Gromit to the rescue!: The importance of having fun in EAP

After a week and a half teaching on the summer pre-sessional EAP course at Bristol University, I had a bit of a breakthrough with my class yesterday. The first week had, as usual, been rather hectic, sorting out admin stuff but also trying to adjust to a new programme and new course materials. All week, I felt like I was running just to stand still and that my lesson planning mostly involved figuring out what I was meant to be doing and what I needed photocopies of rather than really thinking about the best way to teach. So I got to the weekend feeling rather frustrated and deflated.

As someone who gets so little class time through the year, I really look forward to my summer teaching stint. It’s a chance to reconnect with students and colleagues, and to try out some of the ideas I’ve been accumulating through the year. So to have such a disappointing first week, where I didn’t really feel like I got into my stride and, perhaps more importantly, didn’t really connect with my students, was a real downer.

Anyway, Monday was even worse – more confusion about the programme and materials, and another slightly uninspired class. I got home feeling really dispirited and realized I needed a change of tack. Looking at the programme for Tuesday morning, I realized I had a class that seemed rather light on materials and spotted a chance to do something of my own. The theme for the week for the particular module I was teaching was data commentary, so I decided to do a bit of a fun warmer practising numbers. It was a spin on an old favourite where you put up a load of numbers and ask students to guess how they’re connected/what they represent. As my students are new to Bristol and had probably spent their first week just settling in and getting to grips with the course, it seemed like a good time to encourage them to explore the city a bit. So I put up a slide entitled “Bristol in numbers” – including a collection of numbers in some way connected to the city; some connected to events going on at the moment, including the decorated 'Gromits' scattered around the city. I gave them a couple of minutes to chat and make guesses, then added some picture clues.

They loved it! The whole mood of the class changed with lots of laughter and chatter, excitement, questions and sharing of experiences. I’d intended to spend just 10 minutes on the activity, but it probably stretched to 20 in the end. It was definitely time well spent, not only did it provide a bit of light relief in an otherwise fairly intensive programme, but it went a huge way towards creating that essential sense of rapport with the students.

It was helpful from a pedagogical point of view too. As I got students to explain each of the numbers, I was able to really insist on correct pronunciation and accurate expression. Because the task was supposedly ‘easy’, I could playfully tease them about errors, acting the strict school mistress role, and so stress the importance of accuracy without anyone losing face. It felt like a real turning point and the rest of the class, and this morning’s lesson too, had quite a different feel. We’re back to the ‘serious stuff’, but there are lighter moments too and, as a result, I’m definitely getting more from the students and hopefully, they’re getting more from my teaching.

EAP Perspectives

I spent the weekend at an EAP event at the University of Bristol Centre for English Language and Foundation Studies. Sadly, this summer I'm not going to be doing my usual teaching stint there because of other work commitments. As that 'other work' involves writing EAP materials though, I was keen to go along to find out what other EAP teachers are thinking and doing. It's often said that it's relatively easy to write classroom materials to use yourself - you know how you like to teach, you know why you've chosen the materials, what you want to get out of them, how long you're likely to spend on each task and of course, you've chosen the source material because it appeals to you or will be just right for your students. One of the biggest challenges of writing materials for publication is in creating something that's clear, accessible, relevant and appealing to teachers with a wide range of teaching styles and approaches, different levels of knowledge and experience, and faced with all sorts of teaching contexts. And although you chat to colleagues in the staffroom, it tends to be more about admin or that awkward problem student than really what you're doing in the classroom.  So an event where a group of EAP teachers from different institutions were getting together to discuss teaching was a great opportunity to collect some insights and ideas to help in my writing.

