Mediating mediation

This post is a piece of mediation – an attempt to help you understand the concept of mediation itself. In order to mediate this concept, I am engaging in an act of linguistic mediation, helping you to understand the language of the discourse of mediation, which may, at times, seem obscure. See, for example, the last sentence in this paragraph, a sentence which should not be taken too seriously. This is also an act of cultural mediation, a bridge between you, as reader, and the micro-culture of people who write earnestly about mediation. And, finally, since one can also mediate a text for oneself, it could also be argued that I am adopting an action-oriented approach in which I am myself a social agent and a lifelong learner, using all my plurilingual resources to facilitate pluricultural space in our multidiverse society.

Mediation has become a de-jour topic since the publication of the Companion Volume of the CEFR (North et al., 2018). Since then, it has been the subject of over 20 Erasmus+ funded projects, one of which (MiLLaT, 2021), (funded to the tune of 80,672.00 € and a collaboration between universities in Poland, Czechia, Lithuania and Finland), offers a practical guide for teachers, and which I’ll draw on heavily here.

This guide describes mediation as a ‘complex matter’, but I beg to differ. The guide says that ‘mediation involves facilitating understanding and communication and collaborating to construct new meaning through languaging or plurilanguaging both on the individual and social level’. Packed as it is with jargon, I will employ three of the six key mediation strategies to make this less opaque. These are streamlining (or restructuring) text, breaking down complicated information, and adjusting language (North & Piccardo, 2016: 457). Basically, mediation simply means helping to understand, in a very wide variety of ways and in the broadest possible sense. The mediation pie is big and can be sliced up in many ways: the number of categories and sub-categories make it seem like something bigger than it is. The idea is ‘not something new or unknown’ in language teaching (MilLLaT, 2021).

What is relatively new is the language in which mediation is talked about and the way in which it is associated with other concepts, plurilingualism and pluricultural competence in particular. (Both these concepts require a separate mediating blog post to deconstruct them.) Here, though, I’ll focus briefly on the kinds of language that are used to talk about mediation. A quick glossary:

• facilitating collaborative interaction with peers = communicative pair / group work
• facilitating pluricultural space = texts / discussion with cultural content
• collaborating in a group – collaborating to construct meaning = group work
• facilitating communication in delicate situations and disagreements = more group work
• relaying specific information in writing = writing a report
• processing text in writing = writing a summary

See? It’s not all that complex, after all.

Neither, it must be said, is there anything new about the activities that have been proposed to promote mediation skills. MiLLaT offers 39 classroom activities, divided up into those suitable for synchronous and asynchronous classes. Some are appropriate for polysynchronous classes – which simply means a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous, in case you were wondering.

To make things clearer still, here is a selection of the activities suggested in MiLLaT. I’ll spare you the lengthy explanations of precisely which mediation skills and strategies these activities are supposed to develop.

• Students read texts and watch videos about malaria, before working in groups to develop a strategy to eradicate malaria from a particular village.
• Students do a jigsaw reading or video viewing, discuss the information they have come across and do a follow-up task (e.g. express their own opinions, make a presentation).
• Students read an article / watch a video (about Easter in another country), do some ‘lexical and comprehension activities’, then post messages on a discussion forum about how they will spend Easter.
• Students read a text about Easter in Spain from an authentic source in Spanish, complete a fill-in-the-blanks exercise using the information and practising the vocabulary they learned from the text, then describe a local event / holiday themselves.
• Students read a text about teachers, discuss the features of good/bad educators and create a portrait of an ideal teacher.
• Students read extracts from the CEFR, interview a teacher (in L1) about the school’s plurilingual practices, then make a presentation on the topic in L2.
• One student shows the others some kind of visual presentation. The rest discuss it in groups, before the original student tells the others about it and leads a discussion.
• Students analyse a text on Corporate Social Responsibility, focusing on the usage of relevant vocabulary.
• Students working in groups ‘teach’ a topic to their group members using figures/diagrams.
• Students read a text about inclusive writing, then identify examples of inclusive language from a ‘Politically Correct Bedtime Story’, reflect on these examples, posting their thoughts in a forum.
• Students watch a TED talk and write down the top five areas they paid attention to when watching the talk, share a summary of their observations with the rest of their group, and give written feedback to the speaker.
• Students read a text and watch a video about note-taking and mindmapping, before reading an academic text and rendering it as a mindmap.
• Students explore a range of websites and apps that may be helpful for self-study.
• Students practise modal verbs by completing a gapped transcript of an extract from ‘Schindler’s List’.
• Students practise regular and irregular pasts by gap-filling the song ‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’.
• Students practise the present continuous by giving a running commentary on an episode of ‘Mr Bean’.

You could be forgiven for wondering what some of this has to do with mediation. Towards the end of this list, some of the examples are not terribly communicative or real-world, but they could legitimately be described as pedagogical mediation. Or ‘teaching’, for short.

Much could be said about the quality of some of the MiLLaT activities, the lack of originality, the (lack of) editing, topics that are already dated, copyright issues, and even the value of the activities. Was this really worth €80,000? However, the main point I’d like to make is that, when it comes down to classroom practicalities, you won’t find anything new. Rather than trawling through the MiLLaT documents, I’d recommend you splash out on Chiappini and Mansur’s (2021) ‘Activities for Mediation’ if you’re looking for some ready-made mediation ideas. Alternatively, take any tried and tested communicative classroom task, and describe it using some mediation jargon. If you do this, you’ll have the added bonus of practising your own mediation strategies (you could, for example, read the CEFR Companion Volume in a language other than your own, mentally translate into another language, and then amplify the text using the jargon from the CEFR CV). It will do wonders for your sociolinguistic, pragmatic, plurilingual and pluricultural competences.

Now that we have mediation etherized upon a table, there is an overwhelming question that cannot be avoided. Is the concept of mediation worth it, after all? I like the fact that mediation between two or more languages (Stathopoulou, 2015) has helped to legitimize interlingual activities in the ELT classroom, but such legitimization does not really require the notion of mediation. This is more than amply provided for by research into L1 use in L2 learning, as well as by the theoretical framework of translanguaging. But beyond that? I’m certainly not the first person to have asked the question. Bart Deygers (2019), for example, argues that the CEFR CV ‘does not truly engage with well-founded criticism’, and neither does it ‘refer to the many empirical studies that have been conducted since 2001’ that could have helped it. He refers to a ‘hermetic writing style’ and its use of ‘vague and impressionistic language’. Mediation, he argues, would be better seen ‘as a value statement rather than as a real theoretical– conceptual innovation’. From the list above of practical activities, it would be also hard to argue that there is anything innovative in its classroom implementation. Mediation advocates will respond by saying ‘that is not what we meant at all, that is not it, at all’ as they come and go, talking of North and Piccardo. Mediation may offer rich pickings for grants of various kinds, it may seem to be a compelling topic for conference presentations, training courses and publications, but I’m not convinced it has much else going for it,

References

Chiappini, R. & Mansur, E. (2021). Activities for Mediation. Delta Publishing: Stuttgart

Deygers, B. (2019). The CEFR Companion Volume: Between Research-Based Policy and Policy-Based Research. Applied Linguistics 2019: 0/0: 1–7

MiLLaT (Mediation in Language Learning and Teaching). (2021). Guide for Language Teachers: Traditional and Synchronous Tasks https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/project-result-content/2d9860e2-96ee-46aa-9bc6-1595cfcd1893/MiLLaT_Guide_for_Teachers_IO_03.pdf and Guide for Language Teachers: Asynchronous and Polysynchronous Tasks https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/erasmus-plus/project-result-content/3d819e5a-35d7-4137-a2c8-697d22bf6b79/Materials_Developing_Mediation_for_Asynchronous_and_Polysynchronous_Online_Courses_1_.pdf

North, B. & Piccardo, E. (2016). Developing illustrative descriptors of aspects of mediation for the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR): A Council of Europe Project. Language Teaching, 49 (3): 455 – 459

North, B., Goodier, T., Piccardo, E. et al. (2018). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Companion Volume With New Descriptors. Strasbourg: Council of Europe

Stathopoulou, M. (2015). Cross-Language Mediation in Foreign Language Teaching and Testing. Bristol: Multilingual Matters

Glossing (extensions)

In the latest issue of ‘Language Teaching’, there’s a ‘state-of-the-art’ article by Frank Boers entitled ‘Glossing and vocabulary learning’. The effect of glosses (‘a brief definition or synonym, either in L1 or L2, which is provided with [a] text’ (Nation, 2013: 238)) on reading comprehension and vocabulary acquisition has been well researched over the years. See Kim et al. (2020) for just one recent meta-analysis.

It’s a subject I have written about before on this blog (see here), when I focussed on Plonsky ad Ziegler (2016), a critical evaluation of a number of CALL meta-analyses, including a few that investigated glosses. Plonsky and Ziegler found that glosses can have a positive effect on language learning, that digital glosses may be more valuable than paper-based ones, and that both L1 and L2 glosses can be beneficial (clearly, the quality / accuracy of the gloss is as important as the language it is written in). Different learners have different preferences. Boers’ article covers similar ground, without, I think, adding any new takeaways. It concludes with a predictable call for further research.

Boers has a short section on the ‘future of glossing’ in which he notes that (1) ‘onscreen reading [is] becoming the default mode’, and (2) that ‘materials developers no longer need to create glosses themselves, but can insert hyperlinks to online resources’. This is not the future, but the present. In my last blog post on glossing (August 2017), I discussed Lingro, a digital dictionary tool that you can have running in the background, allowing you to click on any word on any website and bring up L1 or L2 glosses. My reservation about Lingro was that the quality of the glosses left much to be desired, relying as they did on Wiktionary. Things would be rather different if it used decent content – sourced, for example, from Oxford dictionaries, Robert (for French) or Duden (for German).

