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.

Critical thinking with the Three Little Pigs

This week, I've been writing about teaching critical thinking in EAP and, perhaps because it was on my mind, was struck by how good the latest Guardian "Three Little Pigs" advert would be to use in class.

It would be lots of fun, especially using the original fairy tale as a lead-in, and it would bring up lots of good discussion questions about stance and perspective.

One of the frustrating things about not having regular teaching is that you don't get the chance to try out lesson ideas like this when they crop up. I generally get a teaching stint through the summer at Bristol Uni on their EAP pre-sessional course. It's a fairly intensive course with a very focused syllabus, so I don't get to try lots of things out, but I usually manage to slip in a few new ideas. Sadly, this year, it looks like I'm going to have to take a summer 'off' because my other work commitments will see me too busy to commit to teaching as well. It would be really nice to have a 'guinea pig class' who I could just dip into when I felt like it to try out a new idea - of course, I'd have to be able to call on them at any time and they'd have to morph to whatever level I needed and be happy to go along with whatever random topic I came up with ...

Academic English v Academic Skills

I've now come to the end of my summer teaching (just assessments this week) and as ever, it seems to have flown by. This is the sixth year that I've taught on the same summer pre-sessional course in some form and every year it's a bit different; different students, different issues and an ever-growing number of colleagues - we've gone from just a dozen teachers when I started to nearly 50! The thing that's most struck me this year though has been the change of emphasis in terms of what we're asked to teach. I guess the changes have probably been coming in gradually over the past few years, but this year, there seems to me to have been a really noticeable shift.

My sense is that there's now more time given over to teaching what could be described as "academic skills" or "academic literacy", which has all but completely edged out actual language teaching. Certainly, the writing tasks we're asking students to do are much more challenging, not just in terms of language but intellectually too. We're asking them to process a lot of complex information in a short time and then to evaluate and analyse it in an intelligent way - more a test of thinking skills and ideas than straightforward language ability.

The rationale behind this shift is, I think, based on the idea that we need to be preparing students for what they can expect when they go on to their main, mostly postgraduate, courses. The argument goes that there's no point in giving them simple essay tasks now that are nothing like what they'll have to deal with later.

My concern though is that in spending such a large part of our limited class time trying to coach them in thinking skills, we simply don't have time for the vital language input that they so desperately need. I'm currently mulling over ideas for some EAP grammar and vocabulary materials I'm going to be working on in the autumn and I'd hoped that my time in the classroom would provide me with some ideas and inspiration. But, in fact, I feel as if I've taught very little vocabulary and the extent of my explicit grammar teaching in four weeks was one quick 10-min activity on articles!

I usually come out of my summer teaching feeling tired, yes, but generally inspired and full of ideas. This year, I'm just feeling rather frustrated and deflated, and wondering whether next year I might take a break. Perhaps with the Olympics coming up, 2012 should be a summer 'off'?

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 :)

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 ...

Year planner

Fitting in freelance projects is always a bit of a juggling act, with things starting and finishing all the time, short projects and long projects, delayed starts and extended deadlines. I try to keep track of everything on a wall planner with different coloured lines to show different jobs I'm working on or have coming up:

Sadly, I generally end up using quite a bit of Tipp-Ex as start dates and timings constantly shift! Which is why I always look forward to the one fixed point in my year; my summer teaching stint at Bristol University that starts on Monday. Although it can be hard work and a bit of a shock to the system - getting up in the morning and having to get out the house on time! - it's also a fantastic break from my usual routine and gets me away from my desk for a big chunk of the day. And it helps me to divide my year up into pre-teaching and post-teaching, a gap that's going to be extended this year by a long holiday at the end of my teaching stint which means that I won't be back at my desk properly again until the start of October - hopefully, feeling fully refreshed and raring to go again.

Just got to get as many bits and pieces finished off and loose ends tied up as I can this week so that I don't have too much spilling over into my teaching time.

Seeing Progress

Having just sat through two full days of student presentations (26 in all!), I've now come to the end of my summer teaching for this year. As ever, the five-week course has whizzed by amazingly quickly, but seems to have consumed a huge amount of energy. Even though I've only been teaching a few classes a week this year, it's amazing how much you can get caught up with your students in such a short period of time. So it was very satisfying to see that many of them had made real, tangible progress. The difference between their initial attempts at presentations and what they came up with in their final assessed presentations was really very impressive in lots of cases. And it was particularly pleasing when some of them had picked up on specific points that I'd made in class and really taken them on board. It was sometimes tempting to give them a high mark just for facing their audience or including an outline in their introduction!

