 My name is Chris Farrell. I'm a teacher in CES. I'm also kind of from this from the perspective of this talk I'm looking more from the from the CPD side from the continuous personal development side. I'm head of CPD in in our schools and so We run basically workshops every two weeks action research groups and to get a lot of feedback from teachers and One of the big things that I get out of the back a lot from teachers is how kind of burnt out they are trying to get students to Develop to move up to the next level. So my my whole Idea in this one is to provide practical advice Not the theory really behind it too much, but for practical tips, which you can do on Monday morning So What one of the big Problems with the current focus and in terms of classroom or getting students to move away from the classroom getting students to be independent learners and is that the skill development Especially receptive skills is really product focused. So if you're giving people reading tasks for homework and all it's really Focusing them is finding the product. They're not actually being asked to develop a skill And and then in terms of listening what I found for homework We were talking in one of the previous previous discussions is about how passive listening tasks are Especially homework listening tasks very frequently. It's go and listen to the radio or Watch a movie or something like that. But what is the student actually doing? There's no focus listening There's no Emphasis is no stress or pressure on them to actually do a task to this very little skill development there And so that's a problem and as as a result you have obviously the intermediate plateau where a lot of students reach the point Where they can kind of understand movies and they're gonna understand their music or whatever, but they're not actually developing beyond that stage The writing and speaking as well We when we give students writing tasks very frequently it's It's not really Contextual based for their real life. I mean, maybe you're asking them to write a letter To somebody does anybody write letters and you're asking them to do things which perhaps don't really have a relevancy to them All it is the task. There's no skill development. They're practicing writing, but are they actually developing the skill? So these can be used obviously as a lexis task in a grammar correction But when we correct it, we're correcting the language not correcting the skill and that's that's a problem And then it was what we were talking about as well At the break time in terms of vocabulary We're looking at morass the discrete meaning of items And I'm mostly teaching Cambridge the Cambridge advanced exam at the moment And one of the big things the use of English tries to test is their ability to understand language in context So we really look at question types. Are we looking at gap fill questions or higher order questions lower order thinking skills This kind of thing and let Joanne was saying how many How many kind of layers of cognitive processing are you actually developing or testing and in homework exercises? so in terms of practical skills, one of the important things is I think kind of one of the one of the most important things is developing a medium of contact with the students and a Lot of teachers don't like to give out their email address A lot of teachers don't like to obviously give out their phone number and things like that So I use paddles I don't know if many people use it paddles is just a wall that you can throw documents on to and you can keep the Paddle address basically cut it on the piece of paper in your classroom And you can put all of the pad anything you want to put exercises reading texts, whatever you want And they can just go on it We use it for all of our action research groups in there in terms of personal development We use it for exam classes, you know students always say to kind of extra exercises They look at the pilot the answers are there as well You can just do up documents leave the answers everything on it So this can be your medium of communication in order to take the pressure off you look at the paddles Just look at the paddles come back to me And or maybe what you can do is set pilot tasks on Monday and give them the answers on Friday If they didn't do it, it's not your you know, it's kind of there. It's on then Now what we're really trying to do is highlight the deficiencies in their approaches or in current approaches So when you're correcting writing, for example, you're not saying you're not only correcting the the The language, but you're correcting the approach as well and with things like Paddles and things like the material you're going to provide them and you're facilitating this development you are Kind of you're the training wheels as such And we're moving the dependence on the teacher one of the big things in terms of teacher development This is going to focus on is Allowing the teacher to develop into problem and solutions right there so if That the reading texts are coming back and the students are always missing something or they're focusing on something You have to try and understand why in order to best facilitate their development remove the frustration Which I think I was with this so I've got one task Yes, I think I'll do it now And I've got one task that I want you to do I'm going to this is one app I use for reading and I just want To show you and then I'm going to give you about a minute to decide how you would use it You can use it in classes and use it at home. I'm just going to I'm going to give you 300 words a minute My is Arabic students are on about 80 my swiss advanced students are under 250 So I'm going to give you 300. It's a test Stop I'm just going to give you a minute to decide What is that and how would you use it? What are we doing? But just for one minute with person closest to how could you use that? application Yeah Okay, so So this is um This is an application called spreader speed reader. Um, and How could you use it? How could you use it? So you actually use it listening with your eyes cast almost. