Scott Thornbury - My 7 favourite language teaching methods | #CambridgeDay2020

[Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hi everyone good afternoon how are you today uh we are halfway our five days together learning from renowned speakers how to support and develop students language from home my name is anata simoes your host hope everybody is ready for cambridge day 2020. uh before i start uh i have a few reminders a lot of you guys are asking on the chat about how to see the webinars on video uh they are all going to be available for being viewing on cambridge university press youtube uh and uh how can i say on next monday 120 on 27th 27th of july uh i also read on a chat a few people asking about the link of each speaker and i have to remind you that uh please check your spam box because when you register we we send it to by email to you guys sometimes you guys didn't uh receive it because it goes to the spam box so please be sure to check your spam box and if you have already registered and the problem is not getting the link remains please our amazing support team will be glad to help you just email them on attend cambridge.org okay so now we're starting canvas day 2020. today we are going to learn about teaching new skills to our students and we hope you enjoy it as much as i'm doing we are broadcast broadcasting this event for the latin american elt community and together we are building a brighter future for us and our students if you attend if you attend our eot specific session you you will be entitled to receive a certificate of attendance from your professional development don't forget to answer our salvia about your experience here with us by the end of each session and time for our first speaker he was born in a country that is well known for its amazing landscape new zealand he now lives in spain he's the author of several award-winning books for teachers on language and methodology please welcome scott thornberry hi scott hi renata hi everybody oh nice to have you here just a pleasure and an honor i think that everybody i see people from argentina from brazil a lot of people there is someone from pakistan oh my god wow wow i'm getting excited i know that you're pretty okay they're pretty used to this kind of uh conversations right how is your relation with uh online teaching and online chatting well i've been doing it actually for a long time i've been teaching on an online master's program for 15 or 12 13 14 years now so i've been doing teacher training online i'm not familiar so much with teaching online but also of course in the last few months where i've been doing lots of webinars um it was i was meant to be in brazil last week yeah actually because of for braz t soul but exactly one thing in the other here i am online again but you came here last year right it's called ow was it last year's a bit like a bit longer than that i can't remember two or three years ago fanata it was chilly okay yeah yeah well welcome again even in an online world and before you say your favorite language cheating methods which is the theme of your webinar please tell us a little bit uh of your memories you hold still from latin america oh well i mean i've been coming that was enforced to latin america for since 1995 i think uh so uh i've got a great affection for the for the region and uh i hope it's reciprocal uh i know i've got a lot of friends there i've been a lot of talks conferences and a lot of our online webinars and sessions in fact i got another one next week so i feel very much at home even though of course here at seven in the evening um in spain but i'm with you in latin america and wherever you are in the world whoever from pakistan all the way through i've seen mexico i've seen argentina uh it's fantastic some people are staying up really late for this i'm really impressed so i'm looking forward to it be welcome and enjoy your webinar thank you scott thornberry thank you renata thank you well as i say everybody ah it's great to be here uh i've got one eye on the uh clock when i on the chat and i've only got two eyes so um i hope to be able to deal with questions at the end i'm going to try and get through this in about 40 45 minutes and that'll give us 10 15 minutes uh for your questions so my topic is methods obviously uh and um i'm gonna start before i get into the kind of content by asking you uh well i'm gonna show you some from pictures and i want you just to identify the method that is represented in each of the photos that i show you are you ready so all you have to do is write what you think is the answer in to the chat and i'll see if i can catch it as it flies by so this is picture number one what method is that uh huh renata i think his first granada silva is first off the block [Laughter] yep there it comes audio lingual audio lingual audio lingual audio link yes absolutely audio lingualism or the audiolingual method or whatever you want to call it so that's the kind of iconic uh technology that's associated with audiolingualism the language laboratory those of you who are old enough to remember long hours in the language laboratory either as a student or as a teacher so that was very much as i say the kind of technology associated with the idea of pattern practice drills drill drill drill practice practice practice doesn't matter if you're not interacting that wasn't important it was to get the uh it was to reinforce those habits those drills so yes bf skinner says louie exactly okay here's number two picks number two you're ready and i'll read you the caption if you can't see the boys and the adult model jumped when they heard the command toby okay i'm waiting for the okay here we go jacqueline i think his first polly you're right camilla yes i love this photo it was from one of the original articles that james asher wrote to publicize this method way back in the 1970s i think and you're absolutely right tpr standing for total physical response so teacher jump says jump students jump say jump etc yeah uh okay pretty good okay number three you need to look closely here i'm rather proud of this photo i took it myself so you