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Brad Patterson recently set a blog challenge to write how and why you learn a language. So here is my response looking at how I learn Russian. I choose Russian as it is the language that I am spending most time focusing on and can speak the most about.


First encounters
My interest in Russian culture started back at school hearing history lessons about the Russian revolution and Cold War. I really wanted to know more about these people and their different way of life.

Politics and Cyrillic script 
Later at university (whilst studying politics) I took a module in the “Democratisation of Russian politics” and started to learn Cyrillic as a means to decipher the many variations on the English spellings. When a couple of my housemates started to learn Russian as well (this time for no obvious reason) I tried to take in some phrases.

Audio CD’s and Self study
After university I dropped my interest in Russian but a year later I came across a teach yourself cd on special offer and picked up studying Russian again. This time via the “Michel Thomas” method. This consisted on being told a word or grammar structure then being asked how to say a combination of these new words. Basically translations from L1 to L2 with some eliciting, revision of vocab and raising awareness of similarities between the languages.

CELTA and Beyond
Soon after I choose to try TEFL and started to consider where to go to. Considering I was already learning Russian, the choose to look at Russian speaking countries was an obvious choice. After initially looking at Russian I found some articles on Ukraine and due to a whole host of reasons I decided that I would set out for there!

Fully Immersed
Language immersion changed my experienced a lot but it could have been less. Being surrounded by Ukrainian teachers at the school allowed me to practice speaking to them about a range of topics including: day to day life, lesson plans or catching up on their weekends. I Guess it was great to have that comfort of explanations in English and really helped getting to grips with the concept of perfective and imperfection verbs, or verbs of motion with singular or multiple directions.

Top 10,000 Words
On top of that I took to searching through a frequency dictionary and highlighting the words I knew (and how to use them correctly) I soon got up to most of the first 500 words as well as some odds and ends dotted about beyond that point.

Coffee and Women
At a coffee shop I frequented one of the assistance set a challenge that I should come in with a new word or phrase each time and she’d do the same in English. This worked well (impressing a girl can be a strong motive). My love of coffee also helped strongly as it meant I had to frequently think of a new phrase.

Summer studyin’ (having a blast)
When I returned to England in the summer I was aware that I’d have little time to practice speaking Russian and so purchased a course book to work through during the summer. 
Amazingly, having barely spoken Russian over the summer I came back to Ukraine more fluent and speaking with greater accuracy than I had before I left.
Possible due to time to process the language I had been consuming or perhaps due to understanding the grammar in a bit better detail I don’t really know why.

To infinity and beyond
Since then I have continued the same approaches but also made a purposeful decision to impose a rule of “let’s talk Russian” when I met new people or Ukrainian friends (before we switch to English as we almost inevitably do) so that I can get more practice in than I did last year. Some teachers certainly seam to have struggled with this but I think it is only because we allow ourselves to feel comfortable.

With little over a week away until my talk at the IH Young Learners conference I thought now would be a good time for an update.

Thanks to no small help from my DoS I have managed to compile a talk together whilst still managing (somehow!) to keep ahead with all my other work.


The talk has several parts:

1. What do you think a Dyslexic person is like?
2. Some characteristics of Dyslexic students
3. Strengths and weaknesses of Dyslexic students
4. General classroom guidelines
5. Analysis activities strengths and weaknesses
6. Sharing of activities
7. Some extra resources.

Yesterday evening I was teaching an intermediate group with the subject of work life balance. Whilst looking at the discussion questions it lead me to reflect in my own balance or lack there of.

Via Kristin Smith (Klsmith77)

You are not alone
It seams to be a common problem for teachers, not leaving work at the school, the subject of this lesson or that, this grammar point or another. When you add in professional development reading and blogging it’s a pretty full timetable.

I actually don’t find this too hard, it’s the other extras which push me over the top.

• Going to/presenting at conferences
• Coursework for an International House course (or two!)
• Doing charity work at an orphanage
• Visiting friends in another city
• Hosting a party
• Contacting family, friends and girlfriend back home
• Planning for next year

They can all push me near the edge of an overload.