I went along with the intention of sitting quietly in the corner as an observer, soaking up as much as possible of what everyone else was saying, but anyone who knows me, will tell you that it's just not in my nature to keep quiet! I just can't resist a good discussion and soon found my hand creeping up. I still managed to do a lot of listening though and made lots of mental notes about different ideas and perspectives. There were far too many interesting points raised and discussed to talk about here (and some I may come back to in later posts), but a few of the things that particularly piqued my interest were:

• the difference between 'corpus-driven' and 'corpus-informed' materials
• the place of the discursive essay across different academic disciplines and whether it's the most useful form of writing to teach on a general EAP course
• the influence of new UK immigration rules on who can apply for student visas here and the implications for how we label courses and materials by level
• the balance between teaching academic skills and language on an EAP course

On that final point, I'd always been rather on the side of including more language work in EAP courses and have felt  frustrated by courses that are so dominated by academic skills that there's little or no time left for work on vocabulary or grammar. On Sunday though, I found myself partly won over by the idea that on a very short pre-sessional course, at least, you're unlikely to make a huge amount of difference to a student's overall language level, but if you can equip them with some basic academic skills and help them to be more prepared for the academic context then that will go a long way towards making up for any language deficit and carrying them through the year to come.

Sometimes, it's really good to have your assumptions and beliefs challenged a bit and to feel your views shifting slightly.  Thanks to everyone who provided so much food for thought over the weekend, it gave me plenty to ponder and may well prompt some more posts ...

Away from my desk ...

Well, I'm now almost exactly halfway through my 5 weeks of summer teaching and I don't think I've managed to improve my time management skills any - I'm still spending much more time "in school" than I should be and struggling to get any time at my desk. Very behind with my schedule for other projects, but not panicking just yet!

Below are a few other things I've noticed since I've been "out at work" for most of my time:

• My tea consumption has dropped considerably - one flask has to last me through most of the day!
• I'm feeling really out-of-touch with the news. I'm so used to listening to the radio for most of the day - a bit of breakfast TV and the evening news doesn't feel the same. Didn't realise I had become such a news junkie!
• Lunch has been reduced from a nice hot salad or a dish of pasta to a snatched egg sandwich!
• I'm struggling to switch off at the end of the day - I'm dreaming about teaching.
• My regular swimming has been almost completely sacrificed :(

On the plus side though, I'm really enjoying the adrenaline buzz of teaching and the interaction with colleagues. I'm feeling much more alert and perky than usual, even though I'm exhausted at the end of the day. I'm also getting a chance to pull lots of things out my wardrobe that I don't usually wear and enjoy putting together new outfits each morning :)

Spreading the word

On Monday afternoon, I did a "guest lecture" for all the pre-sessional students at Bristol Uni. My topic was Choosing and using a dictionary; an insider's guide. I've often felt that I'd like to do more to combine the two elements of my work; teaching and publishing/lexicography. I find it a bit frustrating that I don't really have time when I'm teaching to do more than little 5 minute slots of dictionary training. And the talks I get to give at conferences are a. usually for a specific publisher about a particular book and b. usually to teachers and other ELT folks rather than students. So it was really nice to be able to pass a bit of my inside knowledge about dictionaries accumulated over the past decade or so on to some real students.

I tried to put something together that would give students an overview of what's available on the market in terms of learner's dictionaries (from all the different publishers, books, websites, mobile apps) and also specialist dictionaries and other vocabulary books. But at the same time, give them some concrete ideas about how they can use them in their own context. As I said last week, on a very intensive pre-sessional EAP course, you don't get much time in the classroom to deal specifically with vocabulary, so it's nice to give students a bit of guidance as to how they can work on vocabulary independently - both for comprehension and production.

Guest lectures are optional (and at the end of a long teaching day), so I was quite pleased to get a healthy turnout. I'm a bit rubbish at judging numbers, but I'd guess that about 150 students turned up. We had a lovely lecture theatre in the Physics dept which felt fabulous to speak in. It's a proper old-fashioned lecture theatre with lots of wood and curved banked seating - I almost felt as if I should be wearing a gown! I meant to take a photo once all the students were in, but inevitably, I got caught up in chatting and getting ready, so I completely forgot. Here's one I took of the empty room though, you still get an idea of the space.

