Professional Development

Some time ago, I had the pleasure of attending Friederike Galland’s “Speechless Rhetoric” workshop. What sounded a bit counterintuitive at first, turned out to be a day full of wow moments, personal growth and insights into public speaking. Here are my key takeaways for becoming a better speaker.

After welcoming us into her home and feeding us fresh cinnamon buns with strawberries and cream, Friederike kicked off the day by lifting the secret behind offering speaking workshops – without actually focusing on speaking.

She explained that, due to our cognitive evolution, our brains are biologically hardwired to process visual cues much faster than auditory input.
Therefore, body language plays a key role when giving a speech:

If it feels “off”, it can undermine the speaker’s message, no matter how interesting the content is, whereas effective body language and a punchy delivery can captivate an audience (even if the presenter is trying to sell sand in the Sahara).

Overcoming content

With the above in mind, we started practising speaking. There was no speechwriting, and there were no scripts involved.

Instead, the whole day was filled with little partner exercises, improvised speeches and feedback rounds. Each exercise was followed by each participant briefly speaking about their experience in front of the group, so we all had something to talk about. (For example, one exercise involved looking into another person’s eyes for two minutes). The feedback then consisted of observations about the delivery and tips for the next round.

By the end of the day, everyone had made half a dozen little “speeches” – without worrying about content at all.

Speaking tips

Here are the speaking tips Friederike gave us during the workshop. All of them are “non-verbal” tweaks to support effective speech delivery.

1. The Queen doesn’t hurry

The first tip was simple:

Take your time as you make your way to the stage.

It can be challenging to feel other people’s gaze on you, but this is your moment and you are setting the tone. If you’re nervous, your audience will pick up on that and reflect your nervousness. If you want to create rapport and grab your listeners’ attention, take your time, catch your breath and relax. Friederike told us to remember that “the queen doesn’t hurry”. And as the Queen or King of your speech, you have all the time in the world.

We practiced this a number of times. Whenever someone made a “rushed entry”, Friederike would ask them to sit down and try again, with the conscious choice not to hurry. It quickly felt natural after a few rounds.

2. …and she’s carrying shopping bags

After practising the entrance, we discussed an issue that a lot of speakers face – the right posture. This is more of a beginner’s problem, so with time and experience, you’ll feel more comfortable in your skin.

For practical purposes, the tip Friederike gave us was to “imagine carrying shopping bags”. That way, if you stand in front of your audience, your arms and posture will naturally fall into place. Once you start speaking, you will (also naturally) start gesturing, which is fine. Thus, think of the “shopping bag posture” as the baseline from which to proceed, and come back to it whenever your hands aren’t busy.

3. Tap into the power of the pause

Once you’re standing in front of the audience, it’s tempting to start speaking right away to avoid that dreaded awkward silence. However, Friederike suggested the opposite: to lean into the silence and use it to your advantage.

If you start with a pause, you will create tension and grab your audience’s attention. They will sense that the silence is the lead-up to something meaningful. As a consequence, whatever you say will carry more weight and people are more likely to listen closely.

Thus, it’s best to take a moment before you start talking. Have a look around and get a feel for the audience and the room. If you can, briefly look at every individual person and acknowledge their presence. Then, begin your speech.

4. Speak to one person at a time

We then went on to discuss how to speak to engage the audience. Friederike’s top tip here was to break down your speech into small chunks and make rotational eye contact while speaking.

So when you start, pick a person from the audience and make eye contact with them. Say your first phrase or chunk of lines. Speak to them directly, and only them. After that, focus on a different person while you deliver your next phrase. Keep repeating this for the rest of your talk. Only speak to one single person at any given time.

If you keep making eye contact throughout your speech, you’ll create a sense of privacy and immediacy. And interestingly, everyone will feel addressed, whether or not you have directly spoken to them. As a result, your audience will feel more engaged and interested in your speech.

5. Find your cheerleaders

This tip ties in with the previous one. When you give a speech, your audience will be diverse: not everyone will be equally attentive and eager to listen. So if you sense a lack of interest in some corners, look out for people who are engaged and supportive. They will be the ones to nod in agreement, laugh at your jokes and generally give you signs of acknowledgement.

These are people you can reconnect with to make personal eye contact, and they can help you through rough patches if your speech doesn’t quite go as planned. Plus, you’ll feel more confident and supported.

Bonus tip: Accept the applause

Once you’re done speaking, you may be tempted to leave immediately and breathe a sigh of relief because it’s finally over. While understandable, that’s not the best way to end a speech. Here’s why: you have established a connection with your audience. They’ve enjoyed interacting with you, and they want to show you their appreciation. If you run off immediately, it will feel like you’re cutting them short.

So Friederike’s advice was to see the applause as part of the speech and to allow yourself to receive it. After all, you’ve delivered a great speech, so give the audience a chance to celebrate you! Also, it will feel more natural and calming to embrace the applause, as it will give you non-verbal feedback and closure.

