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!

Disability Pride month: writing with one arm behind your back

July is disability pride month and at the start of the month, I attended a webinar by the Authors with Disabilities and Chronic Illnesses (ADCI) group of the Society of Authors. At the time, I was laid low with Covid, but it provided lots of food for thought and I’ve been mulling it over since.

My situation

I don’t think of myself as having a disability, but I have been living – and working – with chronic pain for more than 20 years. It’s something I’ve written about previously and how it affects my ability to work. A few years ago, it was really debilitating with constant pain throughout my upper body that left me struggling with even the basics of life. As is common with chronic pain sufferers, the pain volume control on my nervous system had got turned right up to the max.

Thankfully, over the past few years, I’ve got my condition much more under control and have dialled things back to just the site of my original injury – a dislocated right collarbone. I now spend a lot of my time pain-free and the pains I do experience are localized and often no more than passing tweaks and twinges.  However, whilst things are hugely better than they were, I’ve discovered that I still need to operate within certain limits. Last year, I started on a new project that involved quite focused, detailed sort of work. It didn’t take long for my pains to flare up again quite badly and I realized I couldn’t overdo things. After a few weeks, I reduced the number of hours I was working and things settled down again. Since then, I’ve been working 15 hours a week on my main project, with a handful of extra hours on admin and other small projects, up to a maximum of 20 hours a week. And that seems to be a comfortable, sustainable level.

It's great to have found a balance that works, but I’m aware that as a freelancer, it’s not always easy to guarantee a regular workflow at the same level and, beyond my current project, I’ll be back to trying to take on enough work without overloading myself physically. And of course, part-time hours also means a part-time income. I probably earn around 60% of what I could if I was able to work full time, which brings me down to well below the average income in the UK – although not low enough to be eligible for any kind of support.

Inclusion and access

Getting back to the webinar, one of the key topics of discussion was inclusion of those with disabilities and chronic illnesses within the publishing industry in general and more specifically what can be done to improve accessibility for writers. One speaker talked about the use of accessibility riders – a document that sets out someone’s accessibility needs at the start of a contract. It’s a really interesting idea and one that’s backed up legally in the UK by the 2010 Equality Act. Of course, it’s relatively easy to imagine the kind of adaptations an employer might make for an employee who, for example, was a wheelchair user and needed ramps or an adapted desk setup. What’s less straightforward is the kind of adjustments needed for people with invisible disabilities and chronic conditions. And of course, once you get into the freelance realm, the responsibilities of those you work for become much more of a grey area.

In my own case, the practical adaptations needed are not obvious. For several years when I was first diagnosed, I tried using voice recognition software to avoid too much keyboard use. It was something that publishers didn’t have a problem with and even supported; in part because I had my own software, so it didn’t require any input from them! I remember one publisher even inviting me into the office to give a demo and taking a real interest in how it worked. However, I gradually realized that keyboard use isn’t actually an issue for me, it’s navigating and formatting with a mouse that causes me pain. You can navigate using voice software but it’s really tricky and frustrating, so I eventually gave up. I’ve tried a whole variety of different devices and settled on a combination of a graphics tablet which I use with my left hand and a regular mouse which is just better for certain tasks and which I use (sparingly) with my right. That means that I try to avoid tasks with lots of fiddly formatting, including lots of work on digital materials which tend to have annoyingly mouse-heavy templates or authoring software.  

Back in the days of working in a headset with increasingly frustrated cries of "scratch that" and "undo that" coming from my office!

Perhaps more significant for me though is the amount of work I can manage. As I said above, 15-20 hours a week seems to be sustainable and those hours need to be evenly spaced, not bunched up into short intensive bursts. Does that mean that I just have to put up with a lower income? Would it be reasonable to ask to be paid for hours I’m not able to work in the name of equity? Perhaps where there should be more flexibility is with workload. Ruling someone out of a project because they’re not able to work a lot of hours in a short period is surely discrimination.  It’s sometimes possible to negotiate taking on a smaller chunk of a writing project, but not always. And of course, taking on a smaller chunk of work means accepting a smaller fee and the inevitable gaps between lots of short projects which is harder to manage, means more admin and is financially loss-making. Spreading a piece of work over a longer timescale would be a better solution all round but would require changes in scheduling and longer deadlines. That should be perfectly possible in publishing, but often doesn’t happen because of poor planning and squeezed schedules. It’s a source of frustration for most freelancers, for me it’s either a source of pain, or more likely, rules me out of work.