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And what what are the Yeah So they can do text reconstruction they can do Um, I've seen students do note taking with this before I can't do it It's only maybe female students can do it. The men are just really focusing I give them homework tasks in this so maybe you put up an article in a pamphlet and you say Try this and try the tasks you can do it as many times you want Now some students will go home and they'll try it on 400 words a minute and say I did it 400 words a minute I read it eight or nine times. I got it. Well, maybe lower down the work less time so Well, I've noticed using this in the past three months is that IEL students and Cambridge exam students are actually finished the reading exam before the time And and it's helping them focus on the key information. They need to focus on key information They're put under exam stress for homework basically And the other one I use is cube prompting to it. It shows you like a teleprompter They don't find that as useful And because it still gives you the full sentence and they're distracted to look around But you can try it as well. Maybe you're a student's mice I realize we're really running out of time so hold on, I'm gonna go really quickly I'll give you all of these links at the very end So in terms of listening as well same sort of idea We're thinking of how do you provide listening tasks for students? So obviously you can go listen to this listen to that. I use this website, which is called clip it And which you can go and record anything. So say you can play a Snip of a TED talk or a youtube talk Record it on the clip and you can just email it or you can send it to the padlet or whatever you want to do And give it to them on the monday give them a few tasks get them to transcribe it like we were talking about transcription And they come back to you on the friday or whatever and it's there for them to use They don't have to do it But you provided the structure if they say my listening skills aren't developing go do it again do it again and I also use this one as we as well English Club This week in history every week has a new text Which has the actual text and then it has the recording of the text and and they do this with transcription exercises That's they're a weekly task. They have to do it. It's every week. And it also is a little bit of play all as well a little bit of history there And writing is a little bit more difficult and so A couple of different tactics What I have been using is um What is natural what is needed in in sense of what do they actually do? A lot of people are writing text messages or facebook posts or things like that and I use a thing called debatabase To this is a higher level learner is generated to get ideas focused And they're using rising as slow speaking exercises really So we're going to have a debate, but you're going to write the debates And so you might go home and you might get some of the key ideas And they can take these articles so they can cut and paste them into spreader And they can read them quickly and they can take down if they agree or disagree with the main opinions in them Okay, and What's really important with the with the writing is it can't be done in isolation It can't just be a writing task for writing sake. There has to be a follow-up Or they're writing to disagree or they're writing to agree with somebody Or they're writing and then we're going to come in and we're going to disagree with them So it's the development of critical thinking skills as well Yeah, so yeah relevant to the real play world or a role play world So if you're if you're giving them that you are As we did this week with the marriage equality referendum You are yes, but you are a no vote and they have to It was interesting um and then uh So lexus is kind of the most difficult one And this is some of the considerations. This is stolen from felicity or del's talk at the eye of Tefalon What to teach what to test in terms of in terms of lexus and basically we're looking at things like What are you actually giving them homework about when you give them a lexus homework activity? Are you testing de notation connotation word formation word brahmer? So we're trying to cover as many bases as possible in our lexical testing in order to facilitate lexical recall or facilitate memory members and correct use Kind of got back to the time a little bit um and also I I Always get my students keep vocabulary notebooks with the language recorded and at least two context sentences And so even if they forget they have to go back to the sentence and deduce from meaning Um, because I've noticed one of the big failings of of students of doing lexising classes Our students just write down the word or they might write down the word in the translation in their own language But they don't know how to use it. So um, that was just a little Another thing and then the last uh thing was developing learner strategies in terms of grammar um, oh, yeah, okay, sorry In terms of grammar, so I asked I actually asked a couple of students in the past few weeks what they use um, and a couple of different students use Voxy, this is voxy.com BUSSU and hello hello as parallel as parallel grammar lessons almost where they use them In conjunction with the lessons that they get in class they use these as almost a test and recall and I don't know. Uh, I didn't encourage it But I was just trying to think of other ways that they could use They could develop grammar or use grammar or recycle grammar on their own, which is not so teacher based So you could encourage them to to go on almost. I think all of these are free Yeah, all of them are free So you can encourage them to do them as well. And obviously they cater for for different levels um And we're looking at the same thing as a lexus. Um, we're looking at language and context really I think Especially with With all levels, I suppose you're not just teaching them the grammar you're teaching the grammar and context is no point really as as discrete items and functional language as well So so focusing on how to use the language in a particular structure Could develop that independence of use so they're not just Going I am you are he is Contextual use and then parallel study with these apps Yeah, cool. That was okay