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Communicative teaching (CLT)

COGNITIVE APPROACH TO LEARNING

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Learning is directly linked to the amount of thinking in our own brains. If we are feeling good doing that, success will follow.

Let’s face the reality. No-one who really wants to learn a foreign language wants to learn it in a behavioristic environment if they have observed any modern lessons. What I am trying to do in these articles is to give language teachers a practical window to communicative language teaching (CLT) by combining the cognitive and constructive approach to teaching. I have a separate article on behaviourism for those who wish to look at those ideas.

Once again using CLT is a question of beliefs. Not just any beliefs, but beliefs which have been verified in practice over many decades.If the teacher believes the principles below are valid and puts them in practice, the lessons are bound to appeal to the students. But we teachers need to justify why we are using a particular method and what the beliefs behind it are.

If the students see that you are devoted to teaching and helping them, they will realize you really have thought the things through and they rely on you guiding them or at least give you a chance to show where the new method is taking you.

Cognitive approach of learning

In applying the cognitive approach of learning we believe that every student has to develop any new idea in their own minds and connect it with the knowledge they already have. Nobody really knows how learning takes place but we agree on the idea that the brains have to be activated properly. Listening to the teacher talking to the whole class does not necessarily lead to learning and memorization. Learning is a complicated intellectual process where each individual has to be active.

Well, how do we activate the brains then?

Traditionally the activation has been done by the teacher’s presentation followed by questions. This is still valid with young pupils and in some other subjects than languages.

The older the students get and the more they master the language, the more should we rely on giving them problems to solve or questions to be answered in groups. The answers they give do not matter that much. The process in discussing the question in the target language and finding possible answers to it is what matters.

The process is more important than the outcome. Learning takes place during the process, as a by-product of all the activities.

“But, … my students are not able to do any of that”, you might say. You may be right but all the things suggested below are possible AFTER you have dealt with the textbook chapter with its vocabulary and ideas first.

My basic philosophy in CLT is based on three premises:
  1. Insist on your students working on textbook chapters very hard, go through the chapters systematically using mainly student-centered approaches. Get them talking! See my articles on how to do it.
  2. Aim at having free discussion sessions at the end of lessons or unit and apply modern pair and group work techniques teaching all language skills.
  3. Teach the students how they can learn better, justify your views and suggestions and rely on the fact that language and life skills will be a by-product of this approach.

In some classes following Point 1 will work miracles and Point 2 may succeed with a little bit of differentiation. To sound convincing in Point 3 you have to have your own ideas clear in your mind. Very many of my articles touch upon Point 3, too. Be patient at first and be pleased with modest progress and presentations. You will see the difference in a few months. Rome was not built in a day. Neither can you change your teaching over night.

“Ok, but where do I find the time to do all that?”, you ask me. By doing three things:

  • Make the students study the chapter at home in advance so that they understand the content. This will speed up the activities in the lesson.
  • Most activities should be oral with very little writing. Instead of silencing the students let them talk and ignore the mistakes they make at this point.
  • Be brave and skip the chapters in the textbook you or the students do not find stimulating. It is a blessing, in most countries, that we teachers are allowed to choose the materials for teaching.

IN a few weeks or months it may be interesting for you to test how capable your students are in doing a more challenging CLT task in groups.

After the ‘compulsory’ orientation engage the students in doing one of tasks below. Or use a task of your own. In a couple of minutes they are working in groups learning more than you could ever do using some other method. Smiling, forgetting they are at school at all. Believe me, I have experienced it thousands of times.

The influence of positive emotions and attitudes to learning is overwhelming.

The students will learn …

  • through a process of observation; they are given sample sentences and they have to figure out the grammatical rule on the basis of them instead of the rule be given to them
  • by linking old memories and experiences to new ones; we link the formulation of comparative forms of adverbs to that of advjectives and make conclusions OR collect all information we have on Australia so far and then make questions that we want to find an answer to
  • by using creative critical thinking; how can we develop public transport in our town and which obstacles we might encounter (having first studied texts about the topic)
  • by working on concepts and categorization; developing mind-maps is ideal; central word, for example, energy and the mind-map is developed in groups and presented to others later on
  • by filling in information gaps; a story is divided in two and your pair asks you questions to find out what is missing in his/her part of the story
  • through problem solving; how can we save energy in ordinary households or how can we improve recycling in our town

One of the big changes in my teaching in the ‘revelation days’ in the 1990s was to observe the time I spend talking to the whole class, which little by little led to a situation where I restricted my speaking only to maybe 10 minutes in a 75-minute lesson. How? By re-organizing the lesson the way I explain in the articles under ‘The structure of a textbook-based lesson’.

My own experiences of learning languages

By now you must have realized that the Cognitive Approach is much more student-oriented than the Behavioristic one. It also gives the teacher a lot of freedom to try out creatively what works in his/her classes and adapt the style of teaching accordingly.

Teachers who use this philosophy also understand that language lessons are not the only places where languages can be learnt. So, we need to encourage our students to make use of all media in the target language, speak English fearlessly to strangers, read magazines and books in English or do anything else that improves their language skills.

My first memory and source of motivation of learning English properly was when an American choir visited my home town Oulu in the 1960s. I had been studying English for a couple of years but understood only a few words in the songs. However, the songs sounded so beautiful that I started to find English songs myself and finally ended up recording pop songs from Radio Luxemburg, writing down the lyrics and singing along with the tape.