If you’d like to put Friederike’s tips into practice, one of the best ways to do so is to join a Toastmasters group in your area. You can find your local club on the Toastmasters website: https://www.toastmasters.org.

To find out more about Friederike Galland and her work, check out her website: Friederike Galland – Rhetoriktraining Berlin and her LinkedIn profile. Friederike offers workshops in both German and English.

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If you enjoyed this article, you may also be interested in this post with presentation tips for English trainers.

What are the things that make good listeners good, and how can teachers help their learners develop their listening skills? Seasoned ESL teacher Hugh Dellar shares examples, insights and practical tips for the classroom.

Several years ago now, I went to watch a colleague of mine teach. He had been at the university quite a long time and had managed to claim the large 1960s-styled language lab as his own private kingdom!

In the lesson I saw, students worked on their own and listened to some sentences on a tape, each of which they had to write down 100% correctly before they were allowed to move on to the next sentence. One poor student must have listened to his first sentence about 30 times and was clearly really struggling. The teacher pointed out his transcription was wrong and kept telling him to listen harder. So he played the sentence yet again – and again – and again!

I put the headphones on myself so I could hear what he was trying to write down. On an old, muffled tape, a voice repeated over and over again:

Tie a knot in your handkerchief in case you forget.

No context, no glossary, no explanation, just that one isolated sentence.

In the end, the student called the teacher over again and asked “What does tire notting mean?” to which the teacher replied “You’re not listening!” again.

At this point, the student snapped and screamed out:

I AM listening, but I just can’t hear!

Now, this experience got me thinking about what kind of problems students have when they listen in English – and I have come to the conclusion that the problems are usually much more to do with HEARING (and KNOWING) than they are with LISTENING.

Just listen – is it that simple?

Our students generally listen and pay attention to listenings in class as best they can, but fail for a number of reasons. They:

• can’t hear words simply because they don’t know them!
• can’t hear the correct words because they can’t distinguish sounds.
• can hear words, but often only individual ones – and can’t group them appropriately.
• can hear words – even chunks / expressions – but can’t process the meaning of what
  they are hearing quickly enough.

So there are serious issues to do with being able to process the ‘acoustic blur’ of speech as students listen to it. And yet what actually happens in classrooms when we think we’re helping students get better at listening?

What does “listening” mean anyway?

I once had a teacher on a teacher training course who already had quite a lot of experience, but who was actually struggling on the course a bit. She said it would be all sorted the next day – she was going to “do a listening”. When I pushed her and asked what the aim of the lesson – or the language focus – would be, she looked at me like I was mad and stated that the aim would obviously be to DO A LISTENING!

All too often we do listenings – and our students endure them – because this is what is to be done, because they’re in the coursebook and because, well, we have the idea we should do them, but perhaps we don’t always think why we do them. What are they actually for, from a pedagogical point of view?

There are those who would say that when we do listenings, we are teaching listening skills. But what are these skills and how do we teach them?

Listening skills: a closer look

Believers in the concept of ‘skills’ might point to the following, taken from the Common European Framework:

The CEFR claims that learners should be able to demonstrate ability of the following ‘sub-skills’:
• listening for gist
• listening for specific information
• listening for detailed understanding
• listening for implications
• listening as a member of a live audience
• listening to audio media

But what are these skills? How do we actually do them? How do we improve our ability to do them? How do we teach them? Is doing a gist task or doing a task where students listen for specific information enough? Do they somehow learn transferable skills of ‘listening for gist’ or ‘listening for specific information’ through the process of doing listenings in class – and can they take these skills away and thus deal with other listenings better in future?

The dominant way of thinking about all of this has been SCHEMA THEORY, which stresses what’s called top-down processing. This emphasises students’ prior knowledge and predictions / expectations about what will be said.

Often this means that before we ‘do’ our listening in class, we get students to predict content from pictures, context, etc.

Language processing: How does it actually work?

Now, this is all well and good, but read deeper in the literature on the field and problems soon start emerging, as the following quote makes clear:

“For complex social and psychological reasons, [learners] are less sure they have grasped the topic being spoken of, the opinion being expressed about it, and the reasons for the speaker wanting to talk about it. They are less sure of the relevance of their own experience in helping them to arrive at an interpretation. On top of all that they are less sure of the forms of the language… for all these reasons learners are less able to bring to bear top-down processing in forming an interpretation and hence are more reliant on bottom up processing.”
(Brown quoted in Jenkins, 2001 OUP)

What Brown focuses on is the idea of BOTTOM-UP PROCESSING. In short, this says that what is important is HEARING individual sounds, decoding words, decoding chunks, decoding sentences and so on, and that it is through the process of doing this that learners build up a mental picture of what is being discussed.

If you accept this – and I do – there would seem to be some profound implications for teaching listening.