Awareness

Should I be more transparent about my condition? Should I have an accessibility rider setting out what I can manage and what adjustments I might need? I certainly don’t keep my health a secret and many editors who I’ve worked with over the years know about my situation; although they don’t always fully understand the implications. I know of well-meaning editors who haven’t offered me work on projects because they thought it would be hard on me physically, when actually it would’ve been fine. Especially with the ups and downs of a chronic condition, they may have dealt with me at a time when I was really struggling and had to cut back or pull out of something and assume that the same applies going forward. That’s especially problematic given the big improvements I’ve seen in recent years. And of course, I don't know how many editors have just chosen not to offer me future work because they thought my health limitations would just be too much trouble ...

And I don’t always mention my health and its limitations.  In part, that’s a conscious decision. The changes I’ve made to control my condition recently have largely been about mindset and a mind-body approach to pain control. In short, I’ve shifted my mental focus away from the pain and stopped letting it define my life. So, I don’t want to have to keep making an issue of it in a work context. If I don’t anticipate something being problematic, there seems no need. So sometimes “availability” just ends up doing a lot of heavy lifting. When I say that I don’t have enough availability to take on a job, I’m sure people assume I have a packed schedule, when in reality, they’re often just asking for more hours than I can comfortably commit to, even with a completely empty schedule.

The ADCI webinar brought up many other issues, some relevant to my own situation, some less so. There’s the issue of variability for those with chronic conditions, managing work through good days and bad days, good patches and bad patches, good energy levels and dips - and how that affects schedules and deadlines. There’s the concept known within the community as ‘spoons’, something I could really relate to when my condition was at its worst, which you can read about here if you’re interested. And then there’s representation of people with disabilities and chronic conditions in what we write, including in ELT materials. But that’s a topic for another day, I think.

RSI Day 2021: pain in a pandemic

Yesterday, 28 February, was RSI Awareness Day. This year, even for those of us used to working from home, our work routines have been thrown up in the air and healthy working habits have gone a bit awry.  It's also been a fairly reflective sort of year, so I thought it might be time to talk about some of my pain-related ups and downs. To explain the past year though, I’m going to have to take you back a bit …apologies to those who’ve heard some bits of this story before.

1989:
I broke my right collarbone in a car accident. I was told it'd healed and was sent off to live fairly unbothered by it for the next 10 years or so.

1999:
After spending my 20s teaching abroad, I’d just switched to a desk-based job as a lexicographer when I suddenly started getting severe pains in my right hand, arm, shoulder and neck. I was initially diagnosed with RSI and after lots of appointments, discovered that my collarbone had never fixed properly but was wobbling around causing a generally unstable wonky top right corner and putting all kinds of stresses and strains on the nerves, tendons and muscles around it.

2000 onwards:
Having had lots of doctors more-or-less shrug their shoulders, I spent the following 20 years doing my best to live with increasingly debilitating chronic pain that affected my whole upper body. It limited my professional life significantly. Having gone freelance early-on to give me the flexibility to work how and when I could, I worked part-time hours, was careful not to take on too much and avoided jobs that would be too fiddly and computer-heavy. I tried various workstation set-ups, took lots of regular breaks, tried various forms of exercise and therapy.

Late twenty-teens:
By about 2018 though, things seemed to have hit a real low-point. The pain was getting worse and dominating my life more and more. I was taking bigger chunks of time off work between projects to recover and my personal life was getting narrower as I avoided more and more everyday situations that would cause me pain.

