Professional Development

Whether as teachers or presenters – many of us choose to put ourselves in the spotlight. Yet, almost all of us experience a degree of stage fright. Here’s what we can do to start strongly, deliver a clear message to an engaged audience, and end with confidence.

As teachers, we stand up every day in front of an audience, and we’re usually well familiar with our topic. So while a little adrenalin doesn’t hurt, why not overcome at least some of those nerves?
My seven top tips have come about through trial and error; if something unexpected happens on the day, I’ve got the back-up to keep going and succeed.

Tip 1: Have an angle on your topic

A good topic is a great start, but giving it direction is also a hook for your audience. For example, instead of “Sustainable Cities”, how about:

Sustainable Cities:
What can we do to make our cities greener?

Conference titles often have two parts; a question further adds to the potential appeal.

Tip 2: Getting attention

A strong start means ensuring everyone is with you. You can do this in a number of ways, such as:

• asking a hands-up question (e.g., “Hands up if you’ve ever given a presentation” or “run a marathon”,  etc.)
• telling a personal / relevant anecdote
• stating a fun / shocking fact
• or (maybe!) by telling a joke

Don’t forget, too, to smile and make eye contact!

Tip 3: The take-away

After listening to any talk, there should be some sort of change in your audience. The K.A.B. framework is helpful in defining this:

K = knowledge
A = attitude
B = behaviour

1. If you’re delivering facts, you’re potentially changing your listeners’ knowledge.
2. If you hope to change their attitude, then maybe illustrate why those facts are important.
3. To further change their behaviour, additional persuasion skills on how they (someone else) might benefit from applying those facts will be useful.

To illustrate, in writing this post, perhaps I can …

• demonstrate strategies you can use (= knowledge)
• show you how these help build confidence (= attitude)
• encourage you to try out the strategies – or even sign up to give a talk! (= behaviour)

Another way of looking at the take-away is to remember the W.I.I.F.Y. – What’s in it for you? – the speaker’s reminder to make their audience aware of why it’s worth staying and listening to you!

But there’s also my aim, slightly different from the audience take-away.
For example, in this article/talk, my own aim is to outline and illustrate seven strategies, clearly and with examples (… so that my audience will feel more confident when delivering a presentation = the WIIFY).

Tip 4: How to organise content

Being very familiar with our topic, it’s easy to forget that we’re delivering something new – or in a new light – to an audience. They need signposts throughout – at the start, during the presentation, and also a reminder at the end of the key message. So a clear and logical structure is crucial.

The following are a few sample structures:

• A series of Wh- questions (3-4) to divide the content
• P.R.E.P. Make your point; give a reason; add an example; restate your point.
• S.T.A.R.R. Define the situation; describe your task; explain the action you took; show your results; offer recommendations.
• Chronological: for describing a sequence of steps, or reporting back on an event.
• A mnemonic – using the letters of a relevant word – to aid memory, e.g. a guided tour of B.E.R.L.I.N. might focus on the Buildings, Entertainment options, top Restaurants – and so on.

Your choice of structure will obviously be one that best fits the type of talk you’re giving.

Tip 5: Involving your audience

While it’s important to hook your audience at the start, they’ll be far more engaged if you can do this in different ways throughout your talk.
Whatever size your audience, the following are simple ways to achieve this:

• Y/N Questions, Wh- Qs, rhetorical Qs
• “You have 60 seconds to write down as many …”
• “Order these five items according to …”
• “Which of these three is incorrect?”
• “Discuss XY with a partner; you have 1 minute.”

Keep moments of interaction short, but regular.

Tip 6: How to start

My own starting tips include an A, B, C, and D: get my audience’s Attention (Tip 2), highlight the Benefit (Tip 3), Credibility: explain why I’m “qualified” to give this talk; and Direction: how I’m going to proceed.
Here, it’s enough to give a brief outline of the content, and what’s going to come first.

I also focus on Soundscripting * , especially for the very beginning (when I might be distracted by whatever’s going on in the room).
In a nutshell, soundscripting is putting the text in a bigger font, double-spacing it, putting key words in bold (or upper case), and adding a slash (/) between words where I want to pause, or an end-of-line break for a longer pause:

With this, I can read and easily look up (and back), knowing that while I might not be focusing clearly on the content at this point, by using the marked-up script I know the message will be conveyed clearly.

Extra starting tips might also include mentioning timing, when you’re happy to accept questions, and if/when you have reference material to share.

Tip 7: How to finish

It’s usually a relief to reach the end of a talk – but it takes careful planning to ensure your audience also gets a sense of achievement and a clear take-away. Write down, word-for-word, what you’re going to say. Include a conclusion and/or summary. Perhaps come full circle by referring to something relevant mentioned at the start, or offer a call to action: what can your audience do next to put some of this into practice?