And this is where the content for the Google Dictionary for Chrome extension comes from. It’s free, and takes only seconds to install. It allows you to double-click on a word to bring up translations or English definitions. One more click will take you to a more extensive dictionary page. It also allows you to select a phrase or longer passage and bring up translations generated by Google Translate. It allows you to keep track of the items you have looked up, and to download these on a spreadsheet, which can then be converted to flashcards (e.g. Quizlet) if you wish. If you use the Safari browser, a similar tool is already installed. It has similar features to the Google extension, but also offers you the possibility of linking to examples of the targeted word in web sources like Wikipedia.

Boers was thinking of the provision of hyperlinks, but with these browser extensions it is entirely up to the reader of a text to decide how many and which items to look up, what kind of items (single words, phrases or longer passages) they want to look up, how far they want to explore the information available to them, and what they want to do with the information (e.g. store / record it).

It’s extraordinary that a ‘state-of-the-art article’ in an extremely reputable journal should be so out of date. The value of glossing in language learning is in content-focussed reading, and these tools mean that any text on the web can be glossed. I think this means that further research of the kind that Boers means would be a waste of time and effort. The availability of free technology does not, of course, solve all our problems. Learners will continue to benefit from guidance, support and motivation in selecting appropriate texts to read. They will likely benefit from training in optimal ways of using these browser extensions. They may need help in finding a balance between content-focussed reading and content-focussed reading with a language learning payoff.

References

Boers, F. (2022). Glossing and vocabulary learning. Language Teaching, 55 (1), 1 – 23

Kim, H.S., Lee, J.H. & Lee, H. (2020). The relative effects of L1 and L2 glosses on L2 learning: A meta-analysis. Language Teaching Research. December 2020.

Nation, I.S.P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Plonsky, L. & Ziegler, N. (2016). The CALL–SLA interface: insights from a second-order synthesis. Language Learning & Technology 20 / 2: 17 – 37

Out with the old, in with the new: ELF and translanguaging

The world of language learning and teaching is full of theoretical constructs and claims, most of which have their moment of glory in the sun before being eclipsed and disappearing from view. In a recent article looking at the theoretical claims of translanguaging enthusiasts, Jim Cummins (2021) suggests that three criteria might be used to evaluate them:

1 Empirical adequacy – to what extent is the claim consistent with all the relevant empirical evidence?

2 Logical coherence – to what extent is the claim internally consistent and non-contradictory?

3 Consequential validity – to what extent is the claim useful in promoting effective pedagogy and policies?

Take English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), for example. In its early days, there was much excitement about developing databases of ELF usage in order to identify those aspects of pronunciation and lexico-grammar that mattered for intercultural intelligibility. The Lingua Franca Core (a list of pronunciation features that are problematic in ELF settings when ELF users mix them up) proved to be the most lasting product of the early empirical research into ELF (Jenkins, 2000). It made intuitive good sense, was potentially empowering for learners and teachers, was clearly a useful tool in combating native-speakerism, and was relatively easy to implement in educational policy and practice.

But problems with the construct of ELF quickly appeared. ELF was a positive reframing of the earlier notion of interlanguage – an idea that had deficit firmly built in, since interlanguage was a point that a language learner had reached somewhere on the way to being like a native-speaker. Interlanguage contained elements of the L1, and this led to interest in how such elements might become fossilized, a metaphor with very negative connotations. With a strong desire to move away from framings of deficit, ELF recognised and celebrated code-switching as an integral element in ELF interactions (Seidlhofer, 2011: 105). Deviations from idealised native-speaker norms of English were no longer to be seen as errors in need of correction, but as legitimate forms of the language (of ELF) itself.

However, it soon became clear that it was not possible to describe ELF in terms of the particular language forms that its users employed. In response, ELF researchers reframed ELF. The focus shifted to how people of different language backgrounds used English to communicate in particular situations – how they languaged, in other words. ELF was no longer a thing, but an action. This helped in terms of internal consistency, but most teachers remained unclear about how the ELF.2 insight should impact on their classroom practices. If we can’t actually say what ELF looks like, what are teachers supposed to do with the idea? And much as we might like to wish away the idea of native speakers (and their norms), these ideas are very hard to expunge completely (MacKenzie, 2014: 170).

Twenty years after ELF became widely used as a term, ELF researchers lament the absence of any sizable changes in classroom practices (Bayyurt & Dewey, 2020). There are practices that meet the ELF seal of approval (see, for example, Kiczkowiak & Lowe, 2018), and these include an increase in exposure to the diversity of English use worldwide, engagement in critical classroom discussion about the globalisation of the English language, and non-penalisation of innovative, but intelligible forms (Galloway, 2018: 471). It is, however, striking that these practices long pre-date the construct of ELF. They are not direct products of ELF.

Part of the ‘problem’, as ELF researchers see it, has been that ELF has been so hard to define. Less generously, we might suggest that the construct of ELF was flawed from the start. Useful, no doubt, as a heuristic, but time to move on. Jennifer Jenkins, one of the most well-known names in ELF, has certainly not been afraid to move on. Her article (Jenkins, 2015) refines ELF.2 into ELF.3, which she now labels as ‘English as a Multilingual Franca’. In this reframed model, ELF is not so much concerned with the difference between native speakers and non-native speakers, as with the difference between monolinguals and multilinguals. Multilingual, rather than ‘English’, is now the superordinate attribute. Since ELF is now about interactions, rather than ELF as a collection of forms, it follows, in ELF.3, that ELF may not actually contain any English forms at all. There is a logic here, albeit somewhat convoluted, but there’s also a problem for ELF as a construct, too. If ELF is fundamentally about multilingual communication, what need is there for the term ‘ELF’? ‘Translanguaging’ will do perfectly well instead. The graph from Google Trends reveals the rises and falls of these two terms in the academic discourse space. After peaking in 2008 the term ‘English as a Lingua Franca’ now appears to be in irreversible decline.

So, let’s now turn to ‘translanguaging’. What do Cummins, and others, have to say about the construct? The word has not been around for long. Most people trace it back to the end of the last century (Baker, 2001) and a set of bilingual pedagogical practices in the context of Welsh-English bilingual programmes intended to revitalise the Welsh language. In the early days, translanguaging was no more than a classroom practice that allowed or encouraged the use (by both learners and teachers) of more than one language for the purposes of study. The object of study might be another language, or it might be another part of the curriculum. When I wrote a book about the use of L1 in the learning and teaching of English (Kerr, 2014), I could have called it ‘Translanguaging Activities’, but the editors and I felt that the word ‘translanguaging’ might be seen as obscure jargon. I defined the word at the time as ‘similar to code-switching, the process of mixing elements form two languages’.

But obscure jargon no longer. There is, for example, a nice little collection of activities that involve L1 for the EFL / ESL classroom put together by Jason Anderson http://www.jasonanderson.org.uk/downloads/Jasons_ideas_for_translanguaging_in_the_EFL_ESL_classroom.pdf that he has chosen to call ‘Ideas for translanguaging’. In practical terms, there’s nothing here that you might not have found twenty or more years ago (e.g. in Duff, 1989; or Deller & Rinvolucri, 2002), long before anyone started using the word ‘translanguaging’. Anderson’s motivation for choosing the word ‘translanguaging’ is that he hopes it will promote a change of mindset in which a spirit of (language) inclusivity prevails (Anderson, 2018). Another example: the different ways that L1 may be used in a language classroom have recently been investigated by Rabbidge (2019) in a book entitled ‘Translanguaging in EFL Contexts’. Rabbidge offers a taxonomy of translanguaging moments. These are a little different from previous classifications (e.g. Ellis, 1994; Kim & Elder, 2005), but only a little. The most significant novelty is that these moments are now framed as ‘translanguaging’, rather than as ‘use of L1’. Example #3: the most well-known and widely-sold book that offers practical ideas that are related to translanguaging is ‘The Translanguaging Classroom’ by García and colleagues (2017). English language teachers working in EFL / ESL / ESOL contexts are unlikely to find much, if anything, new here by way of practical ideas. What they will find, however, is a theoretical reframing. It is the theoretical reframing that Anderson and Rabbidge draw their inspiration from.

The construct of translanguaging, then, like English as a Lingua Franca, has brought little that is new in practical terms. Its consequential validity does not really need to be investigated, since the pedagogical reasons for some use of other languages in the learning / teaching of English were already firmly established (but not, perhaps, widely accepted) a long time ago. How about the theory? Does it stand up to closer scrutiny any better than ELF?

Like ELF, ‘translanguaging’ is generally considered not to be a thing, but an action. And, like ELF, it has a definition problem, so precisely what kind of action this might be is open to debate. For some, it isn’t even an action: Tian et al (2021: 4) refer to it as ‘more like an emerging perspective or lens that could provide new insights to understand and examine language and language (in) education’. Its usage bounces around from user to user, each of whom may appropriate it in different ways. It is in competition with other terms including translingual practice, multilanguaging, and plurilingualism (Li, 2018). It is what has been called a ‘strategically deployable shifter’ (Moore, 2015). It is also unquestionably a word that sets a tone, since ‘translanguaging’ is a key part of the discourse of multilingualism / plurilingualism, which is in clear opposition to the unfavourable images evoked by the term ‘monolingualism’, often presented as a methodological mistake or a kind of subjectivity gone wrong (Gramling, 2016: 4). ‘Translanguaging’ has become a hooray word: criticize it at your peril.

