Answer keys: more than an afterthought

Answer keys are a vital part of ELT materials, relied on by teachers and learners alike, but probably rarely given a huge amount of thought. A couple of recent writing projects, though, have got me thinking about this undiscussed part of an ELT author's job and what it can sometimes tell you about the rationale behind the materials more generally.

Case 1: tight and unambiguous

On the first project, writing workbook materials to go with a C1 general English book, part of the brief explained that in some of the key target markets for the course, teachers were over-worked and had no time to spend on marking homework. Thus, they wanted workbook material they could assign as extra practice for homework that students could work through and check the answers for themselves. For that reason, all the activities I included should have clear, unambiguous 'correct' answers to go in the AK.

In addition, I was told that some teachers lacked confidence teaching at higher levels, because they were often pushing up against their own language limits, and so didn't want learners coming back to them with questions or potential ambiguities in the workbook. Another reason to keep things tightly keyed.

Of course, this had a significant affect on the kinds of activities I could include. Many areas of language simply aren't black and white, especially once you get to C1 level, and it's really quite hard to construct activities where there's only one possible 'correct' answer without making everything strictly multiple choice. And even if you do opt for multiple choice (in some form), it can sometimes be hard to come up with distractors that look plausible but are clearly incorrect. This was made even trickier by the fact that I was also being pushed to keep the level high and the tasks appropriately challenging!

Case 2: open and productive

The second project was again supplementary materials, this time for B1+, that could either be given as homework or potentially used in class. This time, the instructions were for a proportion (actually set out in the brief as a percentage) of the activities to be productive - with either some leeway in how students answered or completely open. Multiple-choice activities were off limits!

From a pedagogical perspective, this is quite freeing, letting you get away from what can often feel like rather mechanical controlled practice and allowing more freedom for creativity - constructing activities that best fit the language points. It's nice not having to tie yourself up in knots trying to come up with unambiguous answers for everything.

However, it can have its downsides too. When you're creating activities to practise a particular vocab set or grammar point, you still need to construct an activity that guides the learners to use that specific language. And sometimes, multi-choice is really just the most obvious option.

Formats and formatting

Most projects I've worked on as an author (including case 1 above) have asked for simple answer keys, by which I mean if you have the following item in an activity:
1 The cat _____ (sit) on the mat.
... then the answer key would simply read:
1 sat

Sometimes, I've been allowed to give maybe two slashed alternative answers in the key or to give a very brief commentary explaining why one answer (perhaps a distractor or an obvious likely error) is incorrect/unlikely. I've also had instances where "suggested answers" were occasionally allowed - usually for the last activity of a section or for a writing task.

From a practical perspective, when I'm putting together an answer key, I generally use the split screen function in Word, so I can see the activity at the top of the screen and add the answers (generally at the end of the document) at the bottom. 

 

 

 

Project 2 above, with it's requirement for freer, more productive activities not only needed plenty of "suggested" answers, but the answer key was to include the rubrics and the answers shown in context. So, the example above would appear in the answer key as:

Complete the sentences using the past simple of the verb in brackets. 
1 Yesterday, the cat sat (sit) on the mat.

At first glance, this seemed like it'd be a fairly straightforward case of cutting and pasting, and to a degree, it was. However, for someone who finds fiddly mousework painful, it turned out to be especially tough going. I settled into an approach of writing the initial activity with the answers in situ.
1 The cat sat (sit) on the mat.
Then when I was happy with the complete activity, I'd copy that into the AK (at the end of the document), then go back and 'blank out' the answers in the main activity - in fact usually replacing the words with [WOL] (the standard abbreviation for 'write-on line').
1 The cat [WOL] (sit) on the mat.

Simple enough, right? Except that highlighting exactly the word/words to be replaced with [WOL] with your cursor can be quite fiddly, especially where it appears directly before a comma or full-stop (without catching the punctuation mark) or where it's the contracted form of a verb - the cat's sitting on the mat. After a long stretch of grammar activities that included present/past continuous and present/past perfect, I started trying to remember to leave spaces between the subject and contraction to make it easier to highlight ... but when you're thinking and typing at speed, it's actually surprisingly hard to do. Cue much swearing and rubbing of sore hands/wrists!