By the time I went to senior high school at the age of 16 I knew hundreds of English songs and I had even learnt most of the English grammar subconsciously thanks to the songs. Somehow I knew how to write unknown words even if I had never seen them. This ‘voluntary project’ also increased my English vocabulary drastically.

After one grammar exam I was terribly disapponted with myself because I had changed the active sentences differently from the others and I thought I had made a mistake. I was surprised when the teacher pointed out that my way of doing it was also right even if it had never been taught to us. Some other teacher in those days might have marked my version wrong because it had not been taught.

It was something like this: My aunt sent us Christmas presents. >> We were sent Christmas presents by our aunt. (taught at school) / Christmas presents were sent (to) us by our aunt. (my version). What I am trying to say is taht some of your students know much more English than you know thanks to their hobbies or interests.

Unfortunately I had no chance to enjoy the benefits of the Cognitive Approach in English lessons over the twelve years I studied it. We never spoke freely in class and I wrote only one ‘essay’ which had to be a joke. It took more than two weeks to get them back marked because other teachers kept on reading them. Frankly speaking, now that I look back my own English lessons were a joke in itself.

Reading

SOLVING READING DIFFICULTIES

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When there are problems with reading comprehension the key to solve the promlems is to identify the causes for the difficulties: lack of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge or skill in translation, or dyslexia, for example. The next step is to find the remedies.

The foundation for reading comprehension is laid in the elementary school or in the basic lessons. I have discussed these ideas under the last horizontal main heading ‘The structure of a text-book based lesson’ THE STRUCTURE OF A TEXTBOOK-BASED LESSON and expand the ideas at the end of this article.

  • the most important piece of homework: students study or translate the next chapter in the textbook in advance at home
  • if the students come to the lesson and understand, say, 80 % of the text, a lot of time is saved and a proper foundation for the lesson is laid
  • however we must remember that understanding a text is a much more profound process than word by word translation
  • we can teach reading only indirectly by giving tips on the process of reading but we have no idea what is really going on in the heads of the students when they are reading a text
  • becoming a good reader is a long process in the mother tongue and even longer in a foreign language; time, patience and guidance are needed
  • we can help students if we can identify what causes the problems in understanding: lack of vocabulary, unknown grammar, translation skills or reading strategies are inadequate

Those suffering from dyslexia are not lazy or stupid. They can’t help it but they can be helped by experts. On average every class has 2 – 3 students who need help either in reading or writing or both.

  • if the reason for reading difficulties is some form of dyslexia, a specialist’s help is neeeded, up to 10 % of students suffer from it and the issue was acknowledged by school authorities only 20 years ago and many teachers pay little attention to it
  • the symptoms of dyslexia can be manyfold: slow or erratic reading, weak short-term memory, mixing or ignoring letters, problems in concentration, often the same problems in writing
  • identifying dyslexia is vital since often these students carry a stigma of being lazy or stupid even if they are trying their best and it unnecessarily breaks their self-confidence

What I mean by reading here is reading comprehension as opposed to reading aloud in class, which was discussed under heading ‘Pronunciation’. Reading is sometimes taken for granted with a false assumption that everyone understands a sentence or a text in the same way if they master the basics of reading. This is wrong since the process of understanding a text is an individual process and there are many things that can prevent proper understanding.

A short individual discussion with a student about a text the students do not understand will reveal to an experienced teacher where the problem probably lies. Most likely it is one of the reasons below.

Common reasons for reading difficulties

  1. First of all the student’s vocabulary has to be wide enough to understand a text. If the student stumbles too often with unknown words, understanding the text turns out to be impossible. In the vocabulary section we already pointed out that there are many things the students must master in order to ‘know’ a word. In reading ‘the recognition of the written form’ is vital and so is knowing the ‘meaning’ of the word. Sometimes the context reveals the meaning but this ‘guessing game’, which is perfectly acceptable, is a skill of its own and has to be taught to students as well.
  2. Secondly, I also noted that in some simple situations it may be enough to know the words to understand the sentences or ideas. However, in most cases the students have to have some idea about the grammar of the new language; i.e. he/she has to know how to combine words, how they are arranged in a sentence. Knowledge of grammar helps us to guess the meanings of words. If the student is not able to translate a particular sentence or explain the meaning in his/her own words, the source of not understanding the sentence can usually be easily found by the teacher. But the trick is to let the student get stuck and pinpoint the difficult point him-/herself – and then you can find the remedy together.
  3. Thirdly, when I discussed the model for a text-based lesson, I strongly recommended that the students always study/translate the text for the next lesson in advance at home. I also discussed the reasons for it: saving time in the lessons and preventing frustration in class due to not understanding the text. The benefits of this kind of flipped learning are undeniable: The students come to school and understand most of the content of the new text. True learning can start!
  4. Fourthly, we teachers have to teach our students what to do at home when they study / translate the text at home. I discussed the ideas already in the model lesson. Everything becomes so much easier if the students have prepared themselves for the lesson. I think this preparation is by far the most important piece of homework, much more important than exercises (which are often mechanical).
  5. Fifth, every time I get a new class in junior high (aged 12) I check that they know how to translate a text since far too many students have no clue how it is done; how to use bilingual wordlists or a dictionary, for example. These student float somewhere in mid-air understanding only fragments of what they need to grasp.
  6. Sixth,as for translation at home I give my students three options: a) the text is fully translated in the mother tongue in their notebook, b) new words are translated with pencil in between the lines in the textbook, c) the translation is done immediately if I snap my finger in class, no need to write down anything.
  7. Seventh, there are many other things as for reading that we can teach our students. Linguists call them reading strategies but in simple terms they are just tips how to become a better reader. I will discuss these reading tips / strategies in another article.