Bottom-up processing: putting together the puzzle pieces

Firstly, simply getting students to predict or use their previous knowledge – so-called ‘activating schemata’ – isn’t necessary. There might be masses of information we have previous knowledge of when we sit and listen to a conversation and yet there may not be anything at all which comes up that we have predicted or which relates to our ‘schema’. Classroom listenings are perhaps designed to include more predictability, but in the real world, language in use can be very unpredictable indeed – and the only way to deal with this is to listen to it all and understand it all.

Another point to make here is that students often hear words even if they don’t make sense to them. Where failure may occur is when they don’t know a word and or else can’t hear it. As I have already said, part of the reason listening is difficult for students is that they simply don’t know the words they are hearing, but on top of that words which they may know change sounds and bunch up in the stream of speech, making them harder to hear. This, in turn, can lead to difficulties for students hearing new words, because they can’t distinguish them from the general mass of sound around them.

Fostering listening skills through a task-based approach

So let’s go back to the ‘sub-skills’ outlined by the CEFR earlier. What is really happening when we do these things? Well, firstly, when we perform any of these skills in the real world, we’re paying attention. It’s not that we don’t hear things we’re not listening for. Imagine that your plane is delayed and you have to listen to a long announcement to find out what’s going on. You process and understand everything that precedes the information that is relevant to you, but then afterwards you just choose to forget it.

In the same way, after watching a film, you report the gist to friends – not the detail. This is NOT because you weren’t paying attention to or enjoying all the detail. It’s much more to do with what we are able to – or choose to – remember after the event.

Given this, task is important in the classroom. If you want students to remember specific details, you have to make the task crystal clear to students. Listening involves a lot of processing: students have to hear all the words, remember what the words mean and then decide whether or not they will need to remember them.

This is a big ask!

Clear tasks make this process a little bit easier.

In addition, as well as doing listenings in class, we also need to think more about how to teach what Mike McCarthy has called LISTENERSHIP.

Listening in class… and out in the world

One point to bear in mind about listening in class is that in several crucial ways it’s easier than listening outside of the class. For one thing, it’ll be graded better and recorded clearly (usually), without too much background noise. Most importantly, though, outside class, listening is often connected to conversation, which means learners have to listen, process AND think of what to say themselves. In class, they don’t have this pressure. Listenings in class leave more time and space for students to react as they don’t need to participate and add.

As such, it’s easier to learn language from listenings in class. It also means that if students are to cope outside of class, they need language to engage in listenership, which means teaching lots of predictable, typical chunks of language, all of which will both help them process what they hear quicker, as well as also becoming more able to control the conversations they find themselves in. This means learning expressions / chunks to help them manage their discourse.

On a basic level, it means things like:

Sorry. Can you say that again?
Sorry. Can you speak slower?

whilst at a higher level, it means things like:

So going back to what you were saying earlier . . .
So what? Are you saying that you think that . . . ?

and so on.

You start to fully appreciate the importance of using listenings in class as a vehicle for bringing useful language to the students when you look at what it is that good listeners actually do.

Good listeners:

• know nearly all – if not all – of the words that they hear.
• hear the words when they listen to them.
• process sound in chunks.
• understand words / chunks automatically due to repeated OVER-LEARNING in class.

Hearing vs. Language issues

Other good things to do include doing a listening once for gist, then letting students compare answers / ideas; round up their ideas and see what the class as a whole have; then set a more language-focused task and play the listening again; let students compare ideas again, before rounding up. Finally, play the listening a third time, but this time let students read the audioscript. This way, they – and you – can see which parts they couldn’t hear because of HEARING problems and which parts were down to LANGUAGE problems.

If they read the whole audioscript and understand everything, but didn’t get it when they listened, that’s a hearing problem and the real issue is that they need to read and listen more and get more used to the blur of sound that is spoken language. However, if they read and STILL don’t understand things, that’s a language problem and means you need to teach that new language. Reading and listening at the same time helps bridge the gap between the nice, tidy way language looks written down and the messy, fast way it sounds spoken.

It’s also good to ask students to read conversations they’ve listened to aloud, especially if the conversations are full of useful, everyday language. Let them read in pairs and go round whilst they’re reading aloud and correct and re-model pronunciation for them.

Pronunciation: Teaching “problem” sounds

We also need to pay a lot more attention to pronunciation in class – especially pronunciation related to connected speech (elision, assimilation, weak forms, linking sounds, etc.) We maybe need to accept that while it’s nice if our efforts to improve our students’ pronunciation work, the REAL goal of these slots in class is an improved ability to HEAR natural spoken language. As such, we need to help students with problem sounds.

Teach the sounds and how to say them, repeat new words with the sounds in them, and then show how these words say within sentences, so students get to hear – and get to practise saying – the way the words change how they sound once they’re within sentences. For instance, with low levels, you may well often work from sound to work to sentence.

Last week, a Chinese group I was working with had problems saying the word WEIRD, so I drilled like this:

EAR
EEEE-YA
WEIRD
WEIRD
WHAT A WEIRD GUY
WHAT WEIRD WEATHER

and so on.

