 So we're talking about pushing past the intermediate plateau. We all have students who have been taking English classes for a while and learning English maybe for a number of years. And they're at this position where they kind of plateaued, having done well early. And they will know there are other students who are up there, but they're not so sure how to get there. And they may become a little bit frustrated. They may become a little bit sort of demotivated. And that's what our talk is about. So I'm going to ask you to think about these quotations. Something is fun until you're really good at it. Until you're good at it. What could it be? Maybe, yes. Your children do not excel at school. Someone is not doing their job. Teachers. Yes. They're people who, something less, live more. Surprise. Okay. I'm sorry. Actually, these ideas come from a woman called Amy Chuang. If you can get rid of that for me, Peter, if this needs to happen, then I'll do that. If you hold on to it, you can drag it down from the top of it. Put it like that. Very nice. Okay. Thank you. She is this tiger mom person. And she said, nothing in any order, okay. So nothing is fun. And it's the parents who are not doing their job. People who sleep less live more. Not stress. Not stress. So it's a little bit different than what we might have been thinking about. And I got all this information from English file. It's the intermediate course. It's from that intermediate course book. For some students that I've been experiencing are doing now for the second, if not the third, time over. So they might be short on motivation. So perhaps this is their situation, they're at the plateau, and I'm trying to say to them, don't give up here, you know, you can get your mother to push you. So I need a tiger mom. She's going to help me in many ways. She'll push me to study. She'll manage my time for me. She'll punish me if I fail. You know, I need that. She'll force me to stay at home and study. She'll give me no choices about the other activities I do. She'll never allow me to do extra activities that I like. She'll decide what I focus on, you know. She'll take all these decisions for me and then I'll be a much better learner. Yo Amy. However, most people react badly to these kind of things. I resented myself when people do this for me, I think my students do as well. But the students, it's a young girl, you know, she wants to make something of herself. It's the daughter of Amy, but she might say, I want to get to the next level, you know. So maybe I need to have some thought about this. And I decided that it would be interesting to think about learning strategies with my students so that they could figure out how they might try and get themselves into the upper intermediate category and move on. So instead of thinking about language, we've got an analogy, like climbing a mountain. I want to climb a mountain. How can I ensure that I get to the top and I don't slide back down? I just ran this with my students like a regular, I guess it's a kind of a discussion, and the students came up with these things. We kind of brainstormed it. Now it might be a little hard to read, so we go through them one by one. Said daily targets, they said. Write down your goals. Know why you're climbing that mountain. That's important, you know, things, and this was something one of my students said. Get help when you need it. Get some walking sticks, tools, you might say. Get some expert advice. Focus on what you're doing. You know, if you're climbing that mountain and you're putting the carabiner into the rock, then you need to focus on that task and do it properly. Take pride in what you've achieved, they said. And they also said believe in yourself, which is important, and find other ways of doing it if what you're doing is not working. So that seems important, too. Okay, this is all about climbing a mountain, but I think it can relate to English language learning as well. So there's a woman called Rebecca Oxford, and she's got this seal or a window seal. It actually stands for strategy inventory of language learning. So a list of ideas that you can use for strategies for language learning. They're direct strategies and indirect strategies. And the direct strategies are things like memory, cognition, and compensation. Memory is, as you can imagine, trying to remember words and phrases that you've learned. So you can create mental linkages or associations in your mind for cognition. You analyze what you're doing, come up with reasons for why we use the present perfect in this situation, etc. And compensation will be maybe guessing intelligently or finding other ways of doing it. Okay, so we've got indirect strategies. These are more Latinisms, I think. If it's metacognitive, that means it's planning your learning, evaluating your own learning, maybe. Thinking about what you've done, have you done it well, have I reached the goals that I've been planning. Effective is like about your feelings. So maybe lowering your stress, you know, sleep. Stress less, like you just said. And also think about what do you enjoy? Do you enjoy listening? Do you enjoy reading, etc. And socialists working with