Future perfect and the ‘will’ you probably won’t have taught

Recently, I was doing some corpus digging to see how the future perfect tense (will have done) is actually used. It’s one of those tenses that tends to make people roll their eyes and question whether it’s worth teaching. And I have to admit, when you see a whole load of examples together on the page of an ELT coursebook, it does start to look awkward and contrived. That’s why I turned to the corpus, to see if I could find some more natural-sounding contexts for it.

I constructed a CQL search as below to look for examples. I knew it wouldn’t capture absolutely everything (it doesn’t include negatives with won’t or passives – will have been done - and it only allows for one adverb in one position – e.g. will probably have done), but it was enough to get me started.

 

Then I disappeared down a grammatical rabbit hole! My main finding? Only roughly 40% of the corpus cites for this structure refer to future time and can really be described as future perfect tenses. So, what were the rest? 

 

Showing my workings:

Before I get into the details, a note about my “methodology”. This was a very quick, rough and ready bit of research, so you shouldn’t pin too much significance on the exact stats. I do, though, think it says something about the general pattern of usage. I looked at three different corpora – the English Trends web corpus (2014-now), the enTenTen21 corpus and for a comparison with spoken language, the BNC2104 spoken corpus (all via SketchEngine). For each one, I performed the same CQL search, then selected a random sample of 100 lines. I went through those lines manually noting down how many lines referred clearly to future time and could be described as the future perfect tense, then everything else was relegated to the “other” category. I did it as a fairly quick scan and I didn’t spend ages agonizing over each line. There were inevitably tricky cases, and I may not have been entirely consistent about how I categorized them. The spoken data was especially tricky, as it always is, because it’s messy and contains lots of repetitions, false starts and fragments of language. This is quite a purposeful construction though (you have to stop and think to put it together), so most of the cites were fairly clear.  There were also a handful  of odd cases in each set where the past participle was actually being used as an adjective with have as the main verb (The supermarket will have frozen fruit, won’t they?), these got lumped in with the “not future”

How DO we use the future perfect?

Looking at the cites which did express a future perfect, they were actually a lot like the kind of examples you find in ELT books. 

 

There were the predictions about the future, especially around climate change (...warn that by as early as 2025 the ice will have melted), or on a more mundane level, weather forecasts (On Thursday that area of rain will have moved away).

There were planning and logistics contexts describing events on a timeline (At 7:30pm, the polls will have closed in Ohio), again, some of them fairly informal and everyday (we're going away the May half term week hopefully - oh okay they'll have finished their exams).

And there were quite a lot of stats and trends of various kinds (... insisting spending will have fallen by £100m over the life of this parliament; The figure will have climbed to 120 by the time the Newcastle outlet opens.)

One interesting usage is in adverts, especially for training courses, touting what you’ll have achieved by the end of the course (By the end of the workshop, you will have developed a draft of a capability statement for your business! When the day is over, you will have experienced Chattanooga in a way that few people have).

I think the main reason that future perfect examples in ELT materials tend to come across as contrived is simply because we don’t typically use lots of instances together. It’s a tense that crops up now and again, so it’s not the individual examples that are inauthentic, it’s just seeing so many of them crowbarred together, especially when someone tries to combine them in a single text … which is hard to avoid when the structure’s the focus of a lesson or activity.

Hypothetical futures

There were a chunk of examples in conditionals or other types of hypothetical contexts, which I don’t want to get into too much here. Some of these were based in reality and fairly easy to pin down as being about future time (If you leave it till tomorrow, they’ll have sold out), others were a bit more abstract and my brain started to melt a bit when I tried to figure out the timelines (if I were sat in the back seat I mean what am I going to do if I think you're driving dangerously? It'll be too late you'll have crashed).

Will as a modal expressing certainty + present perfect

As I said at the start, around 60% of the cites in the written corpora, far more in the spoken data, weren’t referring to future time at all and couldn’t (and shouldn’t!) be classified as future perfect. Taking into account the messy odds and sods, let’s say around half were actually examples of will being used as a modal verb to express certainty, strong likelihood or expectation*, along with a present perfect tense used in the regular kind of present perfect way to express recent past or events at some point in the past with a result in the present. It’s particularly common to make assumptions about what your audience is likely to know already; you’ll have heard/seen/read. But it crops up in a range of contexts, including to express expectations in job adverts (You will have worked at a senior level on at least one national publication; applicants ideally will have completed coursework in technology, software development, transportation or other related areas.)

