ETpedia Vocabulary: combining knowledge

When I was asked to be involved in writing the new ETpedia Vocabulary book, it was a no-brainer. Having started my ELT publishing career working on learner's dictionaries, although I've branched out into writing a whole range of different types of materials, vocabulary is still my first love.

For those of you not familiar with the ETpedia titles, they're resource books aimed at teachers, each of which contains 500 short teaching tips around a particular topic; young learners, exams, Business English, etc. There are 10 books in the series so far and ETpedia Vocabulary is the latest.

Drawing on a mix of expertise:

I co-wrote the book with Fiona Mauchline and Stacey H Hughes, making a writing team who brought very different skills and perspectives to the party. Our different areas of expertise came out right from the very first meeting in which it turned out to be surprisingly easy to divide up the chapters we'd sketched out for different areas of vocabulary teaching. Fiona is an expert in teaching teenagers, she has a fascinating knowledge of the psychology and neuroscience of language learning and she's full of ideas for sparking creativity. Stacey has a background in teacher training and seemed to come up with an endless supply of varied and creative practical classroom activities and tools. She made me think more about all the stuff that doesn't (and can't) appear on the pages of coursebooks, but goes on in classrooms amongst teachers and learners. For my part, I was happy to fill the language nerd role focusing on explaining terminology, looking a dictionary skills, corpus tools and some of the nitty-gritty of morphology and lexicogrammar. I think our different inputs have led to a fabulously rounded resource which will be relevant to lots of different contexts and appeal to teachers with different teaching styles.

I should also add that blending the input from the three of us, dealing with the inevitable overlaps and differences in style was no mean feat, but was ably handled by crack editor Penny Hands and the guiding hand of series editor John Hughes.

Digging deeper into my own knowledge:

The actual writing process was an interesting challenge and quite different from my usual work of writing classroom materials. It forced me to dig around in my brain and think about the why and the how of vocabulary teaching rather than just the what. It allowed me to rove around all the different aspects of vocabulary teaching that I've touched on over the past 20 years or so. It prompted me to go back and read up again on a whole range of areas, as well as checking out the latest developments in corpus tools and other online vocabulary resources. And inevitably, it left me with way more I wanted to say than would fit into the ETpedia style of short, concise teaching tips! At times, that was frustrating, but it was also a great exercise in trying to pick out the key ideas that were really worth passing on and cutting the waffle.

I hope the resulting book will be a useful resource for teachers to dip into and flick through when they're short on inspiration and want to try something new, when the way they approach vocabulary is perhaps feeling a bit stale and repetitive, or when they're tackling a different type of class (EAP, advanced learners, students with dyslexia or colour-blindness). I certainly picked up lots of great ideas from my co-authors in the process of writing the book and re-invigorated my own approach to vocabulary teaching.

ETpedia Vocabulary is available from the Pavilion ELT website as well as the usual places.

Playing with Google Docs for student writing

I don’t get into the classroom as much as I’d like to nowadays, so whenever I get a chance to do some teaching or teacher training, I like to try out new ideas. Last year, I used a week of teacher training workshops in Oxford (as part of the ELT Summer Seminar) to try out using screencast software to give feedback on writing; see my post about it here. This year, I used two lovely groups of teachers on the same course as guinea pigs for using Google Docs for student writing.

I’ve used Google Docs myself as part of writing projects and I’ve heard various people talk about how it can be used with students, especially for collaborative writing. There’s a very good blog post about using Google Docs with EAP students by David Reid, for example.

Context and task: As the workshops I was leading were on the theme of teaching writing skills, giving the participants a writing task to complete themselves, and for me to give feedback on, was an ideal way to demonstrate some of the practical issues I wanted to discuss. Having learnt from my experience last year of trying to give screencast feedback to 27 individual trainees within the space of a couple of days (!!), this year I chose a group writing task. On the first day, we did an activity which involved a group discussion and as a follow-up I asked each group (of 4 to 5 people) to write a very brief summary (max 60 words) of the most interesting point to come out of the discussion. The summary was to be written using Google Docs.

Set-up: I did a quick demo in class just to show what Google Docs looks like and how it works. I had four groups altogether, across two classes, so I set up four documents and gave each one a heading plus a simple rubric. This meant that when the participants reached the document, they knew they were in the right place. 

I then collected their emails and set about sharing the document for each group with its members. As a newbie to setting up Google Docs, I wasn’t sure how simple this process was going to be, but actually it turned out fine. For those with Gmail accounts, it was super simple; I just added their email addresses to the document using the ‘share’ button and hey presto, everything connected up beautifully. For those without Gmail accounts, the process wasn’t quite as smooth, but still wasn’t problematic. In these cases, I sent them a link to the document which they could click on to access it. Apparently, they didn’t get an icon with their name and profile picture, but they still had no problem editing and commenting along with everyone else.

Giving feedback: One of the benefits of Google Docs, beyond students being able to work collaboratively, is that as the teacher you can go in and offer feedback at any point. For this task, I checked in to see how things were going before the deadline I’d set for completing the task. The first thing I noticed was that all the groups had got carried away and written way too much, so I was able to leave a comment just reminding them of the word limit and nudging them back on track. This seemed like a really nice way of working together with students to help them achieve the best result, rather than just waiting for them to get it wrong then failing them.

Once the deadline had passed, I went in again and gave more detailed feedback. On this occasion, I didn’t ask the participants to act on my feedback, but with a “real” group of students, it could have been the start of a series of interactive revisions. Again, it’s an opportunity for the teacher to act more like an editor that an examiner, helping students towards the best possible final piece of work. (See more of my thoughts on this relationship here.)

Shifting comments

Drawbacks: My initial concerns about whether everybody would get on okay with the technology and be able to access the documents turned out to be unfounded. One feature that we found a little bit frustrating though was the fact that the comments, which appear in the margin, don’t seem to link up quite so clearly and obviously with the sections of text they refer to, like they would in, say, a Word document. The comments seem to jump about, sometimes switching order when you click on them and just generally being a little bit confusing.

Participant reaction: The reaction to the technology was generally pretty positive and I think it opened up lots of potential ideas for teaching. What was more interesting, perhaps, was the teachers’ reactions to doing a group writing task. To be asked to work together with a group of people you’ve only just met is no easy task! All the groups reported feeling a bit unsure about how to organize themselves, how to get started and what the etiquette was for commenting on or editing others’ writing. I think it was a useful exercise for the teachers in putting themselves in their students’ shoes.  Some of the points that came up in the post-task discussion:

- Would it be easier for students who know each other better (so later in a course)?
- In terms of group dynamics, is it better to let students choose their groups or for the teacher to ‘engineer’ the groups?
- Would the interaction/dynamics vary depending on the cultural background of the students?
- Would it be better to give students more guidelines for carrying out the task; allocating roles and procedures maybe?
- Or alternatively, would setting too many ‘rules’ stifle students’ own critical thinking and creativity? Is working out how to work together part of the learning process?

Overall, the whole thing was a really interesting exercise and I think Google Docs will now definitely be added to my teaching toolbox.