A frequent problem
At the moment I have all of these extras at once. I keep promising myself that it’s just this weekend, I just need to get through this weekend. However, it does seam every 2 months I face this confrontation of almost everything at once.

I do, however, know that I relax by doing things. Staying in makes me feel restless, more tired and depressed in the long run. So perhaps I actually have my work life balance pretty well rounded. I certainly love reflecting on passing through the hard and hectic times afterwards.

A plan of action
The suggestion my students gave me was to sleep more. Insuring I get 8 hours sleep a night. I also decided to say no to something, something I really wanted to do and felt I should do. I’ve also written out a list of things I want to do with time outside of work. Things I want to do at work and a sort of time frame I’d like to do each thing by.

What about you? How is your work life balance? What tips do you have for improving it?

I really like this goal as I am a big fan of encouraging people and helping them to see what they are doing well.

Luckily, this week I was doing a peer observation as part of my professional development plan for my school and so got to have a feedback session where I could encourage the teacher.

The best part was that the thing I encouraged him on:

• His ability to adapt;
• His classroom management,
• His willingness to go off lesson plan yet stay relevant and then bring it naturally back to the task

Were all things that he had been worrying about!

I also had the opportunity to observe another teacher a week later and as such was looking forward to finding some aspects to encourage him on. The lesson was really great to observe and as he had a teenagers group it was really useful to see him struggling and dealing with the same issues as I did.

• After the lesson I thanked him as it was the most interesting lesson I have attended in a long time!
• I confessed to struggling with the same issues and how he seamed to deal with the issues.
• How he didn’t let problems like late attendance side track him.

What happened afterwards was on a subsequent day he opened up more about his personal life. It was a real honour considering we hadn’t been the closest within the teachers room (not that we didn’t get a long just everything was very normal) and since then the staffroom has been an even better place

Update:

Since then I had a moment of overhearing a teacher in the next door classroom (the only one who I hadn’t observed). It was with a group I knew he had trouble with (Kids 6) and he was teaching them 1st conditionals!!!! His explanation sounds really great, really clear and the kids were all really involved. After his class I told him it sounded great. He thanked me as he had been really worried about that group of kids.

The round recently released their first title to the general market.

52: subversive activities for teachers

Having followed the round of a little time, and having a general interest in all thing eBook, I was very interested to see what this book would be like. My initial impressions were very positive and so I though I’d give away two copies of the book.

The competition starts from 18th of February 2012  till the 25th of February 2012.

So how do I enter?
Very simply, write the best comment of the week.
At the end of the week I will announce who has given the most interesting, inspiring, or encouraging comment and send them an Amazon gift voucher for the same amount as a copy of the book [I can't find how to actually send a copy of the eBook!]

Don’t know what to comment on? Might I suggest these posts:
Training to deal with emerging language
Do teachers of Pupils set the pace
How I use Evernote for professional development.
Dogme as hindsight or Dogme as forward planning.

What if I don’t have an eBook reader.
You can download a desktop app for Kindle via amazon or there is now even a cloud reader that is compatible with several browser.

Not sure you want the book? Why not try a sample?
or read the review here. 

So what are you waiting for? Enter now!

Update: only one person entered and left a comment. He already had the book and as such no prize was awarded

1. What if I don’t recognise the emergent language?
2. What if I can’t explain the language?
3. What if I can’t design an activity for it?

Which happen to coninside with the model of retrive, repeat, and recast language.

So what can a teacher do to become better at these skills?

1. Recognising the emergent language.
Firstly a teacher can start studying English using formal methods. Looking at grammar books, style guides, language awareness courses or a whole range of other resources. In fact here are a list of some.