Slide the photos using the arrows. Which groups do you think your students want to be in? Those who enjoy your lessons or those who come there with little hope to learn anything.

The benefits of studying or translating chapters in advance at home

I perfectly understand if some of you wonder why I talk so much in favour of translating the texts into the mother tongue. ‘Translation’ is not a curse word for me and should not be for anyone else. I give up all translation the minute I know there is no need for it in my class. Let me clarify my points in the matter.

  • First of all, I want the students to learn to do translations at home and minimize the time spent on translating the text in class. Besides this is a way for the parents to get involved in their kid learning a new language. At school time is more wisely used in practising using the language than translating the text.
  • Secondly, I see no point in going through a text if it is not understood. It will only lead to restlessness in the class. If I am learning, say, Polish and understand next to nothing of the text, I cannot participate at all and I will find something else to do in class. Talk to my friends, fiddle with my phone or anything just to make the time go by. Too many students face this situation but feel ashamed to admit it or pretend not to care. itself
  • Thirdly, I cannot stand the idea of students sitting in lessons for many years learning just a few words when the learning process could be drastically improved by helping them to do the translation for every lesson. It might take a few lessons or a couple of weeks but in the end the students would thank you for doing it.
  • If some of your students have this problem, have a special lesson for them. If very many students suffer from this problem, ask your star students to teach the others how to do the translation in groups. I’ve bribed them with candy and doughnuts.
  • If lack of translation skill was the problem and my advice helped any of you, I’d like to hear about it. Stop teaching your language for a while and lay the foundation again. You will get the time back manyfold in better results and raise in students’ motivation.
  • N.B. The translation method itself, translating texts from English into the mother tongue and vice versa, is an appalling method and that is why I never learnt English properly at school in the 1970s.

Learning to translate a text is the foundation for understanding a foreign language and it is a massive boost to motivation and self-confidence. However, the final aim is to think in English and skip mental translations altogether.

Communicative teaching (CLT), Historical perspectives

ASSESSMENT OF and FOR LEARNING

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The quality of the student-centred learning process (AfL) is actually more important than the final results of the exams (AoL).

If you test and use the results to give grades, it is AoL. If you test and use the result to help the students, it is AfL. But AfL is much more …

Assessment for learning (AfL) consists of all the measures that the teacher and the students take while learning in order to make learning more pleasant, relaxing and effective. The best teachers have always done it automatically using formative tests, continuous assessment and personal feedback as a tool.

What the CLT researchers have done is that they have laid the scientific foundation for AfL to balance the over-rated importance of constant grading and exams (AoL).

Assessment of learning (AoL) refers to the traditional ways of evaluating students using summative exams, mostly at the end of the learning period.

In brief, the concept of AfL

  • was developed from formative and continuous assessment
  • but is more focused on the process of learning, learning styles and strategies
  • emphasizes the students’ role in assessing themselves and others
  • favours student-centered methods and feedback that enhances learning.

In short, using assessment of AoL

  • means checking towards the end of the course to what extent the goals of the course have been reached
  • This type of testing is discussed at the end of each skill area under the left-hand side menu topics ‘Vocabulary’, ‘Speaking’, ‘Pronunciation’, ‘Listening’, Reading comprehension’ and ‘Grammar’.

AoL and AfL compared

Assessment of LearningAssessment for Learning
AoL 10% of teaching timeAfL 90 % of teaching time
N.B. The percentages above simply indicate which kind of assessment I personally consider vital.
  1. The focus is on final results, summative exams and giving grades.
  2. The student is classified: excellent – good – satisfactory – bad.
  3. AoL takes mostly place at the end of the learning period in an examination marked by the teacher. Little analysis of what may have gone wrong.
  4. AoL means strict teacher-centred control, individual (not pair / group) accomplishments are valued.
  5. Little attention is paid to ways of learning and development of skills, mainly the content of the course is tested.
  1. The focus is on the learning process and ways to enhance learning.
  2. The student is compared with his/her previous performance.
  3. AfL takes place all the time, done by the teachers or other students, not to give a grade but to guide the learning process, individual needs are taken into account
  4. AfL is more like giving guidance and positive feedback to others continuously, the teacher in the background
  5. A lot of time is spent on learning strategies and how to improve language skills, knowledge of the content is tested but the ‘side products’ of AfL are recognized.

You may wonder if you should be worried about not always knowing if you are applying AfL or AoL. No, definitely not.

The borderline between AoL and AfL can, in fact, be a line drawn on water. Wise teachers have always, at least subconsciously, done both for the benefit of their students.

How come? For example, if you have a practice lesson before the examination and the exam is analysed afterwards when the papers are returned to enhance learning, AoL and AfL are intertwined, in my opinion, in an ideal manner. Any AoL exams that make the teacher realize that the goals were not reached and some remedial actions are required, turn the original AoL exams into AfL exams simultaneously.

Over the last fifteen years more and more attention has been paid to the process of learning which we teachers are trying to make as smooth and effective and enjoyable as possible. These measures are what we call ‘Assessment for Learning’ and they are utilized from the beginning of the course till the end until it is the time for the summative exam.

In the past learners of foreign languages were terrified of making mistakes and the fear of embarrassing yourself in front of others prevented learners from being fully engaged in learning. Thanks to the ideas of communicative learning teachers realized the message getting through to the listeners/readers was more important than the accuracy of the language. Application of CLT and AfL principles is a highly recommended combination in any language class.