should be able to see that the learners uh in this case are interacting uh they are they have pictures on a worksheet and they're communicating between each other and michelle i think you're the first and then aida communicative approach yes i mean i think this captures the essence of a communicative approach we've got the classic information gap activity so uh there's a worksheet there's pictures of different faces on it one student's describing a face to her partner uh and who has to guess which one listen and guess which one so the real information gap real communication going on here uh so i would say that's again a kind of emblematic activity associated with uh what we now know is the communicative approach okay you're doing great here's number four this one not so easy i'll tell you what if you concentrate look how comfortable the students are and even the teacher hasn't got shoes on i'll give you a clue this is one of these kind of fringe methodologies associated with a carolina well done with uh humanistic amanda's in there took the humanistic approaches so we have uh various and this is the one that's called as um uh you correctly guest or guess new uh suggestopedia developed by uh lozanov in bulgaria in the 1960s 70s so the students are listening to a dialogue that beautiful calm music playing in the background they're totally relaxed they're almost in a kind of hypnotic state and they're hearing the dialogue in two languages and they're kind of it's penetrating every um part of their brain so that's suggested pedia and one more for good measure if you go and see what's going on here you can see that it's basically the students doing things not much teacher presence and amanda i think is the first one to get it right okay here's coming in moira yep renata again stella erica silvia task based learning tbl task based language teaching task-based learning what do you want to go task right or pbl uh luciano's project-based learning activity based learning whatever you want to do students are doing a project they're doing a task they're using their the target language to mediate the interaction so yeah brilliant okay so those are just five methods from my collection um and there's many more and that's what i want to focus on so a tiny little bit of background here before we get into my favorite methods um what is a method i mean what is the definition well i'm going to use the one this one david noonan's as good as any uh he said uh that a language teaching method is a single set of procedures which teaches how to follow in the classroom methods are usually based on a set of beliefs about the nature of language and the nature of learning a single set of procedures so that's what audio lingualism was a single set of procedures it was classroom drills uh it was the language laboratory it was based on a set of beliefs which included the belief that language learning was a habit formation process and the nature of language that it was ah it was syntactic patterns and so that is uh very that's that's where we were with audiolingualism you can apply the same um uh template to any other method theoretically however the idea of method kind of as we well know started going out of fashion actually way at the end of last century um h.h stern said in 1983 he said several developments indicate a shift in language pedagogy away from the single method concept as the main approach to language teaching otherwise it's not a single method why well because already in the 1980s english and languages second languages are being taught in a whole range of contexts globally to a range of learners adults young learners teens universities business people etc so no single math by a whole range of teachers too so no single method fit uh all these different kinds of context but also there's a feeling that it was a kind of a kind of a top-down imposed from the center out kind of thing these methods were always developed apart from one or two were developed in the kind of the center the so-called center like britain states and so on and they kind of were exported to places where they possibly didn't have those beliefs about language and about particularly about learning so there was this kind of i don't know about this method thing um and there was a uh a shift towards okay what was called a let's just see if we can get this uh yep to uh what uh we know as the um there's this slide okay oh i'm not getting it here it comes [Music] what what is the missing slide [Music] okay okay there we go um the idea that uh that there was a dissatisfaction with method led people like kumaramadivalu to suggest that we're not we're in the post-method condition we're in the post-method situation uh that was in 1994 in fact in 1991 dick allright wrote a paper an article called the death of method so it's very much the idea that the i that the the notion of method had been kind of super annuated it was kind of finished i would move beyond that but of course if you go online uh and you key in language method or language teaching method you find hundreds of references to method here i've got a few i've just taken randomly from the internet developed and used over the years in the classroom the i've skipped the name the x method has shown phenomenal success uh so this is people promoting their own particular methods and they're calling them methods unashamedly here's another one our approach the blah blah blah method is based on research about how the brain functions and how best to take advantage of them and here's another one method method method method so the idea that people are still talking about methods and in fact one researcher um in 2007 did a survey of teachers all around the world and found that very much they were invested in the notion of method uh they he said he commented he was summarized he said the term is is not dead yeah teachers seem to be aware about the usefulness of methods and the need to go beyond them and we'll be talking about going beyond them uh in a second so in a sense we've kind of we've seen to be going round and round first of all there were methods and then there was okay no