• Grammar for English language teachers by Marion Swan
• About language by Scott Thornbury
• International House Language Awareness course

Secondly spending time looking at authentic material with a specific task such as

• Identifying phrases
• Register
• Same meaning different words
• Stylistic elements

2. Explaining the language.
Again resources such as style guides, grammar books, even the internet search engine can be great for coming up with explanations for certain language elements that a teacher comes across. In fact it is even okay to take some of these resources in to the classroom! After all we take dictionaries into the classroom, why not other resources?
However, one of the greatest resources is other teachers. Their experience in teaching grammar points before [often in the same mono/multilingual context] is even better than a grammar books!

3. Designing activities
Reading suggested activities in books and thinking about how they can be adapted for other language items. The internet again is a great resource here as well as such books as 700 classroom activities [many need little setting up and could again be glanced through mid lesson] Teaching unplugged which has some set formulas, How to teach speaking, or other reading resources.

Again teachers are a great source of activities and in fact having brainstorming sessions where you take a text/language item and the brainstorm as many variations as possible as you could do from it. This is great fun and exposes you to what other teachers ways of thinking.

4: Bringing it all together?
Finally a great resource that combines all of these is Infinite Ideas by Sandy Miller. This blog uses a prompts and asks “How would you use it in the class room?” The great thing Is that it exposes you to a wealth of resources that could potentially be pulled out for any on topic moment, challenges you to think of activities based of the resource in front of you AND perhaps best of all, shows you how other people look at a resource and their ideas.

What are your language training tips?

#eltpic taken by @victoriaB52

One of the very strange moments I had today [when speaking to another teacher] was about the amount of time activities take. [N.B. please bear in mind that this is a school context where there is a common text book and pace chart for everyone to follow.]

A Slow teacher?
One of my fellow teachers won’t get on to the same point as me and frequently takes a lot longer on discussion [or items that are turned to discussion items] than I find myself spending. I sometimes find myself assuming that not enough actually work or teaching went on, that there was no focus on language or skills development and in a way can look down on that teacher.

A Quick teacher?
Paradoxically, one of the other teacher seams to race through activities and I found that he had managed to cover “two lessons” worth of material in ONE lesson! I rationalised this straight way with the fact that I had expanded the material and added extra discussion work for the students so it would fill a whole lesson and thus that was why he hadn’t taken the required two. However according to the said teacher this wasn’t the case, he had also included these extra activities and they had STILL got through it all [due to their quick reading skills]!

My pace is best?
What I found most remarkable is that in both these cases I straight away assumed my pace was the correct and right pace and perhaps this is true for this class. However, I immediately transferred my classes pace onto another class that I didn’t even teach. Which lead me to question this first assumption that the teachers went too quick or too slow.

How much do students or teachers set the pace?
Having said this I do still notice that certain teachers seam to go slower across every group they teacher and other quicker. This surely can’t be a fluke that they get all the quick or slow classes so they must do something to speed up/slow down their classes.


Some possible factors might be:

• Adding extra discussion questions,
• Pyramiding the discussions or leaving it at pair/group work
• Adding extra analysis of the text
• The method of feedback and checking answers
• Setting time limits within activities.

This reminds me of one of my most enjoyable lessons that really can apply to all sorts of levels.

“How do you learn English/other language” 
I originally used it to teach present simple sentences for elementary students and it has a great incentive that the practical outcome of the lesson is students have some ideas for how they can improve their own learning experiences or increase their self study. 

However, I have also used it for practising intrinsic meanings for modal verbs in terms of advice and obligation and I am sure it could be used for higher levels to look at education vocab, conditionals [first for choosing one option over another, second for giving advice] or a whole host of other language and speaking skills.

I have actually set all my groups this challenge, allowing any who wish to respond via being recorded or writing the option as well.

One of my practical aims is to use intervue.me to set further speaking homework tasks for students as there have been a few student who expressed an interested in further out of class speaking practice.

Serge’s response.

After being put on to the imitative of the round via twitter and seeing the striking similarities between what they were seeking to do and Seth Godin’s Domino project I got very excited yesterday to see the first title 52: a year of subversive activity for the ELT classroomwith the tag-line of being subversive activities for a whole year (if you use one a week).