No-one makes mistakes on purpose (unless they are joking). If the message is understood, the mistakes do not usually matter at all. We make mistakes even in our mother tongue. Why should we worry about them when learning a new language?

In the end, the success of our language lessons is measured in how well our students cope with the language in real life, not which grades they were granted.

The next two articles deal with the tools you can use in class to apply the principles of AfL.

Reading

Strategies to be used before, during and after reading comprehension exams

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There is no hope of improving reading skills until the reasons for NOT UNDERSTANDING the text are identified by the students themselves and they commit themselves to overcome the problems.

It is essential for teachers to realize that the process of decoding someone else’s messages is not the same with everybody. We are all different and depending on our background and style of learning we process information differently. Our problems in reading may also vary drastically.

Just like listening, reading skill is hard to teach because we have no control of the process in the reader’s mind. Still, we can affect the process indirectly by giving advice and guidance. The general CLT principle which is in favour of a great amount of input resulting in good results needs to be supported by teaching strategies on how to prepare for reading comprehension exams and how we can learn from our mistakes in taking exams.

If you are teaching senior high students, I suggest you go through the whole process once with your students and then get feedback from them if it turned out to be worth the time spent on it.

  • Strategies are dealt with the students before an exam
  • You, the teacher, study how the returning of the exam is to be arranged
  • Arrange a student-centred lesson to return the exam
  • Show the students the ‘heureka’ type of comments to be used

Strategies / tips for students in a reading comprehension exam

Let’s have a look at some strategies that are useful when students take a reading comprehension exam. Some of them are actually the same as in listening exams. Still, learning to apply the strategies does not take place over night. It also requires some practice.

Throwing the students one text or exam after another and assuming that massive input will automatically improve reading skill does not necessarily lead to success with everybody. It is better to teach the students how they should approach an ordinary or an exam text.

  • Relax your body. Take a couple of deep breaths! It will calm your nerves. Being nervous won’t help you.
  • Read the whole text through at first but do not stop even if you do not understand the text perfectly. This way you will have a better idea about the topic and structure of the text.
  • If the logic of the text is good, you can easily spot the main ideas and sentences. The rest of the text is justifications of the arguments or examples.
  • Start working on the questions only if you read the whole text first. Many ideas open up if you know the exact topic and the perspective of the writer.
  • Once you understand the topic and the questions, you can guess many things they talk about. If you use common sense and your background knowledge on the topic you may find it helpful.
  • Read the questions carefully and focus only on them.
  • Most of the information in the text is not needed. It may be irrelevant.
  • Don’t panic if you see new words. Try to guess what they mean. Very often you need not know the meaning of new words at all.
  • Be aware and watch out for extreme words like ‘never’ ‘only’ ‘always’ ‘anyone’. They are often too strong.
  • Link ideas that have the same meaning. For example: If the idea in the text is expressed “He used to go fishing on Saturdays and Sundays.” the same idea is in the answer booklet as “He was in the habit of catching salmon and trout at weekends.”
  • So the most common technique is just to express the same idea in other words.
  • If your exam consists of multiple choice tasks, use elimination technique. For example: Choice A was not talked about at all, Choice B is wrong because they said ’everybody’ which is not true, Choice D is wrong because ‘chance’ means different from ‘change’… SO the right answer has to be Choice C. You have now eliminated the wrong answers and you will answer C (even if you may not know exactly why).

Strategic tips for the teacher about returning an exam

  1. Have an exam for the students and when you return it devote a whole lesson to go through the exam in detail, every question and every alternative. I explain the process in detail in the next article.
  2. Demonstrate with the first two questions how the analysis is done and then let the students discuss the other questions in groups. Have star students leading the discussion without lecturing the right answers. See my next article.
  3. Don’t interfere with the group discussions but take notes on the problems the groups do not seem to solve well. Answer the students questions at the end of the lesson and point out your own observations.
  4. Now the students should have a vague idea what the reasons for the mistakes are. In other words, they may have identified some of the problem areas.
  5. Now that the students are motivated to hear more it is time to have another lesson where you go through my strategy tips for an exam. Show the tips one by one on the screen and let the students ask questions on them. Give the list as a handout after the discussion with my copyright. Let them have it even in exams.
  6. If you think your class will not be able to discuss these matters in English, let them use the mother tongue to make sure the messages get through.
  7. Make each student write in English what they have learnt over these two lessons and what they are planning to do to overcome the difficulties.
  8. Show them my ‘heureka’ comments on the screen as models of the kind of comments you are looking for. See below!
  9. Collect the comments and give feedback on them in the 3rd reading comprehension enhancement lesson.
  10. Now you have done your job: you gave your students the tools for improvement. Nevertheless, they are the ones who have to start working. Probably making use of the other strategies that I have been talking about.