Listening exercises for the classroom

1. Gap-fill exercises to practise listening skills

It’s great if you can do gap-fill listenings, where the first listening is for gist; then the students listen again and try to fill in the gaps in an audioscript. They compare their ideas in pairs and you play the listening a third time, pausing after each gap and eliciting the missing words. This works best if the gaps are more than one word. When you elicit the answers, write them up on the board and drill them with the whole group and some individual students.

Here’s a conversation from a Pre-Intermediate book I once wrote that works like this:

TALKING ABOUT LIFE IN YOUR COUNTRY

You are going to listen to a conversation between Martin and Alex.
They meet while they are abroad.

As you listen, cover the script below and decide:
1. Why are they abroad?
2. How long are they going to stay?

Listen again and fill in the gaps.

Martin: What do you do back home?
Alex: Well, I was working in a car factory, but it (1) . . . . . . . . . That’s why I’m here, really. I got some money when I lost my job and I decided to go travelling (2) . . . . . . . . to think about what to do next.
Martin: And what are you going to do?
Alex: I still haven’t decided. The economy’s in (3) . . . . . . . . at the moment. There’s a lot of unemployment and people aren’t spending much money, so it’s going to be difficult to find a new job. I might try to re-train and do (4) . . . . . . . . .
Martin: Have you got any idea what you want to do?
Alex: Not really. Maybe something with computers. I might try to find a job abroad for a while, before I do that. What about your country? Is it easy to find work there?
Martin: Yes. A few years ago it was quite bad, but the economy’s (5) . . . . . . . . at the moment. I think unemployment is about four per cent, so finding a job isn’t really a problem. The problem is (6) . . . . . . . . . Prices have gone up a lot over the last few years. Everything is more expensive, so the money you earn goes really quickly.
Alex: Right.
Martin: Sometimes I think I should move to somewhere like here. I’m sure people don’t get paid very much, but the cost of living is so low, and there’s a better (7) . . . . . . . . . People don’t work as hard; life is more relaxed; the food’s great; the weather’s great; it’s just very nice.
Alex: Yes, maybe, but don’t forget that you are on holiday. Maybe it’s (8) . . . . . . . . for the people who live here.
Martin: No, maybe not.
Alex: So anyway, how long are you going to stay here?
Martin: Just till Friday. I have to get back to work. What about you? How long are you staying?
Alex: Till I get bored or I (9) . . . . . . . . money. I don’t have any plans.

As I’m eliciting the answers fro the group and writing things like (9) RUN OUT OF on the board, I’ll draw the links between RUN and OUT and OF and drill RU-NOW-TOV with the group.

2. Listen closely: Dictations

Dictations are also good, especially at lower levels when learners are still developing their ear. Here’s one we built into OUTCOMES Elementary.

A Listen. Write the questions you hear.

B Listen again and repeat what you hear.

C Work in pairs. Ask and answer the questions.

Audioscript

1. What are you studying?
2. What year are you in?
3. Are you enjoying it?
4. How are you?
5. Are you hungry?
6. Are you good at English?
7. Where are you from?
8. Where are you staying?

3. Hearing – the underrated skill

One other kind of exercises that focus explicitly on HEARING is this, from OUTCOMES Intermediate:

B Decide which words you heard. Then listen and check.

1. I’m involved in/on designing what you see on the screen.
2. How did you getting/get into that?
3. Vodafone were recruiting people so I applied/replied and I got a job.
4. It’s like any job. It has its boring moments/minutes.
5. It depends if we have a deadline to complete/meet.
6. I do something/anything like fifty or sixty hours a week.
7. That must be stressed/stressful.
8. I sometimes work better under/in pressure.
9. They said I would get a permanent/payment contract, but then it never happened.

Final thoughts: So how can we help students get better at listening?

Well, firstly, I think we have a duty to simply teach as much typical language as we can – both as part of listening-based lessons and also at as many other times as we can.

Secondly, we need to ensure we always teach language – both vocabulary AND grammar – in natural contexts and we need to say / model the things we’re teaching, so our students get used to hearing them in context and can recognise them when they hear them again. We need to mark the main stresses on words we teach, show linking between words more and do lots and lots of drilling.

Finally, we just need to ensure that we recycle words, chunks, exchanges and conversations over different classes and across different levels. Thus, we’ll ensure not only language development, but also massively increased opportunities for hearing.

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If you found this article helpful, you may also be interested in re-thinking gap-fill exercises and using the Dictogloss method in the classroom.

As teachers, we start writing language learning materials from very early in our careers, sometimes even from day one. It could be slides to introduce a topic, or worksheets to go with songs… But how many of us have had any training in writing materials, and how do we become better at it?

If your background is anything like mine, you learnt how to improve your materials by trial and error. I would create something and use it in class. Then, I’d realise all the things that were wrong with it – or all the things I should have thought about before I created it.

Sometimes these were seemingly very simple:

I didn’t number the questions in an exercise, so I had to read out the whole sentence for learners to know which one I was talking about in feedback.