And of course, will can be used in this way with a range of tenses. Rather than reinvent the wheel, here’s the entry about this usage from the Collins COBUILD English Grammar:

 

 

(Click to enlarge)

 

It’s something I feel I may have seen mentioned in ELT materials here and there, but it’s certainly not a use I’ve seen really highlighted or taught with a variety of verb tenses.  Perhaps one to be added to syllabuses, especially at upper levels?

 

* Of course, there’s an argument that will is always a modal expressing certainty/likelihood. You can replace it with other modals to express different degrees of certainty – By 2030 emissions will/might/may/are highly likely to have exceeded … But at least in the future perfect as described above, it is also expressing future time.

The Summer Shift: wobbly workflow

As we head into November and the days get shorter, I’ve been looking back on what’s been an up-and-down summer, and not just in terms of the weather.

Back in July, I wrote about a shift in what I’m working on, away from a long-term lexicography project and back to the regular freelance juggling act. The lexicography work hasn’t finished altogether, but from the start of August, I dropped down to significantly fewer hours. I had a new writing project lined up and I thought I’d managed to arrange my schedule to balance the two projects fairly evenly for the remainder of the year. So, how’s that been going?

Delays, delays, delays

The new project, writing a workbook for a new coursebook series, was due to use authoring software that I’d been told would need setting up before I got started. This was pencilled in to happen towards the end of July/beginning of August, then I was due to start work on my first unit at the end of August. The set-up, which I thought might take a couple of days, turned out to be incredibly messy and dragged on in dribs and drabs for weeks – waiting for replies to emails about problems I hit, waiting to arrange a call with an IT person and all hampered by the fact it was summer and key people were ‘on leave’.

Frustratingly, at the same time, there were changes going on in my lexicography work too which left me unable to carry on at several points as I waited for things to be implemented in-house. Those delays weren’t especially long, but just happened to coincide with the delays on the other project leaving me twiddling my thumbs and watching my income slip away. It might seem nice to have time ‘off’ right in the middle of summer, but they were the kind of delays where I was checking my email each day hoping for progress, so I couldn’t really use the time to do much else. And all round, it left me with worringly few paid hours through August.

And we’re off!

The software issues finally got resolved at the start of September and I got started on some writing just a week or so later than planned. I settled into the rhythm I’d envisaged for a couple of weeks, with roughly a third of my weekly hours on dictionary work and two-thirds on the writing project.

Because it was the first unit of a new project, there was a bit of time waiting for feedback and redrafting, then the unit had to be passed up the line for approval before I could carry on. Annoyingly, this once again coincided with a bit of a pause in my lexicography work and a few days of thumb-twiddling. Luckily, I had a talk to prep, so managed to fill the time productively, albeit unpaid.

October overload

I’d hoped to make a start on my next WB unit before I went away to the Euralex conference at the start of October, but for various reasons, it didn’t happen. That left me playing catch-up for a couple of weeks when I got back and working well over the number of hours I’d usually put in at my desk. It was only a handful of extra hours, but because it was a new project and new software, the extra focus and concentration involved really took its toll on me physically.

Finding my flow

As I’ve explained before, in order to manage a chronic pain condition, I need to work in relatively short bursts spread out through the day and through the week with plenty of breaks in-between. That’s super-easy with lexicography work that breaks down naturally into short stints. Activities for a workbook should also be fairly modular, but as this is for C1 level and each unit includes relatively long reading and listening texts, it’s easy to get caught up and spend longer stretches at my desk focused on getting a section sorted and not wanting to interrupt the flow while I’ve got everything clear in my head. The authoring software is also proving to be especially fiddly, which means greater stress and tension through my shoulders and hands manipulating the mouse to get the formatting correct.

When I talk about work taking a strain on my health, people often tell me to “be careful” and “take it easy”. I know the comments are well meant, but they’re also slightly grating because they infer that it’s somehow my fault and that I should just organize my work better so that it didn’t impact my health … which of course, is vastly easier said than done! When you’re trying to get your head around a complex new project, dealing with various inevitable stress factors (delays, miscommunication, looming deadlines) and you’re also under financial pressure, “taking it easy” isn’t always feasible.

Settling down

Thankfully, the writing project does seem to be settling down, with some of those initial teething problems sorted out. I’ve also pushed back a bit on the schedule, which has concertinaed up slightly from what I’d originally envisaged. I don’t want to extend deadlines too much because it’s a fee-based project, so if I take longer working on it, I effectively lose income, but a bit of shuffling by the odd day here and there, I think will make for a slightly easier workflow. 