It took a big chunk out of my Sunday to prepare the presentation and it did mess up my schedule a bit, taking out what's usually a non-teaching afternoon, with lots of other work piling up on my desk. I really enjoyed the experience though, so I think it was worth it. It'd be nice to do the same thing elsewhere, but I'm not sure how I could make it work from an economic point of view. Would other institutions pay me to deliver a talk or are they too used to publishers doing this kind of thing for free?

Teaching?

Well, I've made it to the end of the first week of my summer teaching stint ... and now I'm spending the weekend trying to catch up on myself!! As ever, my first week seemed to be largely taken up being incredibly inefficient - rushing around chasing up computer log-ins, missing textbooks and board markers. Although I'm only meant to be teaching three mornings a week plus one full day, somehow the morning's seem to spread across to mid-afternoon and by the time I've sat down and had a cup of tea and sorted out my huge accumulated pile of papers, the day seems to have disappeared and I haven't done any of my 'other work'. I really do need to set aside clear non-teaching blocks this week when I don't get tempted into marking or researching lesson ideas.

The actual teaching has been the relatively easy bit. I've got a nice little class and this year I'm taking over a group who've already done 5 weeks, so they're already 'broken in' and not quite as shell-shocked as the new intake. Even so, I've had the niggling feeling that I haven't really done any proper language teaching yet. Most of the week's been taken up with setting out the ground rules for the end-of-course assessment - lots of academic skills stuff about format and word limits, choosing a topic and writing an outline, using the library and all that preliminary stuff. I'm hoping that next week I'll get onto something a bit more linguistic - I'm itching to get down to some nice juicy grammar rules and the AWL ...

EAP: inspiration & confirmation

On Saturday, I spent the day at a BALEAP PIM at Bristol University - a kind of one-day mini-conference for EAP teachers. It was a good opportunity to catch up with colleagues and to meet some new people too. The various presentations also provided both some new ideas and confirmation of some of the things I'd been thinking and doing myself recently, which is always nice.

The overarching theme of the day was teaching EAP to lower level learners and Debbie Mann's mini-presentation came up with some really neat ideas for putting across important academic concepts to lower level learners using simple, strikingly designed materials. Another talk from which I'll definitely steal ideas for my pre-sessional teaching in the summer, was from Elizabeth Long who presented lots of practical ideas for helping new students adapt to a British academic context.

I also found Neil Harris's session about using the AWL (academic word list) with lower level learners really interesting, because a lot of what he talked about crossed over so much with my own recent work on the Collins COBUILD Key Words for IELTS books, trying to spread the vocabulary from the AWL across three books aimed at different levels. He pointed out that while the AWL is divided into sublists, with the most frequent words in list 1, going through to the least frequent in list 10, because the words are grouped into word families, you often find more frequent and less frequent items within the same list. So, whilst you might want to teach individual, a sublist 1 word, fairly early on and you might link that to individually, you probably won't want to confuse a lower level learner by throwing in individuality, individualism, individualist and individualistic at the same time.

When compiling the headword lists for the Key Words for IELTS books, we started off with the idea of including the most frequent AWL sublists in the lower level book and working our way up, but soon found that we had to consider individual words within word families separately, based on their individual frequencies. At the same time though, we didn't want to lose the important links between words from the same family/root. A key skill for EAP students is being able to play with different forms of a word to see what fits best in a particular context. We got around this by including an element of repetition and building, so for example we dealt with the sublist 1 word family significant as follows:
Book 1 (Starter level): significant (single basic sense)
Book 2 (Improver level): significant (two senses) + significantly + significance and insignificant
Book 3 (Advanced level): signify

It had seemed like the most logical way to deal with the problem at the time, but it's really nice to have someone else independently talk about a similar way of tackling the AWL.

Thanks to everyone involved for an enjoyable and stimulating day!