other students together, both inside the classroom, but maybe also outside the classroom. Okay, so this is Rebecca Oxford's ideas. And I went back to my students and didn't think about Rebecca Oxford, didn't introduce them to her ideas. Just ask them, do you have any learning strategies that you would recommend? And they were into this conversation. It just, it somehow took off in the classroom. And we're working in pairs here, and they have loads of things to say. And they came up with recommendations that we then collected on the board in that way. Again, it's a bit hard to read. Some things that we've already heard, short and medium term goals for yourself. Strategies to improve your listening, maybe. Come up with ways that you can do it. Accept your mistakes. And then learn from them. That's the key thing, you know. Repeat, revise and review. So it's this whole cycle. Take notes, take notes effectively in a way that suits you. Do things that you like. Again, it could be reading or listening or music, for example. Use apps to learn. So more tools related to the previous talk. Use music again. Manage your study time. That's a meta cognitive strategy. Managing your own time so that you're using it effectively. And then reward yourself. Hey, I'm going to have a chocolate biscuit now. Okay, so that's what they said. And I asked them to share experiences of using one of these learning strategies with each other, you know. So again, we went back into pairs. And we came up with these brainstormed ideas. This is what they came up with after having a conversation with each other. And they're saying things. I'm going to go over this side now. They're saying things like notice chunks in language. Notice phrases. Like for example, all day long. Or the whole day long. They're different, you know. So where do I use the, where do I not use the? And notice it. Try to remember it for yourself. Try to figure out meaning from context. That's important because it gives the people an opportunity to, actually, I'm going to be reading a book and I'm not going to understand everything. Do I need my dictionary every single time? So they figure out a strategy for this. And you know, some learners, like hanging onto their dictionary, can they let it go? Try to express the meaning using different words. So circumlocution. Say it in a different way. Take notes, of course. Surprising how many students just don't really want to take notes. Don't take notes. Or to review those notes. So you write it all down. Do you ever look at them again? Okay, so lots of ideas. And I gave my students this homework test. They were going to think about something that they were good at, something that they use, a strategy that they use. And I wanted them to prepare a little talk because this was our Friday progress test. We wanted them to do some speaking. So this was what we were going to do. And the topic was about strategies and they had to focus on one of the learning strategies. Okay, I kind of cheat on those things because before they do the talk, I always get them to tell their partner what they're going to say in their talk. You know, be like all of us who's talking today. We'd say, well, what are you going to say before you? You know, it gives everybody a chance to become more comfortable with it. And then I cheated again. Instead of getting them to talk in front of the whole group, I said, okay, now we've got five people together. Can you share with your ideas? So they did that and they shared their ideas and people took notes from each other. And then at the end, they kind of thought, yes, I think this will work for me. Yes, this is something that I will try out. I'll just give you an example of one of the things that somebody came up with. This is something that we had developed in the class together. It's using an app called Quizlet. And it's a flash card app. If you like, I'll show it to you. If anyone's interested, I'll show it to you later. And you can download the app onto your smartphone or your laptop or you can just use it on the internet. And so the guy says, I can't stay, I'm in a hurry. That's one side of the flash card. Instead of a picture or instead of a Portuguese phrase, that's what he's got. And the missing word is, I'm in a hurry, right? So we all know. So basically he's got on the other side of the flash card the word in. And he can use the app to try and match flash cards maybe to write down the words that are missing. And the interesting thing is that he's now deciding, ah, I'm going to take that word out for myself. He has rationalized it. He's going through some cognitive learning strategies but it allows him to take notes in this way and also to review his notes. And because it's an app, you can share with each other. So it actually ticks a lot of those strategy boxes. So my main point I think is that the students are at this plateau. They probably need strategies to help them to go onto that higher level that they're trying to retain. And they need to think about what strategies work for them. And I think by facilitating conversations in the classroom about that topic, students can help themselves and help each other to get there.