What started as a classroom practice has morphed into a theory (Li, 2018; García, 2009), one that is and is likely to remain unstable. The big questions centre around the difference between ‘strong translanguaging’ (a perspective that insists that ‘named languages’ are socially constructed and have no linguistic or cognitive reality) and ‘weak translanguaging’ (a perspective that acknowledges boundaries between named languages but seeks to soften them). There are discussions, too, about what to call these forms of translanguaging. The ‘strong’ version has been dubbed by Cummins (2021) ‘Unitary Translanguaging Theory’ and by Bonacina-Pugh et al. (2021) ‘Fluid Languaging Approach’. Corresponding terms for the ‘weak’ version are ‘Crosslinguistic Translanguaging Theory’ and ‘Fixed Language Approach’. Subsidiary, related debates centre around code-switching: is it a form of translanguaging or is it a construct better avoided altogether since it assumes separate linguistic systems (Cummins, 2021)?

It’s all very confusing. Cenoz and Gorter (2021) in their short guide to pedagogical translanguaging struggle for clarity, but fail to get there. They ‘completely agree’ with García about the fluid nature of languages as ‘social constructs’ with ‘no clear-cut boundaries’, but still consider named languages as ‘distinct’ and refer to them as such in their booklet. Cutting your way through this thicket of language is a challenge, to put it mildly. It’s also probably a waste of time. As Cummins (2021: 16) notes, the confusion is ‘completely unnecessary’ since ‘there is no difference in the instructional practices that are implied by so-called strong and weak versions of translanguaging’. There are also more important questions to investigate, not least the extent to which the approaches to multilingualism developed by people like García in the United States are appropriate or effective in other contexts with different values (Jaspers, 2018; 2019).

The monolingualism that both ELF and translanguaging stand in opposition to may be a myth, a paradigm or a pathology, but, whatever it is, it is deeply embedded in the ways that our societies are organised, and the ways that we think. It is, writes David Gramling (2016: 3), ‘clearly not yet inclined to be waved off the stage by a university professor, nor even by a ‘multilingual turn’.’ In the end, ELF failed to have much impact. It’s time for translanguaging to have a turn. So, out with the old, in with the new. Or perhaps not really all that new at all.

The king is dead. Long live the king and a happy new year!

References

Anderson, J. (2018) Reimagining English language learners from a translingual perspective. ELT Journal 72 (1): 26 – 37

Baker, C. (2001) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 3rd edn. Bristol: Multilingual Matters

Bayyurt, Y. & Dewey, M. (2020) Locating ELF in ELT. ELT Journal, 74 (4): 369 – 376

Bonacina-Pugh, F., Da Costa Cabral, I., & Huang, J. (2021) Translanguaging in education. Language Teaching, 54 (4): 439-471

Cenoz, J. & Gorter, D. (2021) Pedagogical Translanguaging. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Cummins, J. (2021) Translanguaging: A critical analysis of theoretical claims. In Juvonen, P. & Källkvist, M. (Eds.) Pedagogical Translanguaging: Theoretical, Methodological and Empirical Perspectives. Bristol: Multilingual Matters pp. 7 – 36

Deller, S. & Rinvolucri, M. (2002) Using the Mother Tongue. Peaslake, Surrey: Delta

Duff, A. (1989) Translation. Oxford: OUP

Ellis, R. (1994) Instructed Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: OUP

Galloway, N. (2018) ELF and ELT Teaching Materials. In Jenkins, J., Baker, W. & Dewey, M. (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, pp. 468 – 480.

García, O., Ibarra Johnson, S. & Seltzer, K. (2017) The Translanguaging Classroom. Philadelphia: Caslon

García, O. (2009) Bilingual Education in the 21st Century: A Global Perspective. Malden / Oxford: Wiley / Blackwell

Gramling, D. (2016) The Invention of Monolingualism. New York: Bloomsbury

Jaspers, J. (2019) Authority and morality in advocating heteroglossia. Language, Culture and Society, 1: 1, 83 – 105

Jaspers, J. (2018) The transformative limits of translanguaging. Language & Communication, 58: 1 – 10

Jenkins, J. (2000) The Phonology of English as an International Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Jenkins, J. (2015) Repositioning English and multilingualism in English as a lingua franca. Englishes in Practice, 2 (3): 49-85

Kerr, P. (2014) Translation and Own-language Activities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Kiczkowiak, M. & Lowe, R. J. (2018) Teaching English as a Lingua Franca. Stuttgart: Delta

Kim, S.-H. & Elder, C. (2005) Language choices and pedagogical functions in the foreign language classroom: A cross-linguistic functional analysis of teacher talk. Language Teaching Research, 9 (4): 355 – 380

Li, W. (2018) Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language. Applied Linguistics, 39 (1): 9 – 30

MacKenzie, I. (2014) English as a Lingua Franca. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Moore, R. (2015) From Revolutionary Monolingualism to Reactionary Multilingualism: Top-Down Discourses of Linguistic Diversity in Europe, 1794 – present. Language and Communication, 44: 19 – 30

Rabbidge, M. (2019) Translanguaging in EFL Contexts. Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge

Seidlhofer, B. (2011) Understanding English as a Lingua Franca. Oxford: OUP

Tian, Z., Aghai, L., Sayer, P. & Schissel, J. L. (Eds.) (2020) Envisioning TESOL through a translanguaging lens: Global perspectives. Cham, CH: Springer Nature.

QR codes and language teaching

I’d never felt any need for a QR reader on my phone until one day, a few lockdowns ago, I had to scan a code in order to be allowed to sit down outside my nearest breadshop, Anker, to eat a sandwich. Since replacing my phone a week or so ago, it was only this morning that I felt the need to install a new reader. It will come as no surprise to learn that I have never used QR codes in a classroom, and probably never will.

A book that I co-authored a few years ago included QR codes on some pages, and these take you to video recordings of ‘real students’ carrying out tasks from the book. We don’t learn much about these students’ lives, but we can assume that they are learning English in pre-Covid days, when they went into a physical classroom from time to time. But now that the physical classroom is becoming a receding memory, I have to fear for the future of QR codes in language teaching. Who needs a barcode web link when you’re online already?

I’ve seen some fun suggestions for using QR codes in the classroom. Placing QR codes in prominent places around the school – linking to the codes reveals a set of questions or clues in a treasure hunt. Getting learners to prepare their own multimedia material to upload to an interactive map of their school / town / whatever. Other suggestions involve things like sticking QR codes around the walls of the classroom, or walking around with a QR code stuck on your back or your forehead. But they all require physical space, imagining face-to-face contact. And they all require that phones are allowed, which, in turn, requires a whole lot of administration in some places (e.g. with kids). The activities tend to be a bit juvenile.

Some suggestions for using QR codes are decidedly less fun, in my view. Notifying students of their homework assignments by sending them a QR code, for example. Or giving the answers to an exercise when they click on the link.

More ideas can be found here and in ETpedia Technology (Hockly, 2017) and no doubt some other places, too.

(Image from https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Pirate-Joke-QR-Codes-1262320 )

You can evaluate your own affective response to QR codes in education by pointing your phone at the image above. That’s tricky, of course, if you’re reading this on your phone, and not another device. (Someone is selling this for a dollar.)

So why are they used? According to Cruse and Brereton (2018), they ‘can make classroom activities more engaging and allow students to perform previously impossible or impractical tasks’. Those previously impossible or impractical tasks are, of course, no longer impossible or impractical when the whole class is online. And this leaves us with the main claim of QR advocates: use of these codes leads to more learner engagement. How well does the claim hold up?

With a little encouragement, most people would rather scan a code than manually type in a link. But we don’t really have any evidence that English language learners would be more motivated and engaged if they point their phone at codes. Perhaps, there are some like me who don’t really want to get their phone out. Eye-rollers who find it hard to suppress a groan when someone suggests you use Mentimeter. Of course, the way you feel about using your phone for activities like these may also depend on how good your wifi is (or whether you have any wifi).

Cruse and Brereton’s (2018) first ‘Principle of Good Practice’ is that QR use ‘should not be a gimmick’. If you’re not convinced by the engagement argument, what other reasons could there be? To promote learner autonomy and differentiation? To facilitate asynchronous learning? To support constructivist learning by providing multiple representations of reality and enabling ‘context- and content-dependent knowledge construction’ (Alizadeh, 2019)? To develop digital literacies? Evidence is lacking.

QR codes have soared in global reach since the start of the pandemic, especially for payments and advertising. I also came across a novel use for QR with code stickers designed for tombstones (‘bringing monuments into the 21^st century’). I imagine, with a little more investment, scanning the code could generate a realistic hologram of the deceased. But someone needs to come up with a convincing way of using them in online language learning.

References

Alizadeh, M. (2019) Augmented/virtual reality promises for ELT practitioners. In P. Clements, A. Krause, & P. Bennett (Eds.), Diversity and inclusion. Tokyo: JALT.

Hockly, N. (2017) ETpedia Technology. Hove: Pavilion Publishing

Cruse, D. T. H., & Brereton, P. (2018) Integrating QR codes into ELT materials. In P. Clements, A. Krause, & P. Bennett (Eds.), Language teaching in a global age: Shaping the classroom, shaping the world. Tokyo: JALT.

Online translation activities for language learning

Since I wrote my book of language-learning / teaching activities that involve the use of the learners’ own language (Kerr, 2014), one significant change has taken place. Some of these activities focused on machine translation tools, like Google Translate. The main concern at the time was the lack of reliability of these tools, and many teachers were strongly opposed to their students using them. It was easy to find examples of bad translation and to laugh at them. My favourite was an image of a crowd welcoming Pope Francis to Cuba, where a banner saying ‘Welcome Potato’ was supposedly a mistranslation of the Spanish ‘papa’, which can mean both ‘pope’ and ‘potato’. It’s a pity the image was Photoshopped.