one method because of all the different contexts and now then when there was camaraderie's post method and then there's dick all right saying no method and then there's methods on the internet etc so where are we and i think the method idea hasn't gone away for a lot of teachers a lot of teacher trainers too and one of the reasons why as uh as jack richards and ted rogers say one of their and that best-selling book are about which you'll be familiar with if you've done a course in methodology and what they're saying is methods can be studied not as prescriptions for how but it's a source of well-used practices which teachers can adapt or implement based on their own needs a source of well-used practices the methods can supply sort of ideas templates whatever for teaching and this is especially true for novice teachers for new teachers who have plunged into teaching for the first time and they need something to kind of hang their lessons on so um that's in a sense where i'm at and of course it's not surprising that still lots of books are being published uh about methods here's this lovely one i was given in russia two years ago anybody here from russia you might be familiar with this if you've done a teacher training course but there are many others that have come up over the years every five years sees a new one uh with method in the title or not and this is a great one diane larsen freeman's been several editions and of course the richest and rogers that i just referred to published by cambridge university fresh and oh and here's another one by oh my god this is um one of course that i wrote a couple of years ago and it's from this book that i want to share seven of my methods that i investigated that i find rather interesting for all sorts of different reasons so let's let's have a look at these seven favorite methods and they go back in time this is uh this is the first one i love this nobody knows about this much um except you know geeks like me prendergast's mastery system this is prentegast he was a civil servant in india in the 19th century he learnt some local languages like hindustani and from that experience of being a student he developed a kind of method and he it was called the mastery system and he wrote it up and it went into it was published and it became very popular in its time for teaching a number of languages not just uh english but german and french etc that's the cover of his book and this is one of his um we had a very well developed philosophy about learning about learning how to learn a language and he was committed to the idea that you don't learn a language by learning its grammar uh you learn it by learning by being immersed in its kind of patterns so he said the power of speaking other tongues idiomatically is attained principally by efforts of the memory not by logical reasonings that is to say not by sitting down and learning all the grammar rules necessary it's all about memory and so how did he do it well he had this system whereby he had these sentences these key sentences uh and these are a couple from the book and so these are these are sentences based on the commonest what he called the commonest words in english so sentence number one i'll read it to you i can't see it why did you not ask him to come with two or three of his friends to see my brother's gardens yeah pretty common words etc now he would take those sentences and he would basically explode them so i'm not expecting you to see this but he can't fit this onto a screen but this is a diagram from his book and it shows you how it works so now there are two sentences here his servant saw your friend's new bag near our house her cousin found my sister's little book in their carriage okay each word is numbered and then below what you see is thousands of different combinations of those numbers so let's take any combination of those numbers and we'll get a sentence so for example here is if we take randomly from that list words 9 12 3 9 15 6 7 and we get this sentence our cousin saw our sister's new book you see what he's doing so he's kind of like a jigsaw puzzle he's playing around with all the possible combinations now this the idea was that the learners should memorize these sentences and then do what he called ring the changes do all these different um combinations and do does that sound familiar to anybody i mean does that it's not a million miles away from this kind of thing do you remember this this was uh very much again uh when i was learning to teach uh and it's associated with the language laboratory and pattern practice drills but it's the famous substitution table so what you have the bottom there one two three four you've got the four columns with the different substitutions for the question how does one get there how do you manage to do that how do people get tickets et cetera so all the different possible combinations that could be generated from that table i j you know that's like there's something about that that i find attractive and useful as a language learner and of course if i'm not alone uh if you're familiar with the online app duolingo you'll know that this is basically how they teach languages it's all about playing around with different combinations of words that fit into a syntax so these are taken from different languages this is gaelic the musician played the fiddle but he died that's not a great not a very authentic sentence but who cares good morning spider goodbye fly practicing german or it does be snowing in the month of january i'm not sure about that being correct they say it's correct but anyway the eggplant is not a purple banana useful sentence probably not but it's a way of manipulating all the different elements of the sentence and my favorite the hamster talks romanian i mean you know i love to think of a context where somebody would say that the hamster talks romanian but there you go now this is incredibly popular i'm not trying to sell duolingo but it is very popular because it's free that people like just playing around with these patterns so maybe prendergast uh had something he also said incidentally when a child can employ 