Sometimes they went deeper:

I hadn’t realised that one of my learners knew nothing about films and wasn’t interested in them at all. So she had no background knowledge to build on when using the week’s worth of materials I’d created to help learners discuss films and write reviews of them.

Honing my materials writing skills

Over time, I gradually improved the materials I wrote. I joined the IATEFL Materials Writing Special Interest Group (MaWSIG) and attended their events. This helped me learn more about how to lay out materials to help learners navigate them more easily. It also helped me create effective multiple-choice questions, and write useful teacher’s notes for myself and others.

You can find the MaWSIG events page here: https://mawsig.iatefl.org/events

Besides, I started reading books published by ELT Teacher 2 Writer, with such helpful titles as How to write reading and listening activities and How to write pronunciation activities. These books are no-nonsense, step-by-step guides to creating effective materials. I really noticed a difference in my own materials once I started following these tips.

All of their books are listed here: https://eltteacher2writer.co.uk/our-books

Next I completed the NILE (Norwich Institute for Language Education) module in Materials Development for Language Education for my MA. You can also do the module stand-alone, without committing to an MA. That course introduced me to the theory behind materials development. It taught me how to analyse materials to learn what makes them effective. What’s more, I got feedback on my materials for the first time as part of the module’s MA assignments.

Discovering competency frameworks

When it came to writing my MA dissertation, I wanted to bring together what I’d learnt from the Materials Development and Teacher Training modules I’d completed. Inspired by a talk by Denise Santos at IATEFL Belfast in 2022, I decided to create a competency framework for language learning materials writing.

Competency frameworks are structured collections of characteristics required for effective performance in a job (in this case writing effective language learning materials). These characteristics can be observed in the real world, measured against accepted standards, and improved via training and development.

Before I wrote this framework, there were frameworks for teaching, teacher training and academic management, but not for materials writing. This is despite the fact that materials are incredibly influential in language teaching, both on teachers, in terms of their professional development and the way that they teach, and on learners, in terms of what is taught and the way it might influence their perceptions of the world.

My own competency framework

My framework is designed to be a starting point in deciding what might be useful for you to develop and/or learn about to get better at writing language learning materials. The whole framework is available for free here: https://bit.ly/materialsframework

It is divided into three sections:

1. Background knowledge: developing your knowledge of theory and methodology to inform your materials writing
2. Creating materials: developing practical skills for the actual writing of materials
3. Professional skills: developing other skills beyond the actual writing to enable you to develop materials alone and with others

Each section contains a number of categories and sub-categories containing the actual competencies. All key terms are highlighted and defined in a glossary at the end. Here are examples of competencies from Category 2.2 Activity design:

Although there is currently no specific guidance for how to help you develop in each of these areas, this is something I hope will be developed in the future to accompany the framework. There are ideas at the beginning of the framework document to give you guidance on how you might be able to use the framework.

Final thoughts

I hope you find the framework useful in developing your own materials writing skills. Please let me know how easy you’ve found it to use, how you think it might be developed further in the future, and how we could create support materials to accompany it. I would also like to get it translated into other languages, as I think it could be useful beyond English Language Teaching. If you’d like to help with this, please let me know.

I look forward to seeing how my framework develops and grows now it’s out in the real world!

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also be interested in Kirsten Waechter’s post on the new CEFR framework as well as this interview with ELT Teacher 2 Writer author Sue Kay.

English is an international language: us ELTABBers and our learners come from all corners of the map. But we all live and work together in our little Berlin -Brandenburg box.
ELTABB Chair and Journal Editor Sandra Roggenkamp visited Brighton for the IATEFL yearly conference, to help us all think a little more outside-the-box.

This year’s IATEFL Conference was enjoyable and rewarding in many ways – from a plethora of inspiring presentations and fresh teaching perspectives to networking and socialising with colleagues and friends, all against the backdrop of a charming beach silhouette. Here are some of my personal highlights and takeaways.

IATEFL Associates’ Day

I started off the week with the IATEFL Associates’ Day, a pre-conference meeting of representatives of associate members from across the globe (of which ELTABB is one). There were representatives from countries such as Spain, Israel, Panama, Belgium, Palestine, Bangladesh…

Once again, Germany was very well-represented, due to its many regional ELTAs. It was nice making new connections while also seeing some familiar faces from HELTA (Hamburg), ELTA-Rhine and MELTA (Munich).

We spent the day listening to presentations on ESL-related topics and doing group work on specific questions, such as finding effective strategies to increase and measure the visibility of teachers’ associations. After brainstorming and discussing ideas within our own groups (all composed of people coming from different corners of the world) we presented our results in the plenary.

Jean Theuma from the IATEFL Associates Committee did an excellent job leading us all through the day, providing the structure and reminding presenters to “keep it precise and keep it moving” to avoid listener fatigue.

To mix things up, there were poster presentations during the breaks, and my personal highlight was giving a presentation on my chosen topic of brain-friendly learning.