My approach, feeling that it was impracticable and counter-productive to ban Google Translate altogether, was to exploit the poor quality of many of the translations as a way of training learners to use them more critically and more effectively. But, in the intervening years, the accuracy of online translation has much improved. One study (Aiken, 2019) found that Google Translate had improved by 34% over an 8-year period, although there were still significant differences in the accuracy of particular language pairings. Improvements will continue, and there are new services like DeepL Translator, which was launched in 2017, and, in my view, generally outperforms Google Translate, although fewer language pairings are available. 100% translation accuracy (if such a thing actually exists) may never be achievable, but for some kinds of texts with some language pairings, we are effectively there.

Training in using online translation is, however, still needed for some language pairings. There are two good ways of starting this.

1 Take a text in the learners’ L1 and machine-translate it into English. Highlight the errors and give it to the learners along with the original and a list of common error types (see below). The learners work together, looking at the highlighted errors and attempting to match them to one of the error types on the list.

2 Take a text in English and machine-translate it into the learners’ L1. The learners work together, first identifying and highlighting the errors they find, then comparing the translation with the original and attempting to identify the reasons for the error having happened.

machine-translation-common-errorsDownload

At the time that I wrote this book, I would have advised against using Google Translate as a dictionary to look up single words, on the grounds that (1) the tool worked better the more context / co-text it had, and (2) there were usually better bilingual dictionaries available. My position has shifted somewhat, primarily because the features that Google Translate now offers have improved. There’s a video by Russell Stannard, called ‘Using Google Translate in Language Teaching -Tips and Ideas’,where Russell basically uses the software as a dictionary tool, and enthuses about the possibilities for pronunciation and listening work, for using the ‘favourites’ feature, and for exporting, via a spreadsheet, wordlists that are selected so they can be used with a spaced-repetition memory trainer.

You can find more ideas for using Google Translate as a pronunciation training tool in Minh Trang (2019).

One of the most common uses of machine translation by learners is undoubtedly in the production of written work. One recent piece of research (Tsai, 2019) came to the less than surprising conclusion that learners produced better drafts when doing so, and were happy to use it. Whether or not more learning took place when machine translation was used is another matter. O’Neill (2019) came to a similar conclusion, but found that students performed better with prior training. This training consisted of two 20-minutes sessions, where students tested the tool with examples before reviewing its strengths and weaknesses. More ideas for machine translation literacy training can be found in Bowker (2020).

I’d like to suggest a couple of further activities where Google Translate or DeepL can be used in the preparation of activities. In both cases, I’ll illustrate with the short original text from a newspaper (Der Standard) below:

Eine Passage in der neuen Covid-19-Verordnung erregt seit letzter Nacht besondere Aufmerksamkeit: das Alkoholverbot nach der Sperrstunde im Umfeld von Bars. Weil kein Ende definiert ist, sind manche in Sorge: Sind wir auf dem Weg in eine Prohibition? Konkret heißt es in der Novelle, die am Sonntag in Kraft tritt: „Nach der Sperrstunde dürfen im Umkreis von 50 Metern um Betriebsstätten der Gastgewerbe (sic!) keine alkoholischen Getränke konsumiert werden.“ Die Sperrstunde liegt in den meisten Lokalen bei 1.00 Uhr.

For the first activity, the students’ task is to translate this into English. Beforehand, translate the text using DeepL, and scramble the words, giving a copy of this scramble to the students.

1.00 am   50 meters   a   a   after   after   alcohol   alcoholic   amendment   are   are   around   attention   attracting   ban   bars   be   because   been   beverages   closing   come   consumed   Covid 19   curfew   curfew   defined   end   establishments   establishments   force   has   hospitality   in   in   in   into   is   is   last   may   most   new   night   no   no   of   of   on   on   on   one   passage   prohibition   radius   regulation   sic!   since   some   special   specifically   states   Sunday   the   the   the   the   the   the   time   to   vicinity   way   we   which   will   within   worried

The translation becomes a kind of jigsaw.

The second activity, only appropriate for more advanced learners, takes a text in the L1. Use two different translation tools to create separate translations, and correct any obvious errors (if there are any). Distribute these, along with the original to the students. Their task is, first, to identify and highlight any differences between the two versions. After that, they discuss each difference, saying which version they prefer (and why) or whether they have no preference.

Google Translate: One passage in the new Covid-19 regulation has been attracting special attention since last night: the ban on alcohol after the curfew in the vicinity of bars. Because no end is defined, some are concerned: are we on the way to prohibition? Specifically, the amendment, which comes into force on Sunday, says: “After the curfew, alcoholic beverages may not be consumed within 50 meters of the hospitality industry (sic!).” The curfew is at 1.00 a.m. in most restaurants.

Deepl: One passage in the new Covid 19 regulation has been attracting special attention since last night: the ban on alcohol after curfew in the vicinity of bars. Because no end is defined, some are worried: Are we on the way to a prohibition? Specifically, the amendment, which will come into force on Sunday, states: “After curfew, no alcoholic beverages may be consumed within a radius of 50 meters around hospitality establishments (sic!). The closing time is 1.00 am in most establishments.

One further activity that I would like to suggest makes use of the way that Google Translate translates each word as it goes, but amends previously translated words in the light of what follows. This is only suitable when Google Translate is accurate! The cleft example below (The thing that bothers me most is how long it will take) neatly illustrates the process. The following is a game-like exploitation. Project (or screen-share) Google Translate, set up to English and the learners’ own language. Tell the students that you are going to do a translation together. Tell them that the first word will be ‘the’, and ask them to predict how Google will translate it. Then, type in the word and everyone can see how Google translates it. Tell the students the next word (‘thing’) and again ask for their suggestions before typing it in. Carry on in the same way.

The

Das

The thing

Die Sache

The thing that

Die Sache, die

The thing that bothers

Das, was stört

The thing that bothers me

Das, was mich stört

The thing that bothers me most

Das, was mich am mesiten stört

The thing that bothers me most is

Das, was mich am mesiten stört, ist

The thing that bothers me most is how

Was mich am meisten stört, ist wie

The thing that bothers me most is how long

Was mich am meisten stört, ist wie lange

The thing that bothers me most is how long it

Das, was mich am meisten stört, ist, wie lange es dauert

The thing that bothers me most is how long it will

Was mich am meisten stört, ist, wie lange es dauern wird

The thing that bothers me most is how long it will take.

Was mich am meisten stört, ist, wie lange es dauern wird.

References

Aiken, M. (2019). An Updated Evaluation of Google Translate Accuracy. Studies in Linguistics and Literature, 3 (3) http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sll.v3n3p253

Bowker, L. (2020) Machine translation literacy instruction for international business students and business English instructors. Journal of Business & Finance Librarianship 25 (1):1-19 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343410145_Machine_translation_literacy_instruction_for_international_business_students_and_business_English_instructors

Kerr, P. (2014) Translation and Own-Language Activities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Minh Trang, N. (2019) Using Google Translate as a Pronunciation Training Tool. LangLit, 5 (4), May 2019 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333808794_USING_GOOGLE_TRANSLATE_AS_A_PRONUNCIATION_TRAINING_TOOL

O’Neill, E. M. (2019) Training students to use online translators and dictionaries: The impact on second language writing scores. International Journal of Research Studies in Language Learning, 8(2), 47-65

Tsai, S. (2019) Using google translate in EFL drafts: a preliminary investigation. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 32 (5-6): pp. 510–526. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2018.1527361

Questions about pre-teaching vocabulary (PTV)

‘Pre-teaching’ (of vocabulary) is a widely-used piece of language teaching jargon, but it’s a strange expression. The ‘pre’ indicates that it’s something that comes before something else that is more important, what Chia Suan Chong calls ‘the main event’, which is usually some reading or listening work. The basic idea, it seems, is to lessen the vocabulary load of the subsequent activity. If the focus on vocabulary were the ‘main event’, we might refer to the next activity as ‘post-reading’ or ‘post-listening’ … but we never do.

The term is used in standard training manuals by both Jim Scrivener (2005: 230 – 233) and Jeremy Harmer (2012: 137) and, with a few caveats, the practice is recommended. Now read this from the ELT Nile Glossary:

For many years teachers were recommended to pre-teach vocabulary before working on texts. Nowadays though, some question this, suggesting that the contexts that teachers are able to set up for pre-teaching are rarely meaningful and that pre-teaching in fact prevents learners from developing the attack strategies they need for dealing with challenging texts.

Chia is one of those doing this questioning. She suggests that ‘we cut out pre-teaching altogether and go straight for the main event. After all, if it’s a receptive skills lesson, then shouldn’t the focus be on reading/listening skills and strategies? And most importantly, pre-teaching prevents learners’ from developing a tolerance of ambiguity – a skill that is vital in language learning.’ Scott Thornbury is another who has expressed doubts about the value of PTV, although he is more circumspect in his opinions. He has argued that working out the meaning of vocabulary from context is probably a better approach and that PTV inadequately prepares learners for the real world. If we have to pre-teach, he argues, get it out of the way ‘as quickly and efficiently as possible’ … or ‘try post-teaching instead’.

Both Chia and Scott touch on the alternatives, and guessing the meaning of unknown words from context is one of them. I’ve discussed this area in an earlier post. Not wanting to rehash the content of that post here, the simple summary is this: it’s complicated. We cannot, with any degree of certainty, say that guessing meaning from context leads to more gains in either reading / listening comprehension or vocabulary development than PTV or one of the other alternatives – encouraging / allowing monolingual or bilingual dictionary look up (see this post on the topic), providing a glossary (see this post) or doing post-text vocabulary work.

