Your favourite website: I like any pages where people have ...



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Chris Roland ELI, Seville

Saturday 9th March, 15.30-16.30

Teaching Low Level Two Thousand and Teens

Why can’t low level teens speak English very well? Do we even like the phrase ‘low-level teen’? What about low level language? Does that exist? How important are the irregular verbs and is there a more effective way to teach them? What about vocabulary and speaking and course books? I shall try to offer useful thoughts on all these issues.

Sunday 10th March, 12.15-13.15

A Discipline Festival 2013

Discipline Fest. 2013 is a smorgasbord of strategies, tips, techniques, metaphors, analogies and front line survival tactics to increase order, organization and control in classes. You will hear my advice on sending students out and on those after class chats and will also get to find out what I mean by Mountain Pass Politics, Resetting Jelly and the Cloud Hammer.

Chris Roland is currently a teacher and trainer with ELI, Seville. He has also taught and trained in Barcelona, Nottingham, Aleppo, Cádiz and Damascus. His particular areas of interest are: task micro-mechanics, classroom discipline, learners' engagement with text, context sensitive material and the way that students and teachers talk to each other

Your favourite website: Not a website exactly but I like having Athens or Shibboleth access to articles and journals.

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A gadget you can’t live without: None. I don’t like gadgets. Touch screens irritate me. So do mobiles. I have one but I don’t know where it is most of the time. Although it does come in useful, I don’t want it to play any bigger a part in my life than is absolutely essential. So apps and iPads they’re all out. I kind of like to feel distance as distance. Beautiful disconnection.

In general I try to stay a safe 10 years behind the cutting edge of technology which allows me to pick and choose with the benefit of hindsight. I’ve just got my first MP3 player – which is fun. I have to catch two buses to get between my home, which is a village near Seville, to where I work so it’s nice to be able to listen to Héroes del Silencio or a bit of disco-techno on the way. But there’s also merit in being on a bus and hearing bus sounds too, so I try not to listen to it every day. I’ve still got a Walkman cassette player that I use to listen to exercises in Arabic (I’m doing the same intermediate exercises I was 5 years ago, over and over again).

I got out my Walkman cassette player in class a couple of years back and told the kids it was an MP5. One little girl opened up the thing and looked at the tape.

-But where do you put the new music in?

-It’s on the cassette.

-No but where do you put the new songs in?

-They’re on that cassette. There’s 5 songs on this side and 8 on that side.

-But what do you do when you want some new songs?

-You put a different cassette in. You have to decide which cassettes to take with you before you set out on your journey. I’ve got another two or three in my bag.

She looked at me as if perhaps I still hadn’t understood her question.

I recently bought myself a remote pointer so that I can change slides on my PowerPoint presentations without having to be stuck to where the computer is. After years of watching fellow presenters amble freely about without having to keep dashing back to the same spot, now I can do so too. I tried it out for the first time last week and I liked it! It made the experience of giving the talk a much more pleasurable one so I think that wins as my favourite gadget of the moment.

Something you'd never throw away: I’d never throw away a piece of paper without first making sure I hadn’t written something I wanted to keep on it – an idea or a list. That goes for bus tickets, receipts, serviettes and tissues.

I’d never throw away my two volume Dictionary of Slang by Eric Partridge. I like that. A lot of it’s military slang and nautical terms and some of it’s so old it’s more like poetry – but it keeps me entertained and it’s really useful when I’m training and want to put my the people in my session in the position of learners by giving them some language they’re not so familiar with.

I wouldn’t throw away the silver Saint Christopher that a friend of my parents bought me when I was born nor the bronze ashtray which is one of the things they brought back from Dubai (which is where I was born).

Then finally, there’s Bogin 0 and Bogin Uno, two little creatures that I made out of tiny stones when I was at the Costa Brava a few years back. They were the original inspiration for Humphrey Bogin’s imaginary friends in the PowerPoint stories about him I’m still writing (on the Reg and Lellow site ). I keep the originals as a memento.

Who or what inspires you? In my day to day work life it’s the pragmatically stubborn students, who despite not having much of a flair for languages, get onside with the teacher, do all the homework and all the rewrites and improve who inspire me.

My head also welcomes parents who are obviously proud of their child, however that child does, but who also take an active interest in their child’s learning AND have a realistic picture of that child’s abilities.

My partner inspires me – which I think for me is the best way a relationship could be. One of the things she is currently doing is backtracking from the humanities pathway she took since high school (which can close doors to you if you’re not careful, especially in the Spanish system as it is right now) and is building up a base in sciences. I’ve watched a couple of her genetics videos and it’s also inspiring just how small we go – the 2 metres of DNA coiled up in every cell – and how fast all that is moving and constantly being decoded.

Useful teaching tool: The twin-parametrically-bordered-reality-check, which is something I’ve just this moment invented. For example:

It’s only an English lesson [so I won’t start taking myself too seriously] , but it IS a lesson [so we do need a minimum of joint seriousness here to do the event justice].

Or//

I’m only the teacher because these people, the students, are giving me the authority to be the teacher [so I have to respect that my power is temporary and my authority very much on lease] but they ARE giving me that authority [so I should lead, and I should provide positive direction].

Your favourite lesson: Where new teachers are able to go outside of their own teaching concerns and see things from the perspectives of the students, going on ‘the journey’ with them.

Your favourite bit about your talks: Maybe their conception, that is to say the initial thinking about them. The mad scribbling in notebooks when they first came together was magic. I was sitting near the cathedral in Cádiz one heady evening last July, with a beer and a plate of olives, when the framing arguments for Teaching Low Level Two Thousand and Teens came to me. I was enjoying the process so much that I walked across town to another square and sat next to a gurgling fountain with a second plate of olives to think about it some more.

Going back a bit further, a lot of the concepts for A Discipline Festival came to me during the cold early months of last year while running round Cádiz at night. It was a beautiful time where the classroom tests and triumphs of the day would meet with the realignment of energies that comes through pounding the pavement for a good stint. There was a particular stretch on the port side of the city where ideas for that talk would abound, including the title, commentary phrasing and things I wanted on the slides. Then I’d have to remember them all for another 40 minutes or more until I got home.

A lesson you've learnt while teaching: That when a student says, ‘I don’t understand’, the first thing I need to do is listen and to let them explain what they don’t understand, before giving more explanations of my own.

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