If you’re interested in the subject, you can download my poster here.

We rounded off the day with a reception at the bar of the conference’s Skyline room, enjoying the beach view and catching up with other attendees over a cool drink.

IATEFL Presentations

Over the next few days, I attended a number of presentations on different ELT-related topics. Here’s an overview of my favourite talks.

1. Sarah Plochl: “English for artists – between ESP, self-expression and control”

Sarah’s workshop on teaching English to artists was engaging and interactive. What’s more, it was surprisingly relevant, as it turned out that the challenges artists face are similar to the issues a lot of other learners experience.

She pointed out that, like any language learner, artists seek to make sense of the world, express themselves and share their perspectives for other people to (hopefully) understand.

Also, like other learners, artists constantly oscillate between “control” and “flow”.

While they aim to be precise, they also want to expresss themselves freely. Thus, “control” and “flow” are two sides of the same coin: you need control and precision to express yourself “freely and beautifully”.

Of course, lots of teachers focus mostly on flow, helping students get their point across, even if it’s not done very elegantly. But whether you’re a business person who wants to hold captivating presentations or an artist aiming to inspire, your language will need both thoughtfulness and creativity…

A positive mindset: know what you know and take it easy

Sarah went on to explain that in her work with artists, she focusses on cultivating a positive mindset and confidence. As most artists are perfectionists, they tend to ignore what they already know and underestimate their capabilities. So a good starting point is to show them what they already know with the help of brief exercises and conversations.

Sarah also uses simple drawings to explain things and to create a sense of relaxed imperfection. By sharing “crappy doodles”, she creates a welcoming space in which it’s okay not to be perfect.

Another issue for many artists is that they feel like they are “showing off” when they talk, write about or present their work to others. This is something they share with many other learners of English, especially introverts. Sarah thus helps them realise that they help and inspire others when they present their work, and that their clients are grateful to them for that.

She then presented four case studies about different clients with individual challenges (e.g talking, presenting or writing about their work). She divided us into four groups and assigned each group a case study. We then developed strategies for helping the respective client improve their language skills.

A case study

My group considered how to help a sculptor talk and write about her work. She had a B2-level of English but would often let her partner talk on her behalf in international contexts.
Our main idea was confidence-building through establishing the specific vocabulary she needed to speak about her work. We suggested that she also write scripts and practise speaking while recording herself to simulate getting “out there” and making herself visible.

Sarah added that she would start by showing the student how much knowledge she already possessed, and that she was perfectly able to speak for herself without relying on her partner. She also shared a funny anecdote about a student who needed specific vocabulary to talk about their work, and it turned out the most appropriate expression was the word “thingy”.

Mix and match – fresh teaching ideas

Besides, Sarah encouraged us to “think outside the ELT box” to include more techniques, such as creative writing, design thinking, and even dancing – or to incorporate somewhat dated but fun and effective teaching methods such as Dictogloss.

Another tip she gave us was to help students get English out of the classroom and into their lives. An easy way for learners to do this is switching their phone settings and apps to English, for example.

My takeout from this talk was that it’s fine to use students’ feelings of perceived inadequacy as a starting point and take it from there, gradually building up confidence and skills – with the help of both conventional and creative methods.

2. Gerald Smith: “Engaging and effective exam preparation using audio-visual and digital resources”

This presentation on using digital materials for exam preparation was light-hearted and breezy. Gerald, who’d just had a less-than-civil encounter with a local seagull, kicked off his talk with a casual poop joke.

He then explained that exams tend to have a “washback” effect, meaning that previous bad results can cause exam nerves, shame, guilt and generally low motivation. So any type of exam preparation should try to counterbalance this.

But why would digital materials be more effective than coursebooks then?

Some of the reasons Gerald mentioned were:

• synchronicity: there is an abundance of digital materials that are timely and relevant, which is generally more motivating than using coursebooks dating back a couple of years
• real-world situations: students respond better to authentic materials (e.g. street interviews or news), which are easy to find online
• topics: digital materials allow the teacher to take students’ interests into account (could be anything from hobbies to politics)
• high video literacy: learners are already used to watching videos and quickly grasping visual content, so it’s a “home advantage”
• audio-visual materials are multi-sensory and often contain moving images that make them more engaging
• authentic digital materials contain frequently used language

An example: using videos in the classroom

Gerald provided an example of how digital materials can be used to practise speaking. He picked a short video on art murals in crisis-ridden Baghdad, accompanied by questions and tasks.

The questions can be general (e.g. “What was the topic about?”) or more specific (“Who made the project and why?”) or personal (“Do you like it? Why/why not?”).
They can also be used to simulate exams or interviews, with one student being a test taker/interviewee and the other one an examiner/interviewer (there can be more roles – such as note taker or moderator – depending on group size).

Gerald added that it’s good to pick a topic that’s not only interesting but also a bit polarising, because if students have an opinion on something, they will naturally want to speak about it.

But what about coursebooks and exam relevancy?