The students have to come up with ‘heureka’ realizations like …

  • Ah, I think I worry too much about words I have never seen and stop reading because of them and get frustrated. SO, next time I will try to guess the meanings or maybe the word is not important at all or knowing if the word has a positive or negative meaning on the basis of the context is enough.
  • Ah, ‘carry out’ and ‘realize’ can sometimes mean the same OR ‘no adequate funds’ is the same as ‘not enough money’ or ‘lack of sufficient resources’. SO, my problem is vocabulary and learning many ways to say the same thing.
  • Ah, I stumble over the same structures over and over again. Shortened sentences, never heard. Wow! ‘Having left for downtown’ is a shortened sentence meaning the same as ‘When I had started to drive towards the city center’ SO, I have to study grammar more because I always stop at this kind of structures and do not get the meaning.
  • Ah, my mistake is that I start reading by translating the text word by word. SO, I have to stop translation tactics because it is too slow. Working through mother tongue will not do. I have to learn to think in English.
  • Ah, I have been too much in a hurry. I usually start by reading Question 1 and then look at the text without knowing what the whole text is about. SO, from now on I will read the whole text through first without stopping even if I do not understand everything at first. This way I will get an overall picture of the topic and the main ideas.
  • Ah, I never realized that some sentences are more important in a paragraph than others. SO, spotting of the main sentences in a paragraph seems to work for me. I will worry about the details much less this way.
  • Oh, no. All these years I have been trying hard but nothing seems to work. I thought I was just stupid. Now that you told about dyslexia and its symtoms I think I may suffer from it. SO, Thanks. I will contact the special teacher and see if he can help me.

Having a talent rarely takes anyone to the top. Reaching excellence in anything requires very hard work, 10 000 hours of work, they say. Maybe that is the total number of hours needed to master a foreign language ‘perfectly’. I am still counting ...

Up to 10 percent of students suffer from some form of dyslexia, reading and writing difficulty. Luckily these days students have the courage to admit they have these problems and special teachers are trained to help them.

The text in the next article is an example of how a mature 16-year-old might be able to process a reading comprehension text. I believe that if the students are able to apply the strategies and tips given in my previous articles in this ‘test’ they will become better readers. And writers too since good writers will anticipate the reactions of their readers.

You will find the sample exam in the next article and correct answers with a ‘mature’ reader’s comments in the final article of this Reading Unit.

Reading

READING

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Trial and error -method sometimes works beautifully. But would it not be better and quicker to give these people advice how to learn to swim than let them try it out themselves. The same applies to learning to read at a deep level – the students need to realize what they are doing wrong and which new strategies they need to start applying.

When applying CLT ideas in helping my students improve their reading skills I made a few startling discoveries.

  • The first one was that I have no way of knowing what goes on in the heads of my students when they are reading a text. The ‘quality’ of reading was hidden from me.
  • Secondly, as a result of this discovery I realized that the reading process is different for every one of us and the difficulties may be caused by many reasons and I as the teacher had no clue of them.
  • Thirdly, I had not helped my students enough to find the causes to these difficulties or to find a remedy for them. It had been like ‘Read more and more and you will become a better reader’ OR even worse ‘Throw the child into the water and let them learn to swim little by little’.
  • Fourthly, I realized I can make a difference in my students’ reading comprehension only indirectly; I had to make changes in what happens in my lessons and what kind of advice and guidence I could offer my students.
Move the arrow button to see the two options: Is reading a text a relaxing experience or is it filled with fear of not being able to overcome the obstacles on the way?

I had always insisted on my students studying the new chapter at home in advance. So the foundation for reading comprehension was there. It had actually been laid in the elementary school and with some students in the junior high school. When starting to apply CLT ideas in my ‘teaching’ of reading I first made a few important changes in my lessons.

  • I began to use differentiation in my lessons and replaced me asking questions about the text by giving my students 3 options how to ‘check’ reading comprehension. See Point 4 in Reading strategies below
  • The check was always done orally in pairs or groups, not with the teacher. So I combined reading with speaking. Reading comprehension became part of speaking practice. See more detailed account in ‘Deepening understanding of text, Part 1’
  • I started to teach more and more about various strategies how to improve reading skills and how to cope with exams as well. This idea led directly to improving writing skills as well.

The most striking example of the importance of education and reading skills that I have come across in my life is what happened in Oman in 1970 when Sultan Qaboos became the ruler and turned the uneducated nation into a modern cililized country merely in 50 years.

Introduction to receptive skills and reading strategies

As I have stated earlier on that receptive skills (listening and reading), are much more difficult to teach than productive skills (speaking and writing). Speaking and writing skills can easily be measured against a criteria. In contrast, listening and reading take place in the heads of the students and we have no physical evidence on the quality of understanding.

Listening comprehension can be verified only indirectly by checking if the listeners responses make sense in the light of what was said by other people. The other way is, of course, by having an exam.

Reading comprehension is even more challenging because people often read silently on their own and there are seldom immediate situations where understanding is checked in normal life. We rarely challenge the information someone has read about. Besides, interestingly enough research has shown that the process in decoding written messages is different among recipients and may even result in arguments about the content.

The most important thing for teachers is to make the students aware of their own reading processes, strengths and weaknesses, and also of the ways other readers approach a new text. Pair and group work as well as various reading strategies serve as tools for raising the awareness but they are also keys to the remedies, keys how to improve one’s own reading skills.

Nevertheless, the situation is far from being hopeless since we can teach about reading indirectly and most of my other articles on reading deal with strategies that serve as tools to enhance reading skills of ordinary and examination texts.

