Elka’s Teaching Tips

• Pay attention to transitions during class, from topic to topic. She writes on the board before class the main things we’ll discuss and goes over them verbally at the start of class. She uses the recorder to silence us at the end of a work group session.
• Have people work in threes rather than pairs. It allows for a mediator if two people disagree.
• On the first day she brought in a flower that had a bloom and a bud, and explain that some of us were in bloom and others in bud. She brings in the flower every day and sets it on the floor in the middle of the room, along with some books and, if people bring it, cake or goodies. Today when I felt overwhelmed I looked at the flower and was reminded to take my time and not be harsh on myself.
• Today she referred to a previous day’s teaching: “Remember we had this whole list…” she said as she walked over to the easel and waved her arm as if to re-summon the words on the big paper — and probably some of us were able to reimagine what had been there.
• Balance of teacher- and student-generated content
• Visual presentations should be clean. She likes justified. She likes two-column.
• She did a cool thing: writing terms and ideas on the blackboard (using different colored chalk for different types of concept). It was haphazardly arranged — not neat and orderly, so order isn’t always crucial. But the cool thing was she called a student up front at the end of class and would point to a concept, have the class summarize it, and then have the person erase it. One by one she reviewed key ideas and her “assistant” would then make it disappear.

In our group discussion about the French and Turkish intensives, the French students said their teacher…

• Makes them say a positive thing about their own language-learning aptitude
• Reading comprehension paragraph (v. our teacher’s dictation)
• He has them just listen several times before he lets them repeat

Terminology

• Inductive (data-based) and deductive (rule-based) learning; people are generally divided 50/50, so use both
• Input (meaning is more important than form; i+1)
• Scaffolding
• Fossilization
• Shortcuts
• Patterns
• Thomas Khun principle: people learn not from what something is, but what it is not. Which leads us to…
• Minimal oppositions: lexicon/semantics: clock, watch; phonetics: b, v (difference can’t be heard by some unless they’re juxtaposed), pragmatics (formal v. informal); syntax: simple present v. present progressive
• “The Magic Seven”: short-term memory can hold only seven words
• Input flood
• Focal v. peripheral attention
• Brain-based learning: a field that says brain likes patterns more than isolated facts, it processes consciously and unconsciously, learns from meaningful experiences, needs “shortcuts” [SLA says this too] and requires different modalities (kinesthetic, olfactory, visual, auditory…) for learning
• Affordance: fundamentals in your teaching; tools; creating linguistic opportunities with concrete input (includes cultural learning).
• When writing on the blackboard, in whatever style you choose (all caps, etc) be consistent with style and lettering. Good luck, Ginna, with “the handwriting of a mass-murderer.” —LW

Some examples of TESOL affordance are:

• Storytelling
• Field trips
• Flip charts
• Food (as cultural lesson too)
• Role play/drama
• Multimedia
• Current events
• Realia (stamps, olives)
• “Draw aaaaaa…’ exercise [input flooding example]
• For scaffolding she found a cheap roll of receipt tape and wrote something (I couldn’t hear her) on it and put it up in the classroom, like the ABCs in a kindergarten classroom
• Sentence-starters (“I think that… “)
• She talked about the human brain’s need for beauty and suggested we consider that idea for teaching “affordance” ideas.

Summary of Input

• Types: visual (like drawings) and visual (like writing), auditory, kinesthetic, tactile
• Shortcuts: patterns and other mnemonic devices
• Acquisitionally ready: e.g. tags (isn’t he) require foundation of auxilliaries first, tenses, and pronouns and syntax… That’s a later-learning thing. Can introduce an alternative first (e.g. “right?”). Then when you introduce it, “don’t worry…” show an initial pair just to communicate that there are many ways: “isn’t it” and “isn’t he?” for example
• Input flood
• Simplified input v. minimal pairs
• Inductive (humanities-type people) and deductive (scientists)
• Focal v. peripheral info
• Enhanced input (classic teachers’ device: red pens, marks, blackboard…)
• Comprehensible input
• Preventative v. remedial teaching
• Late acquisition categories (articles, colocations, infinitives, gerunds…)
• PPU (Presentation, practice, usage): classically presented as a triangle with the biggest slice being the “u” but now being thought of as a triangle on its tip, which starts with usage and still spends the most time there.
• Stepping stones

The LAD constrains the kind of mistakes we make: “I must to go.”

When she was putting stuff on the board, I was glad it was all in one “screen” like a Web site, and not spread out across two bulletin boards.