In attempting to move towards a better understanding, the first problem is that there is very little research into the relationship between PTV and improved reading / listening comprehension. What there is (e.g. Webb, 2009) suggests that pre-teaching can improve comprehension and speed up reading, but there are other things that a teacher can do (e.g. previous presentation of comprehension questions or the provision of pictorial support) that appear to lead to more gains in these areas (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021). It’s not exactly a ringing endorsement. There is even less research looking at the relationship between PTV and vocabulary development. What there is (Pellicer-Sánchez et al., 2021) suggests that pre-teaching leads to more vocabulary gains than when learners read without any support. But the reading-only condition is unlikely in most real-world learning contexts, where there is a teacher, dictionary or classmate who can be turned to. A more interesting contrast is perhaps between PTV and during-reading vocabulary instruction, which is a common approach in many classrooms. One study (File & Adams, 2010) looked at precisely this area and found little difference between the approaches in terms of vocabulary gains. The limited research does not provide us with any compelling reasons either for or against PTV.

Another problem is, as usual, that the research findings often imply more than was actually demonstrated. The abstract for the study by Pellicer-Sánchez et al (2021) states that pre‐reading instruction led to more vocabulary learning. But this needs to be considered in the light of the experimental details.

The study involved 87 L2 undergraduates and postgraduates studying at a British university. Their level of English was therefore very high, and we can’t really generalise to other learners at other levels in other conditions. The text that they read contained a number of pseudo-words and was 2,290 words long. The text itself, a narrative, was of no intrinsic interest, so the students reading it would treat it as an object of study and they would notice the pseudo-words, because their level of English was already high, and because they knew that the focus of the research was on ‘new words’. In other words, the students’ behaviour was probably not at all typical of a student in a ‘normal’ classroom. In addition, the pseudo-words were all Anglo-Saxon looking, and not therefore representative of the kinds of unknown items that students would encounter in authentic (or even pedagogical) texts (which would have a high proportion of words with Latin roots). I’m afraid I don’t think that the study tells us anything of value.

Perhaps research into an area like this, with so many variables that need to be controlled, is unlikely ever to provide teachers with clear answers to what appears to be a simple question: is PTV a good idea or not? However, I think we can get closer to something resembling useful advice if we take another tack. For this, I think two additional questions need to be asked. First, what is the intended main learning opportunity (note that I avoid the term ‘learning outcome’!) of the ‘main event’ – the reading or listening. Second, following on from the first question, what is the point of PTV, i.e. in what ways might it contribute to enriching the learning opportunities of the ‘main event’?

To answer the first question, I think it is useful to go back to a distinction made almost forty years ago in a paper by Tim Johns and Florence Davies (1983). They contrasted the Text as a Linguistic Object (TALO) with the Text as a Vehicle for Information (TAVI). The former (TALO) is something that language students study to learn language from in a direct way. It has typically been written or chosen to illustrate and to contextualise bits of grammar, and to provide opportunities for lexical ‘quarrying’. The latter (TAVI) is a text with intrinsic interest, read for information or pleasure, and therefore more appropriately selected by the learner, rather than the teacher. For an interesting discussion on TALO and TAVI, see this 2015 post from Geoff Jordan.

Johns and Davies wrote their article in pre-Headway days when texts in almost all coursebooks were unashamedly TALOs, and when what were called top-down reading skills (reading for gist / detail, etc.) were only just beginning to find their way into language teaching materials. TAVIs were separate, graded readers, for example. In some parts of the world, TALOs and TAVIs are still separate, often with one teacher dealing with the teaching of discrete items of language through TALOs, and another responsible for ‘skills development’ through TAVIs. But, increasingly, under the influence of British publishers and methodologists, attempts have been made to combine TALOs and TAVIs in a single package. The syllabus of most contemporary coursebooks, fundamentally driven by a discrete-item grammar plus vocabulary approach, also offer a ‘skills’ strand which requires texts to be intrinsically interesting, meaningful and relevant to today’s 21^st century learners. The texts are required to carry out two functions.

Recent years have seen an increasingly widespread questioning of this approach. Does the exploitation of reading and listening texts in coursebooks (mostly through comprehension questions) actually lead to gains in reading and listening skills? Is there anything more than testing of comprehension going on? Or do they simply provide practice in strategic approaches to reading / listening, strategies which could probably be transferred from L1? As a result of the work of scholars like William Grabe (reading) and John Field and Richard Cauldwell (listening), there is now little, if any, debate in the world of research about these questions. If we want to develop the reading / listening skills of our students, the approach of most coursebooks is not the way to go about it. For a start, the reading texts are usually too short and the listening texts too long.

Most texts that are found in most contemporary coursebooks are TALOs dressed up to look like TAVIs. Their fundamental purpose is to illustrate and contextualise language that has either been pre-taught or will be explored later. They are first and foremost vehicles for language, and only secondarily vehicles for information. They are written and presented in as interesting a way as possible in order to motivate learners to engage with the TALO. Sometimes, they succeed.

However, there are occasions (even in coursebooks) when texts are TAVIs – used for purely ‘skills’ purposes, language use as opposed to language study. Typically, they (reading or listening texts) are used as springboards for speaking and / or writing practice that follows. It’s the information in the text that matters most.

So, where does all this take us with PTV? Here is my attempt at a break-down of advice.

1 TALOs where the text contains a set of new lexical items which are a core focus of the lesson

If the text is basically a contextualized illustration of a set of lexical items (and, usually, a particular grammatical structure), there is a strong case for PTV. This is, of course, assuming that these items are of sufficiently high frequency to be suitable candidates for direct vocabulary instruction. If this is so, there is also a strong case to be made for the PTV to be what has been called ‘rich instruction’, which ‘involves (1) spending time on the word; (2) explicitly exploring several aspects of what is involved in knowing a word; and (3) involving learners in thoughtfully and actively processing the word’ (Nation, 2013: 117). In instances like this, PTV is something of a misnomer. It’s just plain teaching, and is likely to need as much, or more, time than exploration of the text (which may be viewed as further practice of / exposure to the lexis).

If the text is primarily intended as lexical input, there is also a good case to be made for making the target items it contains more salient by, for example, highlighting them or putting them in bold (Choi, 2017). At the same time, if ‘PTV’ is to lead to lexical gains, these are likely to be augmented by post-reading tasks which also focus explicitly on the target items (Sonbul & Schmitt, 2010).

2 TALOs which contain a set of lexical items that are necessary for comprehension of the text, but not a core focus of the lesson (e.g. because they are low-frequency)

PTV is often time-consuming, and necessarily so if the instruction is rich. If it is largely restricted to matching items to meanings (e.g. through translation), it is likely to have little impact on vocabulary development, and its short-term impact on comprehension appears to be limited. Research suggests that the use of a glossary is more efficient, since learners will only refer to it when they need to (whereas PTV is likely to devote some time to some items that are known to some learners, and this takes place before the knowledge is required … and may therefore be forgotten in the interim). Glossaries lead to better comprehension (Alessi & Dwyer, 2008).

3 TAVIs

I don’t have any principled objection to the occasional use of texts as TALOs, but it seems fairly clear that a healthy textual diet for language learners will contain substantially more TAVIs than TALOs, substantially more extensive reading than intensive reading of the kind found in most coursebooks. If we focused less often on direct instruction of grammar (a change of emphasis which is long overdue), there would be less need for TALOs, anyway. With TAVIs, there seems to be no good reason for PTV: glossaries or digital dictionary look-up will do just fine.

However, one alternative justification and use of PTV is offered by Scott Thornbury. He suggests identifying a relatively small number of keywords from a text that will be needed for global understanding. Some of them may be unknown to the learners, and for these, learners use dictionaries to check meaning. Then, looking at the list of key words learners predict what the text will be about. The rationale here is that if learners engage with these words before encountering them in the text, it ‘may be an effective way of activating a learner’s schema for the text, and this may help to support comprehension’ (Ballance, 2018). However, as Ballance notes, describing this kind of activity as PTV would be something of a misnomer: it is a useful addition to a teacher’s repertoire of schema-activation activities (which might be used with both TAVIs and TALOs).

In short …

The big question about PTV, then, is not one of ‘yes’ or ‘no’. It’s about the point of the activity. Balance (2018) offers a good summary:

‘In sum, for teachers to use PTV effectively, it is essential that they clearly identify a rationale for including PTV within a lesson, select the words to be taught in conjunction with this rationale and also design the vocabulary learning or development exercise in a manner that is commensurate with this rationale. The rationale should be the determining factor in the design of a PTV component within a lesson, and different rationales for using PTV naturally lead to markedly different selections of vocabulary items to be studied and different exercise designs.’

REFERENCES

Alessi, S. & Dwyer, A. (2008). Vocabulary assistance before and during reading. Reading in a Foreign Language, 20 (2): pp. 246 – 263

Ballance, O. J. (2018). Strategies for pre-teaching vocabulary in context. In The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching (pp. 1-7). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0732

Choi, S. (2017). Processing and learning of enhanced English collocations: An eye movement study. Language Teaching Research, 21, 403–426. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362168816653271

File, K. A. & Adams, R. (2010). Should vocabulary instruction be integrated or isolated? TESOL Quarterly, 24, 222–249.

Harmer, J. (2012). Essential Teacher Knowledge. Harlow: Pearson

Johns, T. & Davies, F. (1983). Text as a vehicle for information: the classroom use of written texts in teaching reading in a foreign language. Reading in a Foreign Language, 1 (1): pp. 1 – 19

Nation, I. S. P. (2013). Learning Vocabulary in Another Language 2^nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Pellicer-Sánchez, A., Conklin, K. & Vilkaitė-Lozdienė, L. (2021). The effect of pre-reading instruction on vocabulary learning: An investigation of L1 and L2 readers’ eye movements. Language Learning, 0 (0), 0-0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/lang.12430

Scrivener, J. (2005). Learning Teaching 2^nd Edition. Oxford: Macmillan

Sonbul, S. & Schmitt, N. (2010). Direct teaching of vocabulary after reading: is it worth the effort? ELT Journal 64 (3): pp.253 – 260

Webb, S. (2009). The effects of pre‐learning vocabulary on reading comprehension and writing. The Canadian Modern Language Review, 65 (3): pp. 441–470.