Unfortunately, my teaching stint this year has clashed with the (delayed) end of a particularly busy publishing project and it's been a real juggling act. There have been so many times when I've wished that I could just stay at my desk and get on with work rather than to-ing and fro-ing between classes, photocopying, planning and sitting through staff meetings. But it's definitely been worth it. My time in the classroom is just so valuable for keeping in touch with students and remembering what teaching is all about. It's also the only time of the year when I have colleagues. After spending months alone at my desk communicating only via e-mail, it's so nice to have a moan over the photocopier or a giggle in the coffee break. And it's just long enough not to get involved in "office politics" or become bitter about "the system". Really the best of both worlds.

So now I'm feeling that odd mixture of emotions that I always experience at the start of September of being utterly exhausted, but strangely satisfied and reinspired to push through the rest of the year. First though, I need a break, so I'm really looking forward to a holiday next week :)

Teaching to the test

Over the past four weeks, as well as teaching my usual pre-sessional, EAP classes, I've also been doing some extra IELTS preparation classes. Most of the pre-sessional students complete an assessment at the end of the course which their departments accept as the equivalent of an IELTS score. This assessment takes the form of an individual research writing project in their subject area, a timed writing task, an oral presentation (on the project) and an academic discussion task, all geared towards preparing them for their studies once they arrive in their departments, hopefully in a couple of weeks' time. So although these classes and assessment are roughly 'IELTS equivalent', they're quite different in style and format.

Some students though from certain departments are required not just to complete our course, but to retake the IELTS exam and achieve a specific score. So it's these students who I've been running extra exam preparation classes for. They've all taken the exam before, so know what it's all about, but just need extra practice honing their exam skills. And I have to say, it's been a bit of an eye-opener. Although I "coached" students on exam preparation courses back when I first started teaching, it's not something that I've done for ages, and I'd forgotten just how formulaic it can all be. I've also realised just how simplistic the IELTS writing tasks are compared with what we teach them in the pre-sessional classes. I seem to have spent a lot of my time telling the IELTS students to ignore what they've been learning for the past few weeks when it comes to the IELTS exam. It feels odd to be "un-teaching" things! A lot of that is just down to the length of essay they're required to write - you can't do anything terribly fancy within 250 words. But it has made me wonder how much a reasonable IELTS score really says about a student's readiness to cope on an English-medium university course.

The wonders of technology

Well, my first lesson with my new class didn't quite go to plan ... I had a really swish lesson planned with a PowerPoint presentation, an activity using online videos and a demonstration of online resources that I wanted my students to look at for homework. Inevitably though, when I got to my classroom, a funny little basement room I'd never used before, half an hour before the start of the lesson, I discovered that although the computer worked, it wouldn't link to the big screen at the front of the class. After a bit of fiddling, I called technical support, but they didn't make it to me until halfway through the class and even then, couldn't fix the problem on the spot. So I had to do a bit of thinking on my feet!

After years of working with computer technology, I know not to rely on it 100% and wasn't too fazed. It was a shame though as it didn't quite create the impression that I'd hoped for my first class, especially with all the faffing around and interruptions from the engineer.

It does reinforce though what I often think when I go to conferences and people are extolling the wonders of new technology in the classroom. It's all well and good when it works, but all too often, it lets you down and you have to be ready with a backup plan. And if the setup at a well-equipped UK university can have glitches, I'm sure that teachers working in less supported contexts around the world must have an even greater struggle to 'keep up'.

I'm not a technophobe and I think there are some wonderful things you can do in the classroom with technology, I'm just very aware of not relying on it too heavily and always keep a couple of marker pens in my bag, just in case! Keeping fingers crossed that the problems are fixed for my next class ...

First day nerves

Tomorrow I'm starting my summer teaching stint at Bristol Uni - teaching EAP to overseas students. And I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, but almost 20 years after I walked in to teach my first class, I still get a bit nervous before my first lesson with a new group of students, especially now that I don't teach all year round. I'm not talking about a major crisis of confidence here, just a faint feeling of apprehension, a slight butterflies in the stomach. I'm not teaching until the afternoon, so I know that I'll be a bit restless all morning and won't be able to settle to anything else, faffing about and rechecking what I'm going to teach. I know it's illogical and that almost as soon as I've walked in and said 'Good afternoon' I'll be absolutely fine, but that doesn't make any difference - it still happens every time.

I haven't met my class yet, but I do know that the overall intake this year is more than 90% Asian - mostly Chinese and Taiwanese. Classes are always heavily Chinese-biased, but I'm still holding out hopes of an odd European for a bit of balance! Apparently, there's also been a huge influx of students doing Economics, Finance and Management (due to changes in language policy in that department). So I'm likely to be spending the next 5 weeks with lots of Chinese economists! I guess that's preferable to a load of chemists, computer scientists and engineers - I'm rubbish at science, but can talk fairly knowledgeably about business and economics! I'm very glad though that I'm teaching the 'speaking' rather than the 'writing' components of the course this year and won't have to plough through all those finance research projects.