200 words of a foreign language just 200 he possesses he he possesses a practical knowledge of all the syntactical constructions and of all the foreign sounds so what he was saying is that those core words those most common words give you access to the phonology of the language but also the syntax that's associated with those common words this was in 1864 and it took another hundred years before professor john sinclair at the university of birmingham to say the same thing in a sense learners would do well to learn the common words of the language very thoroughly because they carry the main patterns of the language the common words of the language you get you know does this ring a bell um so again prendergast was in some ways ahead of his time okay let's move on the second one the oral method also known as the direct i mean it had lots of different manifestations but i'm looking at particularly this person uh as he's associated with the book called the oral method and this man is harold palmer and if you don't know about harold palmer you should he's the kind of uh ancestor of language teaching and applied linguistics he wrote lots of books like this one and this one as well as grammars and methodology books etc and basically uh he was trained in the direct method the berlitz kind of met he was taught to be taught at a burl at school in his youth and he kind of developed this method and it was very much based on uh sentence patterns again pre-audio lingualism uh but the sentences didn't have to make a lot of sense it was enough to say this is my head that is your head is this my head is this your head again difficult to think of a context but is this my head or your head is actually can you think of a con is this my head or my foot two people kind of like anyway um and so on and so on so this is the kind of thing that uh didn't matter that it wasn't authentic what mattered was it embodied the patterns of the language and it did it using high frequency vocabulary and palmer oh we can laugh at the method maybe and say you know it's not very authentic but nevertheless he had some amazing insights about uh language learning and proficiency and one when he was asked the question in 1925 nearly 100 years ago he said what is the most fundamental guiding principle to conversational proficiency yeah what this is it what is the most fundamental guiding principle of conversation it is this now what do you think it is i hope this works because hopefully you're sitting on the edge of your seats what is the most fundamental guiding principle to fluency let's say it is this it is memorize perfectly the largest number of common and useful word groups memorize it's a memory you know language learning is all about memory sorry but you know you have to remember a lot of stuff and perfectly you've got to get them right and elijah of common that is to say frequent and useful word not words not individual words but word groups what we would now call chunks yeah so this is this is 1925. let's say now we can move 100 years on and we'll see people saying the same thing in 2013 it is knowledge of conventional expressions more than anything conventional expressions formulaic language chunks etc whatever you want to call it that gives speakers the means to escape from the one clause at a time constraint and that is the key to native like fluency yeah that's exactly what paolo was saying in 1925. so what are these uh conventional expressions what are these um word groups that palmer was talking about well how many of you were at pennyr's session yesterday penny was talking about exactly the same thing and in fact she gave some examples of some common chunks yeah some common collocations or phrases uh i wonder if anybody can remember let's see i'll give you a second if you can see if you've memorized them because this is actually very good activity is retrieving these from uh memory so can anybody she gave some examples of phrases of chunks and can you remember any examples let's see if anybody was paying attention if oh angela yes audrey willy nilly a lot fantastic my god that's amazing i hope penny's watching you see this is this is what it's all about this is what paul was saying memorized perfectly it's not large and bi yeah and it's not nearly willy you got to get it right it's not square and fair it's fair and square now this is the thing you can't get these things wrong memorized perfectly there you go so these are the these are the ones that penny gave you yesterday just if you weren't here but this is very good examples of very common word groups okay the reading method we better move on the reading method uh again not probably not very familiar to you i don't know 1930s in the states uh they did a big study of modern language teaching in the schools and they found that the results were very depressing that children in uh at college at secondary school high school in the states learning french or spanish or german or portuguese were not making very much progress now how could they in two years at one or two hours a week it was pathetic it was certainly not fluent and so they did a big report and this guy called coleman uh concluded that it was a waste of time trying to get these students to be able to speak fluently in the time that was available and he said let's just let's just get realistic let's let's lower the bar and say it's impossible to achieve native like fluency in two years at one two hours a week but you could learn to read in the language and reading may be a step in the right direction so that's why it's called the reading method and so this is how he put it the ultimate objective of the curriculum for modern language should be the ability to read the foreign language with moderate ease and with enjoyment for re-creative and vocational purposes and this idea was picked up the idea that reading was a good it's not everything but it's a great start it's pragmatic it's realistic uh michael west who is again in the generation of people like palmer was a great uh british uh applied linguist uh he wrote a book learning to read in a foreign language uh and he concluded 1937 