Talking teaching writing in St Petersburg

Last weekend, I was in St Petersburg, Russia to deliver a day of workshops to a fabulous group of local teachers. It was the first time I'd visited the city since 1986 and unsurprisingly, it has changed quite a bit! It was lovely to have a couple of days to explore a vibrant, cosmopolitan city with its spectacular museums and dramatic architecture, and I was pleasantly surprised to come across some gastronomic treats too with some great meals in interesting contemporary restaurants.

I was leading a day of workshops on the topic of Teaching Advanced Writing Skills with a group of 20 very knowledgeable and engaged teachers. It's always good to get away from my desk, especially after a long stretch with my head down writing, and I find delivering CPD workshops particularly rewarding professionally. 

Connecting with teachers: 

I sometimes feel a bit guilty that as a materials writer, I don't get much time in the classroom myself nowadays. I think that spending time with teachers from different contexts though can actually be just as helpful. Although I write materials primarily for students, teachers are also a crucial part of my audience. If something on the page doesn't work for the teacher, they're going to struggle to get it across to the class. And when you're writing for a global market, understanding the attitudes and approaches of different groups of teachers and the reality of their teaching contexts is really key. Of course, you can't be familiar with every possible context and you can't please all the people all the time, but I find it helps to have a few different real teachers in mind. I'll often imagine each of them working through an activity and think about whether there are any tweaks I can make to help it work better for them.

Developing ideas: 

I also love that after more than 25 years working in ELT, my ideas and knowledge about teaching are still developing. Each time I give a workshop on a particular topic, it's an opportunity to review and reflect on my ideas. I've been delivering this particular series of workshops over the past 5 years or so and although the basic structure has remained the same, each time I come back to them, I make a few changes. This time I added a look at some practical activities to focus on specific writing skills using short, focused writing tasks and also a couple of tasks to work on editing skills. I think they helped to flesh out my point that teaching writing can involve a variety of different task types and angles, and doesn't always have to follow the traditional writing lesson which builds up to a final complete text to be written for homework at the end.

However, in my excitement about including the new tasks, I realize I didn't really think enough about how they were going to be integrated into the workshop. We ended up with a rather repetitive set of three similar groupwork tasks which, with hindsight, I should have varied somehow. But hey, that's the joy of development, you're always learning and I'll be able to tweak and improve the format next time!

Thanks to the lovely teachers of St Petersburg for inviting me, for being such a receptive audience and for giving me the excuse to revisit your lovely city!

Photos: Thanks to Tatyana and Tatiana of Deutsch Klub who helped organize the event and passed on the photos of the day.

2017 Part 2: What’s next?

In my last post, I talked about some of the reasons why I’ve become frustrated with my work in ELT publishing and started to question where I want to go next. In this post, I want to share some of the thoughts that have been floating around my head, in no particular order, about what I can do to change that.

One of the first questions I’ve had to face is whether I still enjoy working in ELT at all. And you’ll be pleased to hear that the answer is essentially yes. When I’m not getting frustrated dealing with fees and schedules and restrictive briefs, and it’s just me and a Word document and a load of language, then yes, I still love it. What’s not to love about playing with words for a living? The task ahead, then, seems to be one of picking the right projects or as Tania Pattison put it in her recent blog post, taking on projects that “fit with your vision of yourself as a writer” … which is perhaps easier said than done!

Having started off as a lexicographer, I’m still at my happiest using a corpus to tease out how language works. I really could happily spend all my time investigating how words fit together; making lists of collocations and phrases and colligations and dependent prepositions and explaining all the subtle and quirky differences between them. That should equate to writing vocab materials, but having done a lot of that in recent years, I know it’s not always as satisfying as I’d like. The briefs for many vocab projects involve a pre-determined syllabus and format, and an infuriating reliance on wordlists which take no account of chunks and phrases and multiple meanings or the difference between receptive and productive lexis*. And you find yourself being told that you can’t use a word because it’s ‘above level’ or been ‘covered’ before or … any number of other completely nonsensical reasons why you can’t do what you know is pedagogically sound.

Which perhaps leads me naturally to think about breaking away from publishers to go it alone. Several people I’ve spoken to have talked about self-publishing as an alternative. It does have a certain appeal, but from what I’ve heard of others’ experiences, self-publishing involves a huge amount of investment of both time and money, for very little return. You simply don’t make money from self-published materials. And whilst I’m not only in it for the money, this is my job and I do need to pay the mortgage. From a practical point of view, that means either writing something quite small in scope, like the How to Write EAP Materials title I did for ELT T2W, or stretching work on a bigger project out over a longer period of time, squeezing in bits and pieces when I can. I do have a few half-ideas floating around, but nothing fully formed and ready-to-go just yet.

Another option is to more actively push for the types of work I enjoy most … again, not always easy. A few of my ‘big breaks’ and changes of direction have come from proactively pushing. My first book (Common Mistakes at Proficiency) came about because I was doing corpus research for the series and I summoned up the courage to ask the editor if they had authors for all the titles. They hadn’t and she asked if I’d like to write one of them. Other work has come, either directly or indirectly, from chatting to the right people at conferences. A huge amount is down to luck and timing, but sometimes going along to the right events and making your interest in a specific area well known can help. To this end, I’ve started to nudge myself in a couple of directions …

Firstly, I’ve realized that one of the things I enjoy most is messing about with a corpus. Sadly though, it’s something that only rarely do I get paid to do. So I’ve started to edge my way a bit more into the corpus linguistics world. Back in October, I went along to a Corpus Linguistics in the South event in Cambridge. Most of the people there were academics talking about their research, but there are a few other folks who bridge the gap between the academic and the commercial. I haven’t yet spotted an obvious opportunity for work beyond what I’ve already been involved in, but I’m enjoying getting back into the academic side of the discipline and you never know what might crop up. I’m planning to put a proposal in for at least one corpus linguistics conference in 2018, so we’ll see where that leads.