Pass or fail?

Well, I've now said goodbye to my summer class and sent them on their way with the usual round of group photos and good wishes for the future.

PSBC - Pre-sessional EAP group Bristol Uni 2009

The final week is always a mix of emotions, marking final assessments and agonizing over marks, then having to say 'goodbye and good luck' without giving any hint of passes and fails - marks will be collated, moderated, then sent out to students next week. This year has been particularly tricky as I seem to have had a lot of borderline cases - neither clear passes nor definite fails.

After five weeks of seeing a group almost every day, you become really quite attached to them. Whilst they can be infuriating at times, you also get a lot of satisfaction from seeing the progress they make - in some cases really great leaps. You want the best for them and although in one way, you want to pass them all, you also know that it's not fair to push those through who just won't cope on their Master's programmes. Is it better for them to fail at this early hurdle and go away and reassess their options rather than carry on and struggle all year, possibly dropping out or failing at a later stage? Whatever the outcome, I just hope they all make the most of their year ahead and go away with a great stock of experiences and memories.

Hard lessons

I’m now halfway through my summer teaching and I’m definitely finding the stuff outside the classroom is raising more issues in the staffroom than the teaching itself. The ongoing theme of our Wednesday staff meetings, apart from the usual moans about jamming photocopiers, has been the extent to which we should be responsible for students’ welfare outside the classroom.

In the first week, a distracted Chinese student was hit by a car crossing the road. Fortunately, she suffered no more than a wrenched shoulder and a few cuts and bruises, but was taken to hospital and kept in overnight. Quite a traumatic experience for a young woman who’d only been in the country for a few days. Then, one of my own students was burgled after going out and leaving the window of her ground-floor room open. Another upsetting and disillusioning experience.

We all agreed that both students needed practical help and reassurance from their teachers and other staff. More contentious was what we could do to avoid or deal with such incidents in the future. One teacher suggested that the course induction should include more advice about road safety and personal security. Another commented that maybe teachers should receive some training in counselling students. This provoked reactions about mollycoddling, treating students as adults, independence and our role as teachers.

It’s a tricky one, because although our students are adults, they’re mostly only in their early twenties and for many, it’s their first time away from home, let alone in a foreign country. Part of me thinks that they’ve chosen to study abroad and that they have to be prepared to be independent and if necessary, learn hard lessons from their mistakes. I can think of a whole host of “bad” things that happened to me in my late teens and twenties that caused a lot of stress and heartache at the time, but taught me lessons for the future. Or is that a bit of a ‘grumpy old woman’ thing to say?!

This week another spanner was thrown in the works when I got a message passed through one of my class on Monday that another of my students had been taken ill during a trip to London over the weekend and had been taken to hospital. My reaction, especially after everything that’d gone before, was to raise the alarm and set the process of finding and checking on her in progress. After lots of asking around, we managed to track her down, not in hospital at all, but fit and well and just staying over with friends in London. The expression “crying wolf” springs to mind …

The changing face of China

This week has seen the start of my annual teaching stint; teaching EAP (English for Academic Purposes) to international students hoping to start on postgraduate courses at Bristol University in the autumn. The majority of the students generally come from Asia and my class this year is no exception, with mostly Chinese students, a couple of Japanese and one lone Spaniard.

The approach and attitude, particularly of the Chinese students, has changed quite remarkably over the five years I've been teaching the course, and seems to reflect the huge changes that have taken place in China as a whole. Just a few years ago, students fresh off the plane from China would obediently soak up the facts, "learn" them by heart, and spit them out. Everything was black-and-white and every question had a correct answer. The concept of critical thinking was completely alien to them. Getting them to question ideas, to engage with the whys, wherefores and maybes was really an uphill battle.

Over the past couple of years things have begun to change. More "westernised" students have started to crop up. They're better dressed, have all the latest gadgets and know as much about Western popular culture as any British student of their age. At first there were just one or two in each class, but the numbers have definitely grown.

In my first academic research writing class this week, I started off with small group discussions about what their expectations were of the course and what skills they thought they'd need to write successful academic essays. The results were quite startling, without exception, every group came up with ideas about critical thinking, evaluating sources and drawing their own conclusions from evidence.

Now I'm just waiting to see whether they can put their ideas into practice. Will their first attempts at research writing reflect their apparent awareness of what's expected of them? Or have they just learnt all the right things to say from their friends from last year's classes? I'll let you know next week ...