He went on to explain that teachers may have reservations about exam relevancy and coursebook integration. Here’s an overview of the concerns and benefits when it comes to using digital materials:

While the pros obviously outweigh the cons, in order to ensure the exam relevancy of the digital materials in use, Gerald’s recommendation was to focus on:

• fostering Higher Order Thinking Skills
• building contextual language awareness
• developing lexical storage
• promoting learner autonomy

The idea here is that successful integration means helping students develop practical, transferable skills that will help them prepare for the exam, but at the same time go beyond exam preparation. If students can learn to recognise recurring patterns, improve their communication skills and develop lasting motivation, they’ll be able to apply their skills and knowledge in any given context. This will mitigate the “washback” effect and prepare them for real-world encounters.

I left Gerald’s presentation with a wider perspective on what it means to learn successfully and sustainably by shifting the focus from “exam-centred” to “student-centred”.

3. Sheila Thorn: “Designing listening and language practice materials to accompany authentic recordings”

This was Sheila Thorn’s farewell talk – after 25 years of speaking at IATEFL – and her witty, authentic delivery definitely did it justice.

The issue she addressed in her presentation was the mismatch between coursebooks and authentic language and how this affects learner motivation and progress.

The problems she outlined were the following:

• coursebooks are scripted and graded
• the audio sections are performed by actors who articulate and speak very clearly
• coursebooks are good for learning a language and getting good grades, but they don’t help students understand authentic language and a variety of accents

Acccording to Sheila, this easily leads to a “washback” effect (again!) when students don’t understand native speakers despite being “good” at English and doing well in tests. As a result, they experience stress, which in turn makes it harder to learn.

The solution: listening to and learning from native speakers

Sheila’s solution was prioritising authentic listening. She presented short audio snippets that were accompanied by little tasks with questions about the content of the recordings.

Sheila’s tried-and-trusted strategy is to regularly use audio materials in class. She lets her students listen to the recordings, work on the tasks and correct their own mistakes afterwards. Of course, she is there to help when they get stuck (also providing transcripts). She sees herself as a facilitator rather than a source of knowledge – which allows her students to acquire knowledge autonomously.

Self-correction is engaging for her learners, and they make good progress as a result.

Some advantages of authentic listening materials that Sheila mentioned were:

• understanding from context works well for students
• training listening comprehension is effective exam preparation
• real-life content is far more motivating than scripted materials
• not much preparation needed as the teacher can just show up with recordings and tasks
• content is easy to find on the internet

What’s more, the recordings don’t have to be long – all of the examples Sheila gave were under one minute (e.g. interview snippets). Authentic materials will also naturally bring up a wide range of ESL topics, including grammar, functional language, vocabulary, etc.

Throughout her talk, Sheila sprinkled in funny quips and anecdotes. She told us a story about a potential client whose English was so abysmal that she charged a horrendous fee for her services just to turn him away – but he came back anyway and she had to bite the bullet. Now, his English has improved dramatically and they are friends.

I thoroughly enjoyed this funny and inspiring farewell talk, which ended with a standing ovation from the audience and a visibly moved Sheila. I hope she’ll enjoy her golden years.

Brighton: worth a trip for sure!

Last but not least, another highlight for me was the “Introduction to Brighton”, a virtual walk through the city. The presentation was hosted by a local tour organiser and included little visuals and plenty of storytelling. It was fun to explore the history of Brighton, from the early beginnings as a small, sleepy fishing village to becoming the first seaside spa resort before turning into the cultural hotspot it is today.

I took a bit of time to explore some of the local attractions before merrily getting on my way back home, filled with gratefulness for the things I had learned and the connections and happy memories I had made.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing some of the inspiring speakers I discovered at future ELTABB workshops!

***

Whether you’re a freelance English teacher looking for clients, a would-be new employee or somewhere in between, LinkedIn has a lot to offer. Find out how the platform works and make your profile work for you.

LinkedIn tends to be a bit ‘marmite’: Like the (in)famous British spread, you either love it or hate it. Those who hate it tend to see it as basically a glorified CV with lots of posts boasting that people are ‘delighted to announce…’

However, if you haven’t bothered with the platform much, you may well be surprised with how it’s developed in recent years. It’s now one of the fastest growing social media platforms – recently announcing one billion users – and has the advantage of being mostly professionally focused with very few cat pictures.

Because most people are on LinkedIn in a professional capacity, it’s easy to network, build relationships and collaborate with others. There is amazing community and support available, and there’s nowhere better to keep up to date with industry trends. The profile section is like nothing else on social media, enabling you to essentially create a mini website which is also findable through Google search.

Yet, LinkedIn is still massively undervalued and underutilised by most of the ELT professionals I talk to. In part, I think this is because it honestly isn’t the most intuitive or straightforward platform to learn to use. So let me give you some tips and suggestions that will help you to use it more effectively, and maybe learn to love it as much as I do.