learning to read a language before learning to speak has the advantage that when the pupil begins to speak he or she possesses some general idea of the form of the language in some sense of right or wrong idea in other words the reading the experience of reading gives you a sense of the language of what is idiomatic etc you're well prepared from reading i might add reading and listening to those days of course listening in the class was less easily uh implemented now does that sound familiar does that sound familiar i don't think it does because if anybody no stephen krashen hands up anybody heard of steven crash and of course you have stephen krashen's been banging on about this as if he discovered the idea that reading is reading and listening comprehensive input is all you need at least to gain a foothold into the language he said 2004 reading is a powerful means of developing reading comprehension obviously uh writing style it impacts on writing vocabulary you can learn quite a lot of vicario from reading but not as much as perhaps some people would claim as penny said yesterday grammar and spelling in addition evidence shows that it is pleasant reading is pleasant you can read for pleasure promotes cognitive development and lowers writing apprehension reading is good for you it may not be all there is to a language but okay let's move on cll any ideas of what cll stands for this is not the communicative approach this is not clt c l l that's one of the remember i showed you a picture of suggestopedia when i showed you a picture of tpr well this is the kind of same generation of methods uh and cll stands for yes natalya wow you're so on top of things community language learning community not communicative community language learning thank you natalia uh and it goes like this now this is a great little method but it's kind of it's a bit based on groups the group the teacher is outside the group the teacher is that black kind of rhomboid outside the students are facing each other they have a conversation they generate the conversation they talk about whatever they want when they don't know what to say they ask the teacher in their first language they say to the teacher in portuguese or spanish or french whatever how do you say how do you say what did you do in the weekend the teacher says it's definitely and the student repeats it and then they record that repetition and then another student answers the same thing how do you say how do you say and they build up this conversation which they then is played back transcribed and then various features of the language are identified so it's a kind of it works with small groups i've done it uh with teenagers in spain as an activity uh it's much easier now with mobile phones than it was with the tape recorder in the middle of the room this is the kind of thing this is uh generated by a group of uh women in spain uh three of them did an activity and it goes like this one says emma where are you going tonight tonight i'm going to have supper out where you're going to have supper i don't know i'm being taken out you see now this is language that the teacher has fed in it's their content but the language has been tidied up for them by the teacher and then it's recorded and you get the transcript and it looks really good who are you going with i'm going with with a guy but he isn't my boyfriend and where is your boyfriend do you mean now no no not now where will he be this evening he's going to play water polo water polo very interesting is your boyfriend hunky yes he's very hunky now hunky's not a word that students would come up with that came from the teacher obviously so what happens is he is the students are collaborating to produce the language about what they want to talk about uh and it's sort of echo it's echoed in this comment by michael breen the language i learned in the classroom is a communal product derived through a jointly constructed process it doesn't come from outside it doesn't come from the textbook necessarily it doesn't come from the internet it's something that we construct together and it's interesting actually when you look at this book by karen uh about counseling learning or community language learning he did i only discovered this the other day that he did have this option that you could use a phone you could be outside the club it's 1983 you could be in another room the teacher could be out of the room communicating with teachers with the students on their phone so this seems to me to suggest ways of doing this online i just throw that out crazy english um this is a man called lee young chinese who developed this method to compensate for the fact that when he was learning english he was incredibly shy so he said the only way to overcome shyness is going crazy so he developed this method where he had whole stadiums of people repeating uh sentences like i do not feel ashamed of my english and it became so massively popular that uh he became a national hero uh and it's not dissimilar for another man who in the 1970s called john rasius working in the states developed a method where he dressed up he clowned he threw things at the students if they made mistakes he'd throw they'd break an egg on their head he did all sorts of crazy things and he kept doing them until his recent death now what's going on here why were these methods very popular because they were crazy because they disinhibited the learners and this was li yang says that chinese says you have to make a lot of mistakes yeah you're learning a language you have to make a lot of mistakes you have to be laughed at by a lot of people but that doesn't matter because your future is totally different from other people's futures do what you like it doesn't matter be laughter who cares that that's what's involved in learning a language john racias said the similar thing have the courage to be bad to make mistakes but speak and i think there's something in that number six task-based language teaching we're getting back to more serious methods here those of you um again who are familiar with the history of we looked at a picture representing task based