Another aim is to get away from my desk a bit more. Most years, I manage to go to a handful of conferences and events, either as a participant or a speaker, and I generally come back feeling energised and having learnt something new, about a different teaching context or a different area of ELT. Unfortunately, unless I can get sponsored by a publisher to do a talk on their behalf, the costs come out of my own pocket, and with lots of conferences expecting speakers to pay a conference fee as well as their travel expenses, that soon becomes unaffordable. One option I’d like to explore more though is doing more teacher training. I love getting to meet and work with teachers from different places and, as well as being fun, it feeds neatly back into my writing. I recently ran a teacher training workshop in Moscow, which I really enjoyed, and I’ll be looking out for more similar opportunities in the year ahead.

So I guess that’s a few leads to be getting on with, nothing radical and no magic bullet solution, but hopefully, a general push into slightly new directions for 2018.

*I'll be talking about wordlists and their (mis)use in ELT publishing at the IATEFL conference in Brighton in April.

Moscow: a return visit and a new venture

At the weekend, I had my first trip to Moscow in 30 years and my first independently-organized teacher training workshop.

I've been doing teacher training in some form for more than 15 years, but it's always been organized by someone else. I've given talks and workshops at conferences and at events organized by publishers and I've taught on the Oxford University ELT summer seminar (ELTSS). I’ve occasionally been contacted directly by teachers or institutions asking if I'd do some training for them, but until now, the requests have always been either too wide in their scope or they just haven't fitted into my schedule. But when I was contacted by a Russian teacher asking if I'd do something for teachers in Moscow, it sounded more feasible; a day of workshops on Teaching Advanced Writing Skills, a topic I'd previously covered at ELTSS. So I said yes. 

I've been looking for new avenues of work and thinking about opportunities to 'go solo' and it seemed like a good chance to dip a toe into a slightly new pond. So how did it go? Was it worth it? And would I do it again?

Arranging the trip:

The first dilemma was deciding on a fee. The workshop was for an independent group of teachers, rather than a large organization, so I didn't want to charge too high a fee, but neither did I want to sell myself short or leave myself out of pocket. After a few mental calculations (the time I'd be working, time travelling, time for preparation), I came up with a fee + expenses that my Russian contact was happy to agree to. It was only in retrospect that I realized I should have thrown a few more factors into my calculation ... I hadn't reckoned on the time and effort that getting a Russian visa would involve. In total, it probably took me 3 or 4 full working days of to-ing and fro-ing, getting together everything I needed for the application, then a day travelling to the Russian embassy in London because you have to apply in person. 

Overall, the extra time to get everything sorted means that I probably didn't make that much financially out of the trip, but neither did I make a loss. So as a learning experience, it was definitely worth it. For any future trips, I'll know to factor in a bit more admin time, plus more for anywhere with complicated visas.

Moscow:

What with all the effort of getting there, it would have been foolish not to add on a bit of time for sightseeing, so I arrived a day early and gave myself a full day after the workshop too to get out and about in the Russian capital. I'd last visited on a school trip way back in 1986 in a wholly different era. Back then we were shepherded around under the watchful eye, and painfully slow English, of an official guide and spent a lot of our time shuffling slowly round museums. So it was lovely to have the freedom to wander around, jumping on and off the fabulous Metro and making frequent coffee stops partly to warm up and partly to people-watch. Of course, the big architectural sights (the Kremlin, St Basil's etc.) were unchanged, but the Soviet era grey has been replaced with light and colour and shops ... lots of shops! And it even snowed too just before I left, giving everywhere that picture-postcard feel.

Looking across Red Square to St Basil's Cathedral

The training:

I was made slightly nervous at the start of the day when the organizer explained that some of the teachers had travelled from other parts of Russia just for my workshop ... no pressure then?! As soon as I got into my flow and the participants were smiling and nodding though, I relaxed and time flew. It was quite a full-on day with five and a half hours of workshops (split into three sessions), but the teachers' enthusiasm and willingness to engage didn't seem to flag, despite a slightly warm room. I used a mix of tried and tested material plus a few new ideas (thanks to Kath Bilsborough for passing on the 'exit cards' idea, they worked a treat!). I was also pleased that I'd asked the participants to email me a short summary of their teaching context in advance, it helped to know a little about them and it also gave me a sample of their writing to give some feedback on ... they took it well and, fingers crossed, no one was offended by my feedback. All round, it was a genuinely enjoyable day, a pleasure to meet such a lovely group of teachers and the feedback so far has been very positive.

With some of the workshop participants

Would I do it again?

Definitely! It had all the plus points that training always has - meeting new people, finding out about different teaching contexts and just the buzz of the interaction - plus the added benefit of being able to do my own thing. It would be great to do similar things elsewhere either on the same topic or in one of my other favourite areas. And to be honest, apart from factoring in a bit more admin time, I don't think I'd change too much. Thanks to everyone for making the day such a success!

If you're interested in arranging teacher training workshops in the areas of teaching writing skills, vocabulary or EAP, then drop me a line - contact details on my website www.juleswords.co.uk