Critical data literacy #3: learning / teaching resources

In the last post, I mentioned a lesson plan from an article by Pegrum, M., Dudeney, G. & Hockly, N. (2018. Digital literacies revisited. The European Journal of Applied Linguistics and TEFL, 7 (2), pp. 3-24) in which students discuss the data that is collected by fitness apps and the possibility of using this data to calculate health insurance premiums, before carrying out and sharing online research about companies that track personal data. It’s a nice plan, unfortunately pay-walled, but you could try requesting a copy through Research Gate.

The only other off-the-shelf lesson plan I have been able to find is entitled ‘You and Your Data’ from the British Council. Suitable for level B2, this plan, along with a photocopiable pdf, contains with a vocabulary task (matching), a reading text (you and your data, who uses our data and why, can you protect your data) with true / false and sentence completion tasks) and a discussion (what do you do to protect our data). The material was written to coincide with Safer Internet Day (an EU project), which takes place in early February (next data 9 February 2021). The related website, Better Internet for Kids, contains links to a wide range of educational resources for younger learners.

For other resources, a good first stop is Ina Sander’s ‘A Critically Commented Guide to Data Literacy Tools’ in which she describes and evaluates a wide range of educational online resources for developing critical data literacy. Some of the resources that I discuss below are also evaluated in this guide. Here are some suggestion for learning / teaching resources.

A glossary

This is simply a glossary of terms that are useful in discussing data issues. It could easily be converted into a matching exercise or flashcards.

critical-data-literacy-glossaryDownload

A series of interactive videos

‘Do not Track’ is an award-winning series of interactive videos, produced by a consortium of broadcasters. In seven parts, the videos consider such issues as who profits from the personal data that we generate online, the role of cookies in the internet economy, how online profiling is done, the data generated by mobile phones and how algorithms interpret the data.

Each episode is between 5 and 10 minutes long, and is therefore ideal for asynchronous viewing. In a survey of critical data literacy tools (Sander, 2020), ‘Do not Track’ proved popular with the students who used it. I highly recommend it, but students will probably need a B2 level or higher.

More informational videos

If you do not have time to watch the ‘Do Not Track’ video series, you may want to use something shorter. There are a huge number of freely available videos about online privacy. I have selected just two which I think would be useful. You may be able to find something better!

1 Students watch a video about how cookies work. This video, from Vox, is well-produced and is just under 7 minutes long. The speaker speaks fairly rapidly, so captions may be helpful.

Students watch a video as an introduction to the topic of surveillance and privacy. This video, ‘Reclaim our Privacy’, was produced by ‘La Quadrature du Net’, a French advocacy group that promotes digital rights and freedoms of citizens. It is short (3 mins) and can be watched with or without captions (English or 6 other languages). Its message is simple: political leaders should ensure that our online privacy is respected.

A simple matching task ‘ten principles for online privacy’

1 Share the image below with all the students and ask them to take a few minutes matching the illustrations to the principles on the right. There is no need for anyone to write or say anything, but it doesn’t matter if some students write the answers in the chat box.

(Note: This image and the other ideas for this activity are adapted from https://teachingprivacy.org/ , a project developed by the International Computer Science Institute and the University of California-Berkeley for secondary school students and undergraduates. Each of the images corresponds to a course module, which contains a wide-range of materials (videos, readings, discussions, etc.) which you may wish to explore more fully.)

2 Share the image below (which shows the answers in abbreviated form). Ask if anyone needs anything clarified.

You’re Leaving Footprints Principle: Your information footprint is larger than you think.

There’s No Anonymity Principle: There is no anonymity on the Internet.

Information Is Valuable Principle: Information about you on the Internet will be used by somebody in their interest — including against you.

Someone Could Listen Principle: Communication over a network, unless strongly encrypted, is never just between two parties.

Sharing Releases Control Principle: Sharing information over a network means you give up control over that information — forever.

Search Is Improving Principle: Just because something can’t be found today, doesn’t mean it can’t be found tomorrow.

Online Is Real Principle: The online world is inseparable from the “real” world.

Identity Isn’t Guaranteed Principle: Identity is not guaranteed on the Internet.

You Can’t Escape Principle: You can’t avoid having an information footprint by not going online.

Privacy Requires Work Principle: Only you have an interest in maintaining your privacy.

3 Wrap up with a discussion of these principles.

Hands-on exploration of privacy tools

Click on the link below to download the procedure for the activity, as well as supporting material.

hands-on-exploration-of-privacy-toolsDownload

A graphic novel

Written by Michael Keller and Josh Neufeld, and produced by Al Jazeera, this graphic novel ‘Terms of Service. Understanding our role in the world of Big Data’ provides a good overview of critical data literacy issues, offering lots of interesting, concrete examples of real cases. The language is, however, challenging (C1+). It may be especially useful for trainee teachers.

A website

The Privacy International website is an extraordinary goldmine of information and resources. Rather than recommending anything specific, my suggestion is that you, or your students, use the ‘Search’ function on the homepage and see where you end up.

Digital dictionaries

The most widely-used and popular tool for language learners is the bilingual dictionary (Levy & Steel, 2015), and the first of its kind appeared about 4,000 years ago (2,000 years earlier than the first monolingual dictionaries), offering wordlists in Sumerian and Akkadian (Wheeler, 2013: 9 -11). Technology has come a long way since the clay tablets of the Bronze Age. Good online dictionaries now contain substantially more information (in particular audio recordings) than their print equivalents of a few decades ago. In addition, they are usually quicker and easier to use, more popular, and lead to retention rates that are comparable to, or better than, those achieved with print (Töpel, 2014). The future of dictionaries is likely to be digital, and paper dictionaries may well disappear before very long (Granger, 2012: 2).

English language learners are better served than learners of other languages, and the number of free, online bilingual dictionaries is now enormous. Speakers of less widely-spoken languages may still struggle to find a good quality service, but speakers of, for example, Polish (with approximately 40 million speakers, and a ranking of #33 in the list of the world’s most widely spoken languages) will find over twenty free, online dictionaries to choose from (Lew & Szarowska, 2017). Speakers of languages that are more widely spoken (Chinese, Spanish or Portuguese, for example) will usually find an even greater range. The choice can be bewildering and neither search engine results nor rankings from app stores can be relied on to suggest the product of the highest quality.

Language teachers are not always as enthusiastic about bilingual dictionaries as their learners. Folse (2004: 114 – 120) reports on an informal survey of English teachers which indicated that 11% did not allow any dictionaries in class at all, 37% allowed monolingual dictionaries and only 5% allowed bilingual dictionaries. Other researchers (e.g. Boonmoh & Nesi, 2008), have found a similar situation, with teachers overwhelmingly recommending the use of a monolingual learner’s dictionary: almost all of their students bought one, but the great majority hardly ever used it, preferring instead a digital bilingual version.

Teachers’ preferences for monolingual dictionaries are usually motivated in part by a fear that their students will become too reliant on translation. Whilst this concern remains widespread, much recent suggests that this fear is misguided (Nation, 2013: 424) and that monolingual dictionaries do not actually lead to greater learning gains than their bilingual counterparts. This is, in part, due to the fact that learners typically use these dictionaries in very limited ways – to see if a word exists, check spelling or look up meaning (Harvey & Yuill, 1997). If they made fuller use of the information (about frequency, collocations, syntactic patterns, etc.) on offer, it is likely that learning gains would be greater: ‘it is accessing multiplicity of information that is likely to enhance retention’ (Laufer & Hill, 2000: 77). Without training, however, this is rarely the case.  With lower-level learners, a monolingual learner’s dictionary (even one designed for Elementary level students) can be a frustrating experience, because until they have reached a vocabulary size of around 2,000 – 3,000 words, they will struggle to understand the definitions (Webb & Nation, 2017: 119).

The second reason for teachers’ preference for monolingual dictionaries is that the quality of many bilingual dictionaries is undoubtedly very poor, compared to monolingual learner’s dictionaries such as those produced by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Longman Pearson, Collins Cobuild, Merriam-Webster and Macmillan, among others. The situation has changed, however, with the rapid growth of bilingualized dictionaries. These contain all the features of a monolingual learner’s dictionary, but also include translations into the learner’s own language. Because of the wealth of information provided by a good bilingualized dictionary, researchers (e.g. Laufer & Hadar, 1997; Chen, 2011) generally consider them preferable to monolingual or normal bilingual dictionaries. They are also popular with learners. Good bilingualized online dictionaries (such as the Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary) are not always free, but many are, and with some language pairings free software can be of a higher quality than services that incur a subscription charge.

If a good bilingualized dictionary is available, there is no longer any compelling reason to use a monolingual learner’s dictionary, unless it contains features which cannot be found elsewhere. In order to compete in a crowded marketplace, many of the established monolingual learner’s dictionaries do precisely that. Examples of good, free online dictionaries include:

• Merriam-Webster Learner’s Dictionary : quizzes, ‘Word of the Day’ and ‘Ask the Editor’
• Macmillan Dictionary : puzzles and quizzes, lesson plans and ‘Words in the News’
• Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries : word lists, teaching tips and ‘Word of the Month’
• Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE Online):  practice exercises, exam preparation and ‘Word of the Day’
• Cambridge Dictionary : word lists, quizzes, ‘Word of the Day’ and new words
• Collins Online English Dictionary : quizzes, word lists, trending words and ‘Word of the Day’

Students need help in selecting a dictionary that is right for them. Without this, many end up using as a dictionary a tool such as Google Translate , which, for all its value, is of very limited use as a dictionary. They need to understand that the most appropriate dictionary will depend on what they want to use it for (receptive, reading purposes or productive, writing purposes). Teachers can help in this decision-making process by addressing the issue in class (see the activity below).