June 2019:
A chance comment on a Facebook thread about mindfulness apps led to a suggestion from Rachael Roberts that I take a look at Curable, an app aimed specifically at chronic pain sufferers. The results were pretty dramatic. It feels a bit silly to say that an app managed to ‘cure’ 20 years of pain in just a couple of weeks, but I think it was just the right thing at the right time and brought together a lot of ideas I’d been aware of for a while but hadn’t known how to act on. I won't go into the details, because we’d be here all day, but it basically centred around mindset and my attitude to pain. It didn’t fix my wonky shoulder, but I learnt how to turn the volume down on the pain that had started bouncing round my brain’s wiring out-of-control. I went from taking strong painkillers pretty much daily to maybe 3 or 4 times in 18 months.

Coronatimes: 
Despite everything goin on in the world, 2020 on the whole was actually okay in terms of both my physical and mental health. After a fairly busy few months in the spring, work dropped off a cliff through the summer and I had 4 months with pretty much no work at all. Of course, it was all a bit worrying, but thankfully, I got government grants that kept me going financially and the weather was fabulous! My partner was out of work and being cooped up at home together wasn’t great, but with the good weather, we could use the garden as an extra room, there was lots of walking and gardening and we rubbed along fine.

Come the autumn, my work picked up again and I’ve been more-or-less flat-out since October – which is great, but maybe not so healthy. As the weather got worse, the days got shorter and my partner got more bored and despondent, I found myself spending longer stretches at my desk, avoiding leaving my office for my usual regular breaks because I didn’t want to be disturbed. By mid-December, I was getting tweaks in my shoulder. I partly put it down to the cold damp weather, but I knew that too much desk-time and increasing tension (mental tension leading to physical tension) were to blame too. By the end of the year, I was exhausted and at the end of my tether with no reserves of energy to draw on to do the clever, pain-subduing mind trick.

2021:
So far this year has been a tough slog; ploughing on with work, going out for fewer walks because I’m really feeling the cold in my joints, and feeling generally resentful and low. Thankfully, I know that I’ve always struggled with winter and I also know that I usually start perking up in March, so I’m hopeful that the advent of spring, along with the gradual easing of lockdown here in the UK will signal an upturn. I’m also just coming to the end of one work project and it looks like the next project I have pencilled in might be a bit delayed. So, I’m planning a much-needed week off. Of course, I won’t be able to go anywhere or do very much, but a bit more walking, perhaps a bit of pottering in the garden. If I can relax and recharge just a bit, then I think I can get my priorities back in perspective - even in these weirdly out-of-perspective times - and get my health back on track.

Four things I’ve learnt from working with chronic pain

The last day of February every year is International RSI Awareness day. And this year, for me, marks 20 years since I was first diagnosed with RSI. So, it seemed like a good point at which to look back on how chronic pain has affected the way I live and work over the past two decades.

To quickly recap, I started suffering the classic symptoms of RSI, shooting pains in my right hand and wrist, not long after I’d switched from a career as a classroom EFL teacher to one working all day every day at a computer in ELT publishing. Over the period that followed, I learnt a lot about repetitive strain injury and how it’s caused by sitting in a tense awkward position, often with a poor desk setup, doing small repeated movements, especially with a mouse. 

I also discovered that my pain issues stretched far beyond my right hand and that initial crisis was a trigger for a whole load of underlying musculoskeletal problems. As well as the sensitisation of the nerves running through my right hand, arm, shoulder and neck, I discovered that an old shoulder injury turned out to be a permanently dislocated collarbone which was making my whole right side wonky and unstable. Then, added into the mix was a degree of hypermobility, a condition that means that my skeleton and the tendons attached to it are particularly loose and stretchy, meaning that my frame can’t take the strain of holding my body in one position for very long. All of which has led to a messy chronic pain condition that’s had a huge impact on my life and work. It’s a topic I could write about endlessly, but here are the top four things I’ve learnt.