The other articles related to READING COMPREHENSION are

ReadingReading comprehension strategies in class
Solving reading difficulties
Reading strategies, an example how to teach them
Reading strategies, spotting main ideas
Strategies to be used in exams and a model lesson how to introduce them
Sample exam for reading comprehension
Deep level reading, returning the markes sample exam

These other articles under heading READING demonstrate …

  • how important it is that the students themselves become aware of the reasons why they do not always understand a text or succeed in the exams and what they need to do to overcome the difficulties
  • how complex the process of reading actually is and how differently readers may approach an ordinary or an exam text and how versatile the difficulties they encounter may be
  • how the students can make use of various strategies during the exam to get better results
  • how to organize the lessons after the exam has been taken and the exams are returned to the students
Communicative teaching (CLT), Grammar

TEACHING GRAMMAR THE OLD AND CLT STYLE, comparison

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They say 7 is a lucky, godly number. I am not supertitious but I have 7 reasons that speak in favour of the CLT approach to teaching grammar.

Benefits of teaching grammar in CLT style

  • The use of pre-tasks reduces anxiety around the new structure.
  • After the pre-task the structure feels familiar and easier to learn.
  • Using the inductive method activates the brains and enhances learning.
  • Practice is not limited to mechanical written exercises but taken further with versatile oral exercises.
  • Working and checking the tasks together in groups the students teach and help each other in a relaxed atmosphere.
  • The final aim is to have truly communicative activities such as role plays.
  • Grammar is seen as a tool, not as an aim of its own.

Grammar in the old daysCLT ideas on Grammar

PRE-TASK, very rarely used

PRE-TASK, commonly used

Frequent oral tasks before the rules of a new structure are introduced,
Students use the structure 15 -30 times in a few minutes.
They get a feeling they already know the structure.
No great possibility to make mistakes thanks to models or ready-made sentences.

INTRODUCING THE RULES Deductive method
Rules voiced by the teacher
Little student involvement
Comparison with mother tongue
Lexical approach with beginners

INTRODUCING THE RULES Inductive method
Teacher-guided process
A lot of student involvement
Comparison with mother tongue
Lexical approach with beginners

PRACTICE OF THE STRUCTURE
Mostly written exercises which get systematically more and more demanding.
Mechanical exercises, very seldom even semi-communicative
Everybody is doing the same exercises, no differentiation.
Oral exercises are limited to mechanical drills in class or language labs.
Exercises are mostly done alone or supervised by teacher, checked with the teacher too.

PRACTICE OF THE STRUCTURE
Both written and oral exercises which get systematically more and more demanding.
Written exercises which start from mechanical ones, turn semi-communicative and finally fully communicative.
Students can often decide which difficulty level they prefer.
Oral exercises follow the same logic, differentiation is used
Exercises are mostly done and checked in pairs or groups.

One has to be realistic and admit that in many classes this would be as far as many students are able to go. If they understand the rule and can apply it both in written and oral exercises of various kind, you as their teacher can be proud of them. Most importantly the students recognize the structurein all situations and can use it in speech as well.

Let’s think about the previous article and the way I used to teach the present tense passive voice once again. I will show you now how to turn the mechanical exercise to a communicative one. The example below combines written and oral communication and would be one way to end the teaching of the structure.

How can we turn the practice of the present tense passive voice more communicative?

  • First of all, the inductive formulation of the rule is best done slowly with the teacher in charge to give everyone time to think about the matters.
  • Secondly, exercises such as 1 – 4 in the previous article can be done in groups with a star student as the leader of the group and the others give the answers.
  • Thirdly, the teacher has to think in advance of a situation where natives would use the present tense passive voice structure. The most obvious situation is describing a process or a series of events where things happen but we do not need to know who does it.
  • Fourthly, the groups do an oral practice by taking turns in explaining a process: What happens to cars in their life time? How to make fashion clothes? How to make your greenhouse plants grow well? How to drive a car or plan a journey?
  • Fifth, the group decides on the process to be described in writing:

A couples of examples of the kind of sentences required are needed as models.

  • What is done in a local McDonald’s during an ordinary day to serve the customers well?



  • What is done before my day in the riding stable is done?

    • What is done?
  • Other topics: playing football or icehockey / at home or school
    • …    		The place is cleaned between 5 and 7 a.m.
    Kitchen preparations for the meals are done before opening.
    The doors are opened at 9.00.

    I am taken to the stables by my dad round four p.m and the horses are groomed before the lesson. We are given other chores too to do before we are allowed to saddle the horses. etc.

    • Models like above are needed to stir the students’ imagination and to give them an idea of what they are supposed to do.
    • Sixth, the descriptions are checked by the teacher while the writing process is going on. Finally the descriptions are read aloud in front of the class, each student reading at least one sentence. The ideas can be challenged by the other groups if they think something essential was ignored.

    Make coming in front of the class a habit. Yes, it is scary at first but not so much any more after twenty trials. After two and a half years a very shy IB-student of mine took all of us by surprise when she wanted to give a presentation on ballet. No-one knew she was a ballet dancer but when she got in the front and made us copy her movements explaining what is done in a ballet practice and why, she became a shining star in the very last lesson we had together. She finally found her confidence in doing what none of us was able to do. I will never forget the smile on her face and the courageous memory she left on all of us. And the brilliant example of using the present tense in the passive voice. Yes, I feel like a wet blanket now. Mixing grammar with brilliance. But grammar is important, right?

    Model text-based lesson, Reading

    SAMPLE EXAM FOR READING COMPREHENSION

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    One of the keys to the students’ success and improvement in reading comprehension exams is to devote a couple of lessons to the strategies when you get a new group.

    Throwing the students one exam after another and assuming that massive input will automatically improve the reading skills for an exam, does not necessarily hold true.

    In the previous articles I hopefully gave a lot of food for thought about preparing the students for exams.

    All language skills are intertwined. Thus many of the tips given on listening comprehension, writing tasks and learning vocabulary apply in taking reading comprehension exams too.