In addition to the problem of selecting an appropriate dictionary, it appears that many learners have inadequate dictionary skills (Niitemaa & Pietilä, 2018). In one experiment (Tono, 2011), only one third of the vocabulary searches in a dictionary that were carried out by learners resulted in success. The reasons for failure include focussing on only the first meaning (or translation) of a word that is provided, difficulty in finding the relevant information in long word entries, an inability to find the lemma that is needed, and spelling errors (when they had to type in the word) (Töpel, 2014). As with monolingual dictionaries, learners often only check the meaning of a word in a bilingual dictionary and fail to explore the wider range of information (e.g. collocation, grammatical patterns, example sentences, synonyms) that is available (Laufer & Kimmel, 1997; Laufer & Hill, 2000; Chen, 2010). This information is both useful and may lead to improved retention.

Most learners receive no training in dictionary skills, but would clearly benefit from it. Nation (2013: 333) suggests that at least four or five hours, spread out over a few weeks, would be appropriate. He suggests (ibid: 419 – 421) that training should encourage learners, first, to look closely at the context in which an unknown word is encountered (in order to identify the part of speech, the lemma that needs to be looked up, its possible meaning and to decide whether it is worth looking up at all), then to help learners in finding the relevant entry or sub-entry (by providing information about common dictionary abbreviations (e.g. for parts of speech, style and register)), and, finally, to check this information against the original context.

Two good resource books full of practical activities for dictionary training are available: ‘Dictionary Activities’ by Cindy Leaney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and ‘Dictionaries’ by Jon Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Many of the good monolingual dictionaries offer activity guides to promote effective dictionary use and I have suggested a few activities here.

Activity: Understanding a dictionary

Outline: Students explore the use of different symbols in good online dictionaries.

Level: All levels, but not appropriate for very young learners. The activity ‘Choosing a dictionary’ is a good follow-up to this activity.

1 Distribute the worksheet and ask students to follow the instructions.

2 Check the answers.

Activity: Choosing a dictionary

Outline: Students explore and evaluate the features of different free, online bilingual dictionaries.

Level: All levels, but not appropriate for very young learners. The text in stage 3 is appropriate for use with levels A2 and B1. For some groups of learners, you may want to adapt (or even translate) the list of features. It may be useful to do the activity ‘Understanding a dictionary’ before this activity.

1 Ask the class which free, online bilingual dictionaries they like to use. Write some of their suggestions on the board.

2 Distribute the list of features. Ask students to work individually and tick the boxes that are important for them. Ask students to work with a partner to compare their answers.

3 Give students a list of free, online bilingual (English and the students’ own language) dictionaries. You can use suggestions from the list below, add the suggestions that your students made in stage 1, or add your own ideas. (For many language pairings, better resources are available than those in the list below.) Give the students the following short text and ask the students to use two of these dictionaries to look up the underlined words. Ask the students to decide which dictionary they found most useful and / or easiest to use.

4 Conduct feedback with the whole class.

Activity: Getting more out of a dictionary

Outline: Students use a dictionary to help them to correct a text

Level: Levels B1 and B2, but not appropriate for very young learners. For higher levels, a more complex text (with less obvious errors) would be appropriate.

1 Distribute the worksheet below and ask students to follow the instructions.

2 Check answers with the whole class. Ask how easy it was to find the information in the dictionary that they were using.

Key

When you are reading, you probably only need a dictionary when you don’t know the meaning of a word and you want to look it up. For this, a simple bilingual dictionary is good enough. But when you are writing or editing your writing, you will need something that gives you more information about a word: grammatical patterns, collocations (the words that usually go with other words), how formal the word is, and so on. For this, you will need a better dictionary. Many of the better dictionaries are monolingual (see the box), but there are also some good bilingual ones.

Use one (or more) of the online dictionaries in the box (or a good bilingual dictionary) and make corrections to this text. There are eleven mistakes (they have been underlined) in total.

References

Boonmoh, A. & Nesi, H. 2008. ‘A survey of dictionary use by Thai university staff and students with special reference to pocket electronic dictionaries’ Horizontes de Linguística Aplicada , 6(2), 79 – 90

Chen, Y. 2011. ‘Studies on Bilingualized Dictionaries: The User Perspective’. International Journal of Lexicography, 24 (2): 161–197

Folse, K. 2004. Vocabulary Myths. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

Granger, S. 2012. Electronic Lexicography. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Harvey, K. & Yuill, D. 1997. ‘A study of the use of a monolingual pedagogical dictionary by learners of English engaged in writing’ Applied Linguistics, 51 (1): 253 – 78

Laufer, B. & Hadar, L. 1997. ‘Assessing the effectiveness of monolingual, bilingual and ‘bilingualized’ dictionaries in the comprehension and production of new words’. Modern Language Journal, 81 (2): 189 – 96

Laufer, B. & M. Hill 2000. ‘What lexical information do L2 learners select in a CALL dictionary and how does it affect word retention?’ Language Learning & Technology 3 (2): 58–76

Laufer, B. & Kimmel, M. 1997. ‘Bilingualised dictionaries: How learners really use them’, System, 25 (3): 361 -369

Leaney, C. 2007. Dictionary Activities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Levy, M. and Steel, C. 2015. ‘Language learner perspectives on the functionality and use of electronic language dictionaries’. ReCALL, 27(2): 177–196

Lew, R. & Szarowska, A. 2017. ‘Evaluating online bilingual dictionaries: The case of popular free English-Polish dictionaries’ ReCALL 29(2): 138–159

Nation, I.S.P. 2013. Learning Vocabulary in Another Language 2^nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Niitemaa, M.-L. & Pietilä, P. 2018. ‘Vocabulary Skills and Online Dictionaries: A Study on EFL Learners’ Receptive Vocabulary Knowledge and Success in Searching Electronic Sources for Information’, Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 9 (3): 453-462

Tono, Y. 2011. ‘Application of eye-tracking in EFL learners’ dictionary look-up process research’, International Journal of Lexicography 24 (1): 124–153

Töpel, A. 2014. ‘Review of research into the use of electronic dictionaries’ in Müller-Spitzer, C. (Ed.) 2014. Using Online Dictionaries. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 13 – 54

Webb, S. & Nation, P. 2017. How Vocabulary is Learned. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Wheeler, G. 2013. Language Teaching through the Ages. New York: Routledge

Wright, J. 1998. Dictionaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Book Review: Interaction Online by Lindsay Clandfield and Jill Hadfield

More and more language learning is taking place, fully or partially, on online platforms and the affordances of these platforms for communicative interaction are exciting. Unfortunately, most platform-based language learning experiences are a relentless diet of drag-and-drop, drag-till-you-drop grammar or vocabulary gap-filling. The chat rooms and discussion forums that the platforms incorporate are underused or ignored. Lindsay Clandfield and Jill Hadfield’s new book is intended to promote online interaction between and among learners and the instructor, rather than between learners and software.

Interaction Online is a recipe book, containing about 80 different activities (many more if you consider the suggested variations). Subtitled ‘Creative activities for blended learning’, the authors have selected and designed the activities so that any teacher using any degree of blend (from platform-based instruction to occasional online homework) will be able to use them. The activities do not depend on any particular piece of software, as they are all designed for basic tools like Facebook, Skype and chat rooms. Indeed, almost every single activity could be used, sometimes with some slight modification, for teachers in face-to-face settings.

A recipe book must be judged on the quality of the activities it contains, and the standard here is high. They range from relatively simple, short activities to much longer tasks which will need an hour or more to complete. An example of the former is a sentence-completion activity (‘Don’t you hate / love it when ….?’ – activity 2.5). As an example of the latter, there is a complex problem-solving information-gap where students have to work out the solution to a mystery (activity 6.13), an activity which reminds me of some of the material in Jill Hadfield’s much-loved Communication Games books.

In common with many recipe books, Interaction Online is not an easy book to use, in the sense that it is hard to navigate. The authors have divided up the tasks into five kinds of interaction (personal, factual, creative, critical and fanciful), but it is not always clear precisely why one activity has been assigned to one category rather than another. In any case, the kind of interaction is likely to be less important to many teachers than the kind and amount of language that will be generated (among other considerations), and the table of contents is less than helpful. The index at the back of the book helps to some extent, but a clearer tabulation of activities by interaction type, level, time required, topic and language focus (if any) would be very welcome. Teachers will need to devise their own system of referencing so that they can easily find activities they want to try out.

Again, like many recipe books, Interaction Online is a mix of generic task-types and activities that will only work with the supporting materials that are provided. Teachers will enjoy the latter, but will want to experiment with the former and it is these generic task-types that they are most likely to add to their repertoire. In activity 2.7 (‘Foodies’ – personal interaction), for example, students post pictures of items of food and drink, to which other students must respond with questions. The procedure is clear and effective, but, as the authors note, the pictures could be of practically anything. ‘From pictures to questions’ might be a better title for the activity than ‘Foodies’. Similarly, activity 3.4 (‘Find a festival’ –factual interaction) uses a topic (‘festivals’), rather than a picture, to generate questions and responses. The procedure is slightly different from activity 2.7, but the interactional procedures of the two activities could be swapped around as easily as the topics could be changed.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this book is the variety of interactional procedures that is suggested. The majority of activities contain (1) suggestions for a stimulus, (2) suggestions for managing initial responses to this stimulus, and (3) suggestions for further interaction. As readers work their way through the book, they will be struck by similarities between the activities. The final chapter (chapter 8: ‘Task design’) provides an excellent summary of the possibilities of communicative online interaction, and more experienced teachers may want to read this chapter first.

Chapter 7 provides a useful, but necessarily fairly brief, overview of considerations regarding feedback and assessment

Overall, Interaction Online is a very rich resource, and one that will be best mined in multiple visits. For most readers, I would suggest an initial flick through and a cherry-picking of a small number of activities to try out. For materials writers and course designers, a better starting point may be the final two chapters, followed by a sampling of activities. For everyone, though, Online Interaction is a powerful reminder that technology-assisted language learning could and should be far more than what is usually is.