#1 Pacing myself

I soon discovered that I couldn’t manage a regular full-time job. I have good patches and bad patches, I’m better at working in short bursts with breaks in between and I have to fit my work around what I can physically manage. So, being freelance gives me more freedom to manage how and when I work. For any freelancer though, trying to achieve a schedule that gives you a steady flow of work is an incredible challenge. Work comes in fits and starts, projects get delayed, they run over, and sometimes get cancelled altogether. Most freelancers end up agreeing to more than they’d like just so that if one thing’s delayed or cancelled, they have something else to cover the time. And then when it all comes at once, they put in extra hours, work evenings and weekends, and just juggle their time to fit it all in. For me, however, that’s not an option. I simply can’t afford to get into a position where I’m working extra hours because my body will break down and everything will grind to a halt. That means I have to be conservative about the amount of work I take on, only agreeing to as much as I can reasonably cope with; 15-20 billed-for hours a week is ideal, 25 for the odd week at a push. That leaves me really vulnerable to those delays and cancellations though. If I’ve only got one project in my diary and that suddenly disappears at short notice, then I simply have no money coming in. I’ve got used to having a significantly lower income than my peers, but at times, with bills to pay and nothing in the bank, it’s definitely a source of stress and frustration.

#2 Avoiding the fiddly bits

Contrary to many people’s impression of RSI, for me at least, straightforward typing isn’t particularly problematic. That’s especially true with ELT materials where you’re very rarely typing long stretches of text, it’s mostly short sentences with thinking time in-between and doesn’t put that much strain on my hands. What gets me is all the fiddly stuff navigating around documents and formatting text either using a mouse or repeated keystrokes (such as lots of paging up and down). Although I use a graphics tablet instead of a mouse because I find it more comfortable, there are still certain things that are really problematic. My biggest bugbear is anything that involves highlighting specific sections of text, in order to cut and paste, or change the format. Trying to highlight exactly the right words and characters involves a degree of tension and control in your hand and wrist no matter what device you’re using and it’s that focused tension that really causes me the most pain, especially if it’s repeated over and over again.

I’m perfectly happy just typing text into a straightforward Word document and even using a template with Word styles isn’t a problem once you get into the swing of it. The projects I hate are the ones, often for digital materials, that require you to fill in lots of different fields with codes for exercise types, that involve copying and pasting the same instructions numerous times, repeating the same text for answer keys and audio scripts and artwork directions. I’ve worked on a couple of projects where getting the initial content down “on paper” took up a fraction of the time compared with filling in field after field of text in what amounted to no more than data input. Those are the jobs that I now avoid.

#3 Not standing around

Perhaps the number one most frustrating aspect of my health though is something that affects me both socially and professionally. For me, standing around for any length of time gets really uncomfortable. It can be a tricky one for people who know me to get their head around because in many ways I’m quite fit. I walk a lot – I’m currently walking around 20 miles a week as part of a walking challenge – and I don’t look like a hobbly old lady. But for me, there’s a huge difference between walking along at pace and standing around or even mooching about slowly – it puts my body under a whole load of different strains. On a bad pain day, just standing about for a few minutes can leave me unable to think about anything other than sitting down in a comfortable chair. Add to that standing around holding a drink (really painful for my arm and shoulder) or standing around with a bag on my shoulder (so uncomfortable I now avoid it at all costs) and the prospect of any kind of social or networking event that isn’t going to involve comfortable chairs fills me with dread.

It’s a real killer, because I really enjoy being sociable and chatting to people, whether they’re friends or colleagues. But unless I’m going into a situation that I’ll be able to control, such as meeting in a café where I know we’ll sit down, I find myself avoiding situations where I might end up  uncomfortable, distracted and wishing I could leave. That gets amplified at events which I’ve had to travel to (another potential source of discomfort) and at which I’m going to have to spend extended lengths of time without any respite.  It makes me feel like an unsociable grouch which I’m really not … honest!

#4 Perspective

If all that’s sounding a bit negative, there is one major positive to having a chronic health condition and that’s the perspective it gives you on life. For me, work-life balance isn’t a luxury add-on, it’s absolutely essential. If I’m overdoing it, my body will tell me so in no uncertain terms and I have no choice but to listen. I’ve learnt not to let my working life get out of perspective. That’s not to say I don’t ever get annoyed and frustrated by stuff, but I’m pretty good at stepping away from my desk, taking a break, going out for a walk, then coming back and dealing with the problem before it gets out of hand. Over the years, I’ve got better at standing my ground, speaking up when expectations are unrealistic and if necessary, just walking away. I love my work and I want to do a professional job, but you know, sometimes there are just more important things.

... like a cup of coffee in the sunshine ...