at outreach and cultural centres, and the use of Information Technology is encouraged within lessons. The ESOL department follows the learning cycle set out by the Skills for Life initiative in compiling assessments, although no use is currently made of the national diagnostic and assessment tools provided by the DfES.

Key education policies currently influencing practice

Teacher Training

Effective from 2003, all new and existing ESOL teachers have been required to train for FENTO subject specialist qualifications. As recommended in Breaking the Language Barriers, these courses involve training in linguistics, pronunciation and intonation, grammar and practical teaching skills. Teachers also need to log at least 30 hours of continuous professional development training every year. In my opinion, these measures can only lead to an increase in the quality of teaching within the sector and, in particular, the awareness of teachers towards methodology, best practice and cultural sensitivity.

The Skills for Life Materials

The 2004 publication of a dedicated set of free teaching materials from Entry Level 1 up to Level 2 has undoubtedly helped to standardise the ESOL curriculum, and increased the scope and quality of materials available to tutors. However, the materials have been criticised for their over-emphasis on skills work at the expense of grammar, while their cultural relevance has dated badly due to demographic changes resulting from the large number of students arriving from EU accession countries. Having used the materials in class, I’ve found that I’m often required to very heavily supplement them. A major area of weakness is the lack of practice activities included compared to the many coursebooks developed for EFL teaching.

The Skills for Life Exams

Administered chiefly by Cambridge and Edexcel, Skills for Life Exams are available in reading, writing and speaking and listening modes from Entry Level 1 to Level 2. In addition to meeting Moser’s call for a new system of qualifications, the exams help to motivate learners and standardise lesson planning, providing goals for learners and their teachers to work towards. However, they retain some significant drawbacks: the qualifications are not widely recognised internationally or by domestic employers and, given the link between exam results and funding, there could be a tendency for teachers to coach their students in the specific language they need to pass an exam as opposed to topics of more immediate need.

The role and implementation of ILPs

From the Skills for Life Initiative to publications such as the FENTO-produced Including Language, Literacy and Numeracy Learning in All Post-16 Education (2004), ILPs are commonly seen as exemplifying good practice in ESOL teaching. Arrived at by mutual negotiation between the teacher and learner, and based on student needs and the results of initial and diagnostic assessments, ILP targets should be measurable and time-bound, aiding the teacher’s course planning and ensuring a focus on the needs of the individual. Additionally, the use of ILPs is seen as essential in enabling independent learning, building a student’s ability to plan, set targets, and both monitor and reflect on their performance.

ILPs therefore form of an integral part of the Skills for Life Initiative’s Learning Cycle, coming after the Diagnostic Assessment (which provides the basis for ILP targets), informing the subsequent choice of in-class learning materials, and being used as the yardstick for regular formative assessments to review the learner’s progress.

The usage, lay-out and scope of ILPs varies widely between institutions. South Tyneside College uses a booklet format with sections for tutor notes on any issues the students may have outside of class as well as end-of-course and tem reviews, termly learning goals and both long and short-term objectives. Carbon-paper is used to enable the teacher and learner to keep their own individual copies. To aid the process of drawing-up and reviewing ILPs individual tutorial time is set aside at the end of lessons.

My own experience of ILPs

Firstly, having started work in the ESOL sector in late-January 2007, I have limited personal experience of both the implementation of ILPs and their effect on my personal practice. However, as outlined above, I’ve found that the use of ILPs offers several potential advantages: they promote a focus on individual rather than just group needs, actively involve students in the learning process, enable teachers and students to record and review progress towards learning goals, and can help to draw attention to the ‘spiky profiles’ of learners within same-level classes.

Allowing for this, I have practical and pedagogical reservations about the current use of ILPs with ESOL learners. In particular, I believe their effectiveness with lower-level learners is open to question. Drawing-up ILPs with a Pre-Entry level class was a substantially teacher-led experience: my students were, in the main, unable to express let alone negotiate their targets. Students at all levels also often have very general goals (“I want to learn English to get a job,” “I want to practise my speaking”) which cannot be strictly measured. In these cases there is a danger of targets being imposed on learners, often to suit the requirements of inspectors.

The need for targets to be measurable and time-bound runs counter to many current theories of language acquisition, assuming a linear process of learning or, in the words of Lightbown and Spada (How Languages are Learned), “the gradual accumulation of one linguistic item after another”. In my own personal experience ‘soft’ targets are often much more appropriate to learners than SMART ones. These could be anything from understanding a neighbour to improving attendance or finding more opportunities to use English outside of class.

My other personal concerns are the time needed to draw-up ILPs - especially in large classes with limited classroom contact time – and the difficulty of integrating individual goals into what are often necessarily group based lesson plans and schemes of work. I have also noted that my students’ short-term needs can change rapidly, often based on knowledge gaps identified during lessons, and that too much emphasis is sometimes put on setting simplistic targets rather than recording actual progress.

Many of these concerns were noted by NIACE in a report entitled More than a Language (2006). The authors called for guidance on the implementation of ILPs “in the ESOL context, taking account of ESOL pedagogy and the needs and capabilities of English language learners,” and recommended that the appropriateness of ILPs for lower-level learners be reviewed.

Conclusion

The Moser Report, and the subsequent findings of reports such as Breaking the Language Barriers, has resulted in huge changes in ESOL, affecting both learners and teachers, and bringing standardised curricula and teacher training, new qualifications and innovations in the planning and quality of delivery.

Although ILPs are theoretically valuable, I believe research needs to be undertaken with regard to their appropriateness for lower-levels, and that much more advice should be issued to teachers on the preparation and review of ILP targets.

Bibliography

How Languages are Learned - Ligtbown and Spada (OUP, 1999)
Findings of the ILP Working Party - LLLU (South Bank University, 2002)
The ILP Debate - Reflect (NRDC, 2005)
More Than A Language - NIACE (2006)
The Moser Report - DFEE (1999)