    The text below is a sample exam for those who are about 15 years of age. The idea is to let them take the exam either before or after the strategies lessons. The exam has A) True/False-questions, B) multiple choice questions and C) a task combining reading with writing and justifying opinions.

    The next article after this one is an example on how a mature 16-year-old might be able to process this exam. I will also give the ‘correct answers’ there with some recommendations on how to organize the return of the ‘test’.

    I believe that if the students are allowed to use and apply the strategies handout in doing this exam they will internalize the ideas more profoundly. I am talking about the handout and articles in the previous article. And the student may become better writers too since they will learn to anticipate the reactions of their readers better.

    Still, learning to apply the strategies does not take place over night. It also requires a lot of practice.

    Let’s look at the exam now.

    https://asanteafrica.wordpress.com/2010/11/12/matt-suskis-impressions-from-a-school-in-tanzania/

    Making a difference in Tanzania

    Up to 113 million children worldwide do not have access to school books. What a waste it is that old school text books are binned or pulped. Books written in Arabic will, of course, be of no use in most of Africa but English is an official language in Tanzania, for example. Moreover, all secondary education is done in English there and children are taught following the old British O- and A-Level curricula. Due to the way syllabi in Tanzania mirror the old English system, second-hand course books are perfect to help bridge the gap between rich and poor nations.

    In Tanzania educational resources are scarce but children have the will to learn. An organisation based in Liverpool is working hard to see that school text books and other equipment are collected and re-distributed. The Tanzanian Book Appeal would be nothing without the help and support of schools, many of which have been involved in fund raising activities as well as donating old books. John, one of the students involved in the project, says that before the fund raising he didn’t really know or even care about Tanzania. Now he understands that Tanzania is the fourth poorest country in the world, and that there may be up to 40 pupils sharing one text book.

    Once the books have been donated they are collected in a truck and taken to a holding warehouse – which was donated by a local business – sorted through and stored. They will be packed up and shipped off to Tanzania in a big container. The students who have worked on the project will then fly out to meet the books over there. The government in Tanzania have loaned government vehicles to sort out the distribution. The group of English students and teachers will then tour the schools in the Kagera region near Lake Victoria.

    A  Decide whether the statement is true (T) or false (F). Correct the false statements.

    1. In Tanzania there are 113 million children without school books.
    2. In Tanzania all education starting from the first school years is done in English .
    3. The curricula in Tanzania follow the old English model to a great extent.
    4. In Tanzania there is not a lot of money to organize teaching.
    5. An organization in Liverpool gathers secondhand school books and forwards them to Tanzania.
    6. The aid organization does not need the help of school children in its work.
    7. In Tanzania there may be as many as 40 pupils in one classroom.

    B  Answer the multiple choice questions. Choose a) b) or c)

    8. What happens to the school books once they leave the donating schools?

    • a) They remain in an old lorry until a storage warehouse is found.
    • b) They are sent to Tanzania in small units with goods from local businesses.
    • c) The books that have been given away are taken into storage and sorted in Britain.

    9. What happens to the books when they reach Tanzania?

    • a) A group of students from England will go and distribute the books in Tanzania.
    • b) The schools have to pay for the transportation of the books.
    • c) The British students travel on the trucks to the schools.

    C  1 Why are British secondhand school books ideal for Tanzanian schools? (Give 3 reasons and answer in your own words in a full sentence or two.)

    2 What do you think about the procedures of getting the books to schools after they have arrived in Tanzania? (Mention 3 opinions and why you think so.)

    The ‘correct’ answers with detailed analysis are to be found in the next article.

    Africa at its best. Karin Blixen’s home near Nairobi. Blixen wrote famous books about her life in Africa.

    Before you look at my next article about returning this sample exam, please ponder on the questions below.

    How would you organize immediate student-oriented feedback after a reading comprehension test? Background info: The test was 30 min long, 6 multiple choice questions and 4 open-ended ones. A mixed-ability class, 16-year-olds and onwards.

    1. What would you say to the students about the purpose of the exam-returning session?
    2. How do you organize the feedback session right after the test?
    3. Grouping the students? Making it a student-centred learning situation?
    4. How to provide a model how to approach the questions?
    5. How to deal with multiple choices?
    6. How to answer open-ended questions?
    7. When do you give the correct answers and to whom?
    8. Various options to deal with low-achievers, i.e. How do you deal with differentiation?

    Reading

    Reading comprehension strategies in class

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    In the previous article I pointed out that reading takes place in the heads of the students and we have no physical evidence on the quality of understanding. Besides, in general people are reluctant to admit that they did not understand what was said or written.

    For this reason I have always tried to make sure all my students know how to study a new text beforehand at home. Once the students start to think in English, there is no need for any translations. If the students come to classes unprepared there simply is not enough time for most of them to understand the text well enough to learn from it. I have found the teaching of study skills and strategies more and more important over the years. It is a wonderful asset in CLT classes.

    In the mid-1980s I had a rather weak new senior high class and I discovered that seven out of 30 of those 16-year-olds did not understand the texts in our textbook at all. So I made them sit down and translate texts with me once a week while the others were working independently. I felt embarrassed and so did my students. I simply told them what I expected them to do at home and demonstrated how to do it.

    In addition, I told them that they could leave the group and study with the others the minute they could prove they have no difficulties any more in translating a text into Finnish. It took five lessons and all seven students learnt how to get prepared for my lessons. After that we did not have to translate any of the texts. It was taken for granted that everybody has to understand the new texts at the beginning of the lesson.