The Top Card – Say Hello and Shake Hands

This is the part at the top of your profile displaying your name, a description of what you do (known as the headline) and a headshot of you. It also features a banner photo in the background.

Think of this section as your business card. You want it to be well-designed, attractive and clear. What is it that you do, and crucially: how can you help your ideal clients (or employers)?

Let’s start with the banner photo. Many people either stick with the default blue and grey background, or stick an out-of-focus photo of their last holiday destination there. But the banner photo is a massive opportunity to tell anyone visiting your profile the most important things about you and what you have to offer.

You can use Canva to bring up a whole range of LinkedIn banner templates, and then change them in any way you want. You can add your own words, describing what you do, or maybe even a short testimonial quote, as well as adding an image and using colours that fit with your personal branding.

The headshot is like that moment in networking when you make eye contact and shake hands. So, make sure that you’re looking at the camera, not wearing sunglasses, and that people will still recognise you if they meet you in real life!

The Headline – Bring Your Message Home

Then, there’s the all-important headline. Think of this as your ‘elevator pitch’. Imagine you’ve just met someone at a networking event, and they ask you, ‘What do you do?’

Which is going to be more interesting and lead to a better conversation?

I’m a teacher of business English.

OR

I help international business professionals go from being anxious about their English to confident communicators in 12 weeks.

A good formula to use is something like this:

“I help X to do Y through/in/without/so that they can Z.”

So now you’ve said hello and briefly introduced yourself. What next? In real life, you would probably swap business cards and think about how you might be able to work together.

On LinkedIn, you also want this. If you switch on Creator mode, you are then gifted with a link in your top card, where you can suggest people book a call, sign up for your mailing list, or whatever you feel is the best next step towards becoming a client.

Creator mode is aimed at those posting regularly, which I also recommend. It does have the possible disadvantage that people are steered towards following you, rather than connecting. But you can always check through your follower list and request to connect with them later. I think it’s well worth it to get that well-positioned link.

(If you’re not sure, following means that they see your content, but you don’t see theirs, and they can’t message you directly or vice versa. If you’re connected, you see each other’s content, and can message.)

The About Section – Showcase Your Expertise

The About section is probably the second most important part of your profile. If the whole profile is a mini website, then the top card is the home page, and this is your about page and the sales page of your website wrapped up into one.

So, it shouldn’t be a summary of your CV (yawn). The About section really needs to ‘speak’ to your ideal client.

Unless they click ‘see more’, they will only see the first line or two of your About section. So you need to grab their attention, and make it clear why reading more will be helpful for them.

This is what you’ll see before you click ‘see more’ if you go to my profile:

Hi, I’m Rachael. I’m here to help ELT/MFL/ESL freelancers work less, earn more and live more fully, through optimising both your business model and your business mindset.

– Maybe you’re working as an online teacher or coach, but clients feel hard to come by, or ….

If you are self-employed, you should know inside out and back to front who your ideal clients are and what they’re looking for. Your About section needs to demonstrate this understanding. Only then lay out how your experience and expertise can help them. Check out my full profile to see how I’ve done that:

Rachael Roberts | LinkedIn

If you are employed, you may think this doesn’t apply to you. But actually, companies and organisations also have needs, struggles and aspirations. The more you can make it clear how employing you will help with these, the stronger a candidate you’ll appear.

The Featured Section – Spread the Word

This is one of my favourite sections, and yet it’s so underutilized that many people haven’t even activated it on their profile.

People often assume it’s just for you to pin featured posts, much as you can on other platforms. You CAN do that, but you can also pin links to anything external that you like. This could be your website, your lead magnet landing page, a video on YouTube, a podcast you run or appeared in, or an event you’re running or appearing in.

This means that LinkedIn gives you pretty much unlimited links, without having to use something like Linktree, as you do on Instagram. What’s more, for each external link you can add a thumbnail image (1270 x 720 works well), meaning that your links look professional and enticing.

(For more help with this section – and other aspects of LinkedIn and your ELT/MFL freelance business, check out my YouTube channel.)

Recommendations – Stand Out and Shine

The fourth and final section I’m going to talk about is the Recommendations section.

Whether you’re looking for clients or employment, the primary reason behind creating a LinkedIn profile is to help people see what you have to offer, how you can help them, and why they should trust you. Your content will do a lot to build this trust, but testimonials are even more compelling. And those on LinkedIn have the added benefit that they are attached to real people who the reader can check out.

You need to request that someone gives you a recommendation (there is a button to press). I would suggest that you contact them separately first and explain the kind of thing you’d like them to write. Remember that this is about reducing risk for anyone considering working with you. So anything about any hesitations they may have had which were removed, the process of working with you, and the results they got, will be super useful.

If you work on these four areas of your profile, that alone will hugely benefit you and your business. And imagine the impact if you’re actually posting regularly, too. I look forward to seeing some new shiny profiles popping up on LinkedIn. Do take a moment to say hi while you’re there!

***

If you found this article helpful, you may also be interested in authentic branding for ESL professionals.