(This review first appeared in the International House Journal of Education and Development.)

 

Revising vocabulary #2

In the last post, I suggested a range of activities that could be used in class to ‘activate’ a set of vocabulary before doing more communicative revision / recycling practice. In this, I’ll be suggesting a variety of more communicative tasks. As before, the activities require zero or minimal preparation on the part of the teacher.
1 Simple word associations
Write on the board a large selection of words that you want to recycle. Choose one word (at random) and ask the class if they can find another word on the board that they can associate with it. Ask one volunteer to (1) say what the other word is and (2) explain the association they have found between the two words. Then, draw a line through the first word and ask students if they can now choose a third word that they can associate with the second. Again, the nominated volunteer must explain the connection between the two words. Then, draw a line through the second word and ask for a connection between the third and fourth words. After three examples like this, it should be clear to the class what they need to do. Put the students into pairs or small groups and tell them to continue until there are no more words left, or it becomes too difficult to find connections / associations between the words that are left. This activity can be done simply in pairs or it can be turned into a class / group game.
As a follow-up, you might like to rearrange the pairs or groups and get students to see how many of their connections they can remember. As they are listening to the ideas of other students, ask them to decide which of the associations they found the most memorable / entertaining / interesting.
2 Association circles (variation of activity #1)
Ask students to look through their word list or flip through their flashcard set and make a list of the items that they are finding hardest to remember. They should do this with a partner and, together, should come up with a list of twelve or more words. Tell them to write these words in a circle on a sheet of paper.
Tell the students to choose, at random, one word in their circle. Next, they must find another word in the circle which they can associate in some way with the first word that they chose. They must explain this association to their partner. They must then find another word which they can associate with their second word. Again they must explain the association. They should continue in this way until they have connected all the words in their circle. Once students have completed the task with their partner, they should change partners and exchange ideas. All of this can be done orally.
3 Multiple associations
Using the same kind of circle of words, students again work with a partner. Starting with any word, they must find and explain an association with another word. Next, beginning with the word they first chose, they must find and explain an association with another word from the circle. They continue in this way until they have found connections between their first word and all the other words in the circle. Once students have completed the task with their partner, they should change partners and exchange ideas. All of this can be done orally.
4 Association dice
Prepare two lists (six in each list) of words that you want to recycle. Write these two lists on the board (list A and list B) with each word numbered 1 – 6. Each group in the class will need a dice.
First, demonstrate the activity with the whole class. Draw everyone’s attention to the two lists of the words on the board. Then roll a dice twice. Tell the students which numbers you have landed on. Explain that the first number corresponds to a word from List A and the second number to a word from List B. Think of and explain a connection / association between the two words. Organise the class into groups and ask them to continue playing the game.
Conduct feedback with the whole class. Ask them if they had any combinations of words for which they found it hard to think of a connection / association. Elicit suggestions from the whole class.
5 Picture associations #1
You will need a set of approximately eight pictures for this activity. These should be visually interesting and can be randomly chosen. If you do not have a set of pictures, you could ask the students to flick through their coursebooks and find a set of images that they find interesting or attractive. Tell them to note the page numbers. Alternatively, you could use pictures from the classroom: these might include posters on the walls, views out of the window, a mental picture of the teacher’s desk, a mental picture generated by imagining the whiteboard as a mirror, etc.
In the procedure described below, the students select the items they wish to practise. However, you may wish to select the items yourself. Make sure that students have access to dictionaries (print or online) during the lesson.
Ask the students to flip through their flashcard set or word list and make a list of the words that they are finding hardest to remember. They should do this with a partner and, together, should come up with a list of twelve or more words. The students should then find an association between each of the words on their list and one of the pictures that they select. They discuss their ideas with their partner, before comparing their ideas with a new partner.
6 Picture associations #2
Using the pictures and word lists (as in the activity above), students should select one picture, without telling their partner which picture they have selected. They should then look at the word list and choose four words from this list which they can associate with that picture. They then tell their four words to their partner, whose task is to guess which picture the other student was thinking of.
7 Rhyme associations
Prepare a list of approximately eight words that you want to recycle and write these on the board.
Ask the students to look at the words on the board. Tell them to work in pairs and find a word (in either English or their own language) which rhymes with each of the words on the list. If they cannot find a rhyming word, allow them to choose a word which sounds similar even if it is not a perfect rhyme.
The pairs should now find some sort of connection between each of the words on the list and their rhyming partners. When everyone has had enough time to find connections / associations, combine the pairs into groups of four, and ask them to exchange their ideas. Ask them to decide, for each word, which rhyming word and connection will be the most helpful in remembering this vocabulary.
Conduct feedback with the whole class.
8 Associations: truth and lies
In the procedure described below, no preparation is required. However, instead of asking the students to select the items they wish to practise, you may wish to select the items yourself. Make sure that students have access to dictionaries (print or online) during the lesson.
Ask students to flip through their flashcard set or word list and make a list of the words that they are finding hardest to remember. Individually, they should then write a series of sentences which contain these words: the sentences can contain one, two, or more of their target words. Half of the sentences should contain true personal information; the other half should contain false personal information.
Students then work with a partner, read their sentences aloud, and the partner must decide which sentences are true and which are false.
9 Associations: questions and answers
Prepare a list of between 12 and 20 items that you want the students to practise. Write these on the board (in any order) or distribute them as a handout.
Demonstrate the activity with the whole class before putting students into pairs. Make a question beginning with Why / How do you … / Why / How did you … / Why / How were you … which includes one of the target items from the list. The questions can be rather strange or divorced from reality. For example, if one of the words on the list were ankle, you could ask How did you break your ankle yesterday? Pretend that you are wracking your brain to think of an answer while looking at the other words on the board. Then, provide an answer, using one of the other words from the list. For example, if one of the other words were upset, you might answer I was feeling very upset about something and I wasn’t thinking about what I was doing. I fell down some steps. If necessary, do another example with the whole class to ensure that everyone understand the activity.
Tell the students to work in pairs, taking it in turns to ask and answer questions in the same way.
Conduct feedback with the whole class. Ask if there were any particularly strange questions or answers.
(I first came across a variation of this idea in a blog post by Alex Case ‘Playing with our Word Bag’
10 Associations: question and answer fortune telling
Prepare for yourself a list of items that you want to recycle. Number this list. (You will not need to show the list to anyone.)
Organise the class into pairs. Ask each pair to prepare four or five questions about the future. These questions could be personal or about the wider world around them. Give a few examples to make sure everyone understands: How many children will I have? What kind of job will I have five years from now? Who will win the next World Cup?
Tell the class that you have the answers to their questions. Hold up the list of words that you have prepared (without showing what is written on it). Elicit a question from one pair. Tell them that they must choose a number from 1 to X (depending on how many words you have on your list). Say the word aloud or write it on the board.
Tell the class that this is the answer to the question, but the answer must be ‘interpreted’. Ask the students to discuss in pairs the interpretation of the answer. You may need to demonstrate this the first time. If the question was How many children will I have? and the answer selected was precious, you might suggest that Your child will be very precious to you, but you will only have one. This activity requires a free imagination, and some classes will need some time to get used to the idea.
Continue with more questions and more answers selected blindly from the list, with students working in pairs to interpret these answers. Each time, conduct feedback with the whole class to find out who has the best interpretation.
11 Associations: narratives
In the procedure described below, no preparation is required. However, instead of asking the students to select the items they wish to practise, you may wish to select the items yourself. Make sure that students have access to dictionaries (print or online) during the lesson.
This activity often works best if it is used as a follow-up to ‘Picture Associations’. The story that the students prepare and tell should be connected to the picture that they focused on.
Ask students to flip through their flashcard set and make a list of the words that they are finding hardest to remember. They should do this with a partner and, together, should come up with a list of twelve or more words.
Still in pairs, they should prepare a short story which contains at least seven of the items in their list. After preparing their story, they should rehearse it before exchanging stories with another student / pair of students.
To extend this activity, the various stories can be ‘passed around’ the class in the manner of the game ‘Chinese Whispers’ (‘Broken Telephone’).
12 Associations: the sentence game
Prepare a list of approximately 25 items that you want the class to practise. Write these, in any order, on one side of the whiteboard.
Explain to the class that they are going to play a game. The object of the game is to score points by making grammatically correct sentences using the words on the board. If the students use just one of these words in a sentence, they will get one point. If they use two of the words, they’ll get two points. With three words, they’ll get three points. The more ambitious they are, the more points they can score. But if their sentence is incorrect, they will get no points and they will miss their turn. Tell the class that the sentences (1) must be grammatically correct, (2) must make logical sense, (3) must be single sentences. If there is a problem with a sentence, you, the teacher, will say that it is wrong, but you will not make a correction.
Put the class into groups of four students each. Give the groups some time to begin preparing sentences which contain one or more of the words from the list.
Ask a member from one group to come to the board and write one of the sentences they have prepared. If it is an appropriate sentence, award points. Cross out the word(s) that has been used from the list on the board: this word can no longer be used. If the sentence was incorrect, explain that there is a problem and turn to a member of the next group. This person can either (1) write a new sentence that their group has prepared, or (2) try, with the help of other members of their group to correct a sentence that is on the board. If their correction is correct, they score all the points for that sentence. If their correction is incorrect, they score no points and it is the end of their turn.
The game continues in this way with each group taking it in turns to make or correct sentences on the board.

(There are a number of comedy sketches about word associations. My favourite is this one. I’ve used it from time to time in presentations on this topic, but it has absolutely no pedagogical value (… unlike the next autoplay suggestion that was made for me, which has no comedy value).