learning the the history of of the communicative approach will know that it sort of began life as task-based language teaching with students doing tasks with no input necessarily from the teacher but feedback on the tasks and this is diagramized it was a diagram in 1979 by chris brumford showing the two different kinds of methodologies the current methodology of the time which is you present some grammar you drill it you practice it you present some more you drill it you practice it a bit like audiolingualism the task based or the strong communicative approach said no no no let's start with the production stage let's start with communication communicate as much as possible and then the teacher presents language that is necessary to improve the communication durativeness go back repeat the task that's the task cycle and it makes a lot of sense because if communication is the aim then maybe communication should be the starting point and that's exactly what dick all right said one of the architects of the communicative approach if communication the and that should be the major element in the process uh and if you again to spell that out a bit uh this is a slightly longish quote but um i like it for obvious reasons and again i'm doing the same thing pres a presentation approach is based on the idea that there's something the learners don't know they don't know the present perfect continuous okay so i better teach it to them it's so important okay so they don't know something and i'm going to fill the holes in their knowledge it's kind of a deficit model of teaching that's the ppp the traditional presentation today we're going to do the present perfect continuous because you don't know it and i do because i'm the teacher now a task-based approach on the other hand starts from the assumption that there is something the learners can do in language in our language maybe their first language but they probably can do it a little bit in their second language and it attempts it attempts to empower them with the means to do this more effectively there's something you can do everybody can tell a story everybody can tell a joke everybody can complain everybody can make a request not very well but if you start with telling stories if you start with making requests if you start with complaining and then the teacher will tidy it up for you that's the idea so a task-based approach is more empowering in theory than a um presentation based approach that's the theory um okay so what's how many methods is that i think we've done six and i said i'd do seven and we're running out of time so what's the seventh method oh this is the cheesy bit it's your method you are the architect you are the designer of your own method every teacher teaches according to their own beliefs values experience and response to their learners appropriately in the context their institutional context their cultural context their political context or whatever we craft our own methodology that's why there's no one method because there's so many different teachers every teacher has their own method and that method that you have developed is the best method it may be a little it may be a kind of mix and match of various bits and pieces of other methods it doesn't matter that's what's called eclecticism hopefully it's principled eclecticism though that another the the the activities that you're choosing are based on some kind of intuitions if you're lying or explicit theory of learn as diane larsen freeman said in one of the books i showed you criticism she says when teachers pick and choose from among methods to create their own blend their practice is said to be eclectic electric but eclectic but she goes on to say remember though that methods are should be coherent combinations of techniques they should make sense thus teachers who have a consistent philosophy and pick in accordance with it you have a theory uh and you choose your activities in accordance with your theory they are practicing principle eclecticism um so let's just summarize then these are the seven methods uh and the uh as i said before there's no one method uh your method is the one that is pos for you personally the most plausible and this echoes prabhu's wonderful article written in 1990 when he said there is no best method why he says perhaps the best method varies from one teacher to another but only in the sense that it's best for each teacher to operate with his or her own sense of plausibility what he's saying is if it if you believe it if it's plausible that is that's what guides your choices and that plausibility will come from your experience for understanding your context from listening to your students as well as your teacher training what you read and attending wonderful cambridge days like this so let's just summarize what's why do i like the seven methods that i've just outlined remember prendergast mastery system well i like that because of the manipulation of formal elements that you get in substitution tables or on some apps it may not be all of language learning in fact it's not all of language learning but it's part of language learning the oral method remember that's harold palmer is this my head is that your head but the memorization of chunks what he realized in 1925 was key that's why i like the oral method the reading method i like it because it's realistic you can't learn to speak as i say overnight but you could learn to read quite well in a period of two years or so and because comprehensible input as krashen says is uh if not the uh only element involved in second language learning it's a very important element community language learning the students sitting around creating their own dialogues they can notion that learning is collaborative it's co-constructive very very important crazy english yeah i mean it was popular why stress reduction lowering uh inhibitions task-based language teaching you know it's meaning driven it's driven by communication by this learner's own meanings uh it's empowering it has to be um it has to be better than being fed somebody else's meanings and your method is the best because it's