    Reading strategies to be applied in class

    Provided the students have done their homework and studied the next chapter beforehand, we can quite quickly move on to the stage in the lesson where the understanding of the text is checked.

    The change that CLT brought along was that I started to use the textbook chapters as a stepping stone to free speaking. Understanding the text and doing written exercises was not enough. I started to differentiate the activities in class which lead to the students checking understanding ORALLY in many ways in pairs and groups.

    At its best reading comprehension is linked seamlessly to speaking freely in pairs or groups. There are many ways to do it. I have already discussed these matter in ‘Deepening understanding, Part 1’ but I will rephrase the main points here. Many of the strategies I discuss under deep-level reading in exams can be applied in reading ordinary texts too.

    1. ‘Question-answer’ technique (QA): if you use ready-made questions, have them on the screen and let the students answer them in pairs. After all we teachers.already know the answers so the only reason for asking these questions is to get the students talking; this is an intermediate stage on our way to free speaking. N.B. If we ask the students’ opinion about a text, it leads to free talking: To what extent do you agree with the ideas in the text? / What is the most interesting and boring part of the story and why?
    2. Replacing one-student-answering-the question-at-a-time with pair work means the activity level soaring towards 100 %. But CLT teachers are not pleased with this situation. Why not? Because the answers can simply be read from the text, which means the QA is ‘mechanical’ and our aim is to move via semi-communicative tasks to free speaking.
    3. However, there are other ways than questions to test reading comprehension and have the focus on free talking. I have discussed True-False tasks, Multiple Choice tasks, Explaining the story with the help of pictures or mind maps (= my favourites) and especially differentiation in reading skill in article Deepening understanding, Part 1.
    4. My way of realizing differentiation is very simple. For example, if the topic of a chapter is ‘Sports’ and we are on the verge of checking understanding of the text, every student chooses one of the 3 tasks and works with others who took the same level task. The tasks are: A) Answer the questions on the screen and work in pairs B) Explain about the content of the chapter in your own words , use the key words on the screen if needed. C) Have a discussion in pairs or in groups about your sport experiences and what sports means to you.
    5. Some students insist on doing A, B and C. Others A and C or B and C. It is all the same for me. All I demand is that they work actively all through the lesson. Not for me, but for themselves.

    As you can see I have minimized the extra work for the teacher in this A, B, C style of invisible differentiation. Invisible in the sense of no stigma on any student. Now the students work at a level that suits and pleases them.

    I can sense some of you are wondering ‘How can I be sure my students understand the text correctly?‘. A justified question. My answer is. You can never be sure of it since you can observe it only from outside. Your students will ask each other or you if they do not grasp part of the text. Mostly they simply rely on each other’s help.

    Intensive and extensive reading

    Intensive reading

    In a narrow sense ’intensive reading’ is what we normally do with textbook texts: study them in detail trying to understand the content properly. Sometimes we may look at the vocabulary and the structures more carefully too. I suspect many teachers have never really stopped to think about the various stages and strategies that take place in reading.

    • at first reading is based on translating the text into the mother tongue, aloud, silently in the head or like I do with weak readers: force them to write the translation in their notebooks or the translation of new words between the lines in the text, this goes on for a few weeks or months until the students realize they simply have to do it
    • beginners’ reading pace varies a lot while they are reading a text and they tend to stop and go back and forth in the text, which is quite normal
    • beginners are mostly provided with simplified texts in their books to avoid frustration due to the language being too difficult, still they should be encouraged to read authentic texts at least in their free time
    • at an advanced level the students start to think in English, no translations are needed any more and authentic texts can be used as a source of information at least in projects
    • advanced students should be taught how to make use of various strategies while reading texts, many of the strategies can be taught to younger students too
    • however, there are always a number of students in all age groups who work through translation, which slows down the reading process a lot so teaching effective reading strategies is of vital importance for them in particular

    In a wider sense ’intensive reading’ covers the study of many types of texts and genres often followed by a set of tasks to be done. There are two types of reading tactics depending on what kind of information we are looking for. Both ‘scanning’ and ‘skimming’ a text are very useful skills later on in working life too.

    • We often ’scan’ texts to find a particular answer or a detail.
    • On other occasions we ’skim’ the whole passage or text through to get an overall idea about the text.

    Extensive reading

    ’Extensive reading’ means reading for fun, reading because we enjoy the content or the story as such. Present-day media offers everybody a massive number of sources for extensive reading: in addition to library books we can make use of the internet which is full of interesting texts. It does not really matter what the students read as long as they are interested in the articles or texts. This kind of internal motivation guaratees learning and takes place in a relaxing atmosphere. In brief, the more there is INPUT, the more the students learn.

    It is a good idea to let the students sometimes read whatever they want in class and then tell others what they find interesting in the texts. Some read only short newpaper articles, others may leaf through a thick novel. Encourage all of them to keep on reading no matter what.

    I hate to admit it but during my time at school song lyrics were the only extra thing I read on top of textbook chapters. The first book I read in English was the university entrance exam novel ‘Brigton Rock’ by Graham Greene.

    These days one of my most popular sources for reading is ‘onlinenewspapers.com’ where you can find hundreds of newspapers in English and other languages from all over the world. And I let the students read whatever articles they want, take notes and then summarize the content orally to their group or occasionally for the whole class.

    The more there is INPUT, the more the students learn. The main thing is that they enjoy the texts and the content. Internal motivation to read is best!