Deadlines on sticky notes to allow for reshuffling!

 

Last week was moving towards being a slightly better balance of hours and towards the end of the week, there was a sense of feeling more on top of things. This weekend was also my first fully non-working weekend in several weeks (although I did write this blog post!). So, I’m hoping I can find a better workflow through November and December at least … before the added stress of needing to find new work from January onwards starts to kick in! It’s making me wonder how I’ve managed for the past 25 years of freelancing! A few easy years of ticking along with one project and I feel like I’ve rather lost the knack of the freelance juggle.

Euralex 2024, Croatia

After 25 years of working in dictionaries, I recently I attended my first ever lexicography conference, the Euralex Conference held in Cavtat, Croatia (8-12 Oct). That might seem a bit surprising, but comes down to a number of factors about the nature of lexicography and lexicography conferences.

Why was it my first lexicography conference?

Primarily, it's because the kind of lexicography I do, working as a freelancer for UK commercial dictionary publishers is a bit of an anomaly in the world of lexicography. In many countries and for many languages other than English, lexicography is something carried out largely by academics attached to universities and language institutes, and funded by governments and grants from places like the EU keen to support those countries' linguistic and cultural heritage. So, many of the conference presentations were much less about the kind of practical, jobbing lexicography that I do and instead were papers reporting on academic research, often in very niche, theoretical areas.

At the reception on the first evening, I found myself chatting to Dirk Geeraerts, a very eminent name in the field and one of the plenary speakers - whose name, thankfully, I did recognize despite my incredibly patchy knowledge of academic lexicography! I was explaining my background and commenting that I didn't even understand many of the talk titles in the programme. He responded that it was probably all stuff I did know about but I just didn't recognize the terminology. He turned out to be spot on.

Not a bad spot for a coffee break!

So, why was I there?

Unlike the ELT conferences I typically go to, there was no chance of me being sponsored by a publisher to speak and there were almost no publishing contacts there for me to network with and potentially pick up new work. All reasons why, as a freelance lexicographer working on commercial dictionaries, I'd never been to a lexicography conference before. My "in" came, instead, via my role with the AS Hornby Dictionary Research Awards (ASHDRA), which are, as the name suggests, directly involved in dictionary research. The Hornby Trust was one of the conference sponsors, they sponsored the Hornby Lecture, this year by the fabulous Kory Stamper, and the current ASHDRA awardees presented their research (remotely online) in a slot at the event which, this year, I chaired.

Kory Stamper giving the Hornby Lecture

 
Was it useful?

In a very general sense, it was useful to give me a feel for the wider field. I'd been kind of aware of the differences I mentioned above, but meeting lexicographers and researchers from other countries and languages has crystallized just how different their worlds are from mine.

With my ASHDRA hat on, it's given me a better sense of what dictionary research looks like, and the norms and expectations of the field. As Dirk predicted, I had quite a few aha moments where I realized that some concept or theory or framework that I'd never heard of and sounded incredibly fancy was actually something I already knew about and use pretty much daily but without knowing the relevant label! And of course, it was a chance to spread the ASHDRA message and publicize the awards.

On a more personal level, I met lots of interesting people and it was been fun getting into some incredibly nerdy, niche conversations about the intricacies of dictionary compilation, corpus tools, and, inevitably, the impact of AI and LLMs on the field. Most of the new contacts I've made are unlikely to lead to future work, just because they work in such very different arenas, but one or two could potentially result in the odd offshoot which could be interesting.

Good to meet the team behind Sketch Engine, the corpus software I use.

As most of my trip was self-funded, it was an incredibly costly week. I decided to go at the start of the year when work was more stable and my finances were less precarious. More recently, it's felt like an outlay I could ill afford (and one which came out of my personal savings), but seeing as it was all booked, there was no point in feeling resentful and I tried to draw the positives out of it. Not least of those was the opportunity to visit beautiful Croatia. As is often the case with conferences, I spent much of my time inside windowless conference rooms, but I did have a free day at the start of the week to visit Dubrovnik and I grabbed a free afternoon to swim in the warm, crystal-clear waters of the Adriatic, so I really mustn't grumble!

Dubrovnik Old Town

 

 

The sparkling, crystal-clear Adriatic

 

Cavtat

 

 

 

The Adam Kilgarriff Memorial hike