sensitive to your context and it gives you a sense of plausibility i'll just finish with one more oh there's that book again well i've just talked about seven methods that another 23 in this book and that doesn't exhaust by any means all the different methods that have been suggested over the years but i've tried to summarize uh in that book what i think are the ones that have perhaps got more to say and there's no method that is completely without some kind of value if some learners have learned something somewhere from it so don't knock things like crazy english for example um and james spyro last quote but basically it's all about you because the critical factor in success is the commitment and belief of the teacher in the methods he or she is using it's your belief in the method because if you believe it you'll the students will you know if you're convinced the students will be on site and then combine with continuing reflection as to whether these methods are making a positive difference you can't just rest on your laurels you've got to keep thinking and i think again each teacher's own method is evolving it's dynamic it's never the same and hopefully you're going to go away and next week be trying out the little changes that you could be doing to our own particular methods so i'm going to throw it open now some questions we've got approximately 12 minutes um hi yes we have a lot of questions to use thank you very much for such an iron lecture uh actually we have even more questions than we can handle it but let's go quickly to that rodrigo da silva asks this grammar translation method gives real beginners to some knowledge of the language but acquiring intermediate or advanced level productive skill is unlikely yeah i mean i didn't talk about the grammar translation because i mean we're all kind of familiar with it and it's still very much the default setting for a lot of in a lot of contexts uh and you know i mean i no i i have no problem with grammar but i think you're absolutely right that it's limited uh there's a point where now i think this is what they people realized uh this is why the direct method was kind of designed in the late 19th century because people have been like grammar translation was fine for reading and writing perhaps but it was not very good for speaking uh and so they said well let's just throw out all that stuff and just start with speaking and direct whether no translation because translation is bad for you in it uh it um you know it it entrenches bad habits well i don't think that's necessarily the case i think the grammar translation could be redesigned to bring it into line with some of these communicative principles that we've been talking about so in combination with kind of fluency activities i see no problem no problem with the grammar translation and you can quote me hello there ivana next question rodrigo george miguel da silva asks in which class from context levels is dogma most likely to be successful dogma now i didn't mention the d word um in fact if you look if you look at the book you'll find i sneaked in a chapter on dogma stroke teaching unplugged so i invite you to buy the book and uh to read about it's published by cambridge i love you and uh this the condition which is most successful you'd be surprised how many people have used dogma techniques in context which would not necessarily be conducive to it so i'll i'll pass on that because i don't want to be seen to be advertising my own method yeah there is someone also on chat already where i can buy the book can we buy the book so uh later the people on chat will say to you elena d'alessandro asked is it fair to say we should use all the tools and positive practice to each method approach technique to motivate learners and have them achieve their learning goals yeah i mean i don't think we could use all the tools and positive practice for each method i mean as i say i've i've collected 30 and there's probably another 70 if if not more in the last century i think we should look at all the tools and positive practices and we should try to identify which ones would be appropriate in our particular context and try them out and sometimes you'd be surprised that what you know things that you wouldn't think oh this won't work with these learners you'll be surprised of course we're also talking about a change a major change which nobody's asked about yet which is which of these methods would work best online uh since most of us or many of us are teaching online uh and that's another question that i don't address in fact in the book but what i do actually in this is there's a chapter on um there is a chapter actually on uh on things like programmed instruction and some of these apps online poly etc so but you'd have to adapt some of these procedures some of them just wouldn't work like community language learning with the students constructing a a conversation in a group i think that could work in a breakout room for example and zoom where they constructed the conversation they recorded it and then they performed it to the rest of the class and then it's transcribed i mean i think that would be interesting an interesting line to follow but i don't have any immediate answers on that question which is not one that you ask but it's one that i anticipated our next question is claudici piroli asked why the students are stuck by methodology rather than being focused on their own results um yeah i don't think students are stuck by methodology so much as teachers who get stuck by methodology i mean i think learners are amazingly adaptive as long as they understand as long as well as i said before as long as the teacher is enthusiastic about the method and i think there's a thing called the hawthorn effect hawthorne effect is a um authenticated response to experimentation that researchers have noticed when people are know that they're being experimented on they perform to the limits of their competence so if you say to your class i'm going to do an experiment with you i'm going to try i'm going to do a method this just this one lesson which is totally different for what we've been doing traditionally it may be uh that i'm going to i'm not going to speak whatsoever like the silent way and i'm just going to manipulate things and you're going to tell me what i'm trying to say now the students will be very engaged theoretically because of this thing called the hawthorne thing the idea that they're being experimented on and particularly if they can then talk about it and you say what did you like about that what would you like what would you like would you like to repeat this kind of thing i think that's where the question about the dogma approach needs to be qualify and say yes it's not going to work in every context unless you persuade the students this is something worth doing and once you do that and try something out with them you'll be surprised that oh students say oh i quite like this it's a chance to you know express our own meanings so uh i think yeah students are actually quite adaptable our next question comes from argentina michaela soleda what happens if there is no method is it is it possible well i mean uh you could say there's no method in this context where there's no rigid remember the definition of david noonan when i started with a single set of procedures so you may be in an institution where uh teachers have more freedom to choose their own procedures what i think is the case in many contexts now and i didn't mention this but there's that the uh there is no method because the course book is the method yeah so there's an institutionalized or institutional mandated course book that everybody uses uh or a curriculum or a syllabus or a set of lesson plans that everybody uses in the institution and even and i know this this happens a lot uh where every teacher has to teach that particular lesson that particular day so everybody the whole system is standardized we say there's no method there but there is a course book or there's a syllabus or there's a curriculum which is kind of imposed but that that in a sense is the method it becomes the method perfect thank you marcelo from juarez vista would it be possible to use the same method both for one-on-one lessons and grouped classes oh good question i mean one-to-one lessons uh some some of these methods work really well in fact they're actually better in one-to-one situations like community language learning or uh where you know you say to the learner what is it you want to say you know what you need to say why are you here you know why what is this for professional reasons in which case it was an academic reason you tell me what you want to say and i'll put the words into your mouth and then you tell me again that kind of thing that will work well uh there are other things that would work less creation um uh like uh communicative approach where you know there's meant to be interaction pairs work information gap etc it's difficult to set that up uh with a teacher all the time not possible um so yeah i mean i think that's a very good that's one of the reasons why there's no one method because of these different kinds of situations which people are teaching it one-to-one groups large groups online etc so you know you have to pick and choose according to those particular constraints and then use those constraints to your advantage you know the one-to-one is a fantastic way to learn the language if if if people are committed to it and can afford it our last questions come from cincia fermino sao paulo can we say that the best method depends on the age and something the learner's objectives of learning absolutely so that's another factor another contextual factor that you need to take into account certain things will that's right grammar translations never worked for five-year-olds because they can't get their heads around the kinds of conscious the grammatical concepts uh like you know uh the present perfect continuous etcetera so uh where's the direct method which much much better for five-year-olds because it's just about repeating and repeating and repeating uh so yes absolutely so the age the learner's objectives the learners previous educational experience what they used to you can't kind of ignore that again so this is where you need to kind of consult with them and experiment with them and generally get them on site before you start to impose your own method oh thank you very much scott uh any final words any final thoughts you want to leave us yes well i mean it's been wonderful uh being with you uh virtually and i'd like us to thank cambridge uh brazil and yuranata and gabriela and the whole team for setting this up in such a wonderful professional way and for attracting uh such a huge audience and uh for making sure that the technology worked so uh well so uh thank you very much sincerely uh all of you in cambridge all of you who have participated uh thank you and i hope that there's something for you in this uh talk that you can take away uh and integrate into your future practice i'm sure people are already excited for the next monday when the videos are going to be available for them to read to proceed again thank you very much for your participation scott and now we'll follow the next activity of campus day 2020 but before we have our small bake break i must remind you every year during cambridge day events we request participants a donation of one kilo of food for local assistance organizations in 2020 it couldn't be different this year we are asking participants and partners to contribute with assan palestinia arinona nagio with more than 20 years of action against hunger and poverty in brazil it's easy for you to donate just use the qr code that appears on your screen now nowadays our help is more important than ever we now will have a short break and we'll be back soon so go scratch get grab a glass of water and i'll be waiting for you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Cambridge Brazil

Views: 21,470

Rating: 4.9683452 out of 5

Keywords: CambridgeDay2020, Cambridge Brazil, Cambridge University Press, english language teaching, Scott Thornbury

Id: XERPdwe0HHQ

Length: 68min 22sec (4102 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 27 2020