And, finally, smile, and accept – humbly! – the applause.

So what’s your take-away?!

References and Recommended Reading

* Soundscripting, ref: Powell, M. (1996). Presenting in English. LTP.

Atkins, R. (2023). The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence. Wildfire.
Groskop, V. (2019). How to own the room. Collins (book, and weekly podcast available on Apple, Spotify etc.).

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If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

Wow Your Audience without Words: Top Tips from a Public Speaking Expert – Connections.

Artificial Intelligence has become a “household item” in recent times. But how can it make life easier for you as an English teacher? In this blog post, we’ll explore ways you can interact with AI to use it as a virtual colleague and personal teaching assistant rather than just a tool.

This was my first interaction with AI back in December 2022:

I asked ChatGPT for a joke about oat milk in Berlin. Just like that overpriced oat milk latte, AI tools started as something I tried because everyone was talking about it. I spent the holiday season treating it like a party trick. But when January rolled around and school was back in session, everything changed.

Faced with designing Business English certification exams— a task I felt neither qualified for nor excited about—I discovered AI could be more than just entertainment. I kept hearing that people were doing A-M-A-Z-I-N-G things with AI… getting output that was mind blowing.

But my first attempts were basic:

Please write six possible titles for this text. 3 options should be true, and 3 should be false but could be true.

The results weren’t revolutionary, but they showed potential. It was useful to some extent, but I kept feeling like it was not what everyone was hyping it up to be.

As I went down the AI-for-teaching rabbit hole, I realized that effective communication was quite literally the key to unlocking its potential.

The Power of Communication

Think about attending a TESOL Conference. You’re in the plenary surrounded by teachers—some novices, some veterans, some teaching kids, others training corporate executives.

If someone simply asks, “Write me a lesson plan”, how useful would that response be?
The lack of context and specificity makes it nearly impossible to provide a meaningful lesson plan.

Now imagine the same request in a special interest group meeting, where you get to share everything about your context, student needs, specific challenges, and get to ask/answer questions. The quality of guidance you’d receive would be dramatically different.

Just as the usefulness of that lesson plan request depends on the details you provided, so too does the effectiveness of using AI in teaching. By understanding how to communicate our needs to AI, we can maximize its capacity to support and enhance our pedagogical practice.

Approaches to Interacting with AI

While effective communication is crucial when using AI, its impact varies depending on how we choose to interact with it. There are two primary approaches:

1. using AI as a Tool
2. using AI as a Collaborator

● Tool: AI performs tasks for you, similar to a computer or software, providing generic responses and acting like static teaching resources. It’s useful for tasks that require minimal customization, such as generating vocabulary lists.

● Collaborator: AI works alongside you, offering ideas, sharing insights, and actively engaging with you to brainstorm lesson plans, suggest activities, and support learning at different levels. This approach requires a deeper level of interaction and understanding, allowing AI to provide creative solutions to specific teaching challenges.

Understanding these approaches can make a big difference in the output we get, and ultimately, how useful that output is.

After all, what is the benefit of AI when you only get generic content that you can’t even use?

Understanding Prompts: Your Teaching Instructions

To effectively use AI, especially as a collaborator, understanding how to craft good prompts is essential. A prompt is like a set of clear instructions for AI. Just as we wouldn’t ask students to complete a task without providing them with specific guidelines and understanding of what they need to achieve, we shouldn’t approach AI with vague requests. For instance, instead of saying “Write something about grammar”, we would give students a detailed assignment like:

Create a short dialogue between two friends using at least three examples of conditional sentences.

Similarly, when working with AI, we need to craft prompts that are precise and well-defined to get the desired output.

Good prompts include:
– Context about your teaching situation
– Clear objectives
– Specific constraints or requirements
– Student background and needs
– Available resources and limitations

Practical Implementation

Let’s give it a try. Think of a topic and an audience for a class. Go to Claude.ai or Perplexity.ai (my favorite ones – the latter adds sources in the output!). Then, use the prompts below and analyze the output.

AI as a Tool

First, let’s look at how a typical prompt might be structured when using AI as a tool:

Create a lesson plan outline for a 60-minute class on [topic] for [type of students].

Example:

This basic prompt lacks the key elements that make for an impactful AI interaction. We need to provide more context, specify our objectives, define constraints, and consider our students’ needs.

AI as a Collaborator

To interact with AI as a collaborator, you can break down your request into chunks, providing more context and detail.
For this purpose, feed it information in chunks, like you’re having a conversation with a fellow teacher:

Chunk 1
#Identity: You are an experienced [type of teacher].
#Task: Let’s brainstorm engaging activities for a lesson on [topic] for [type of
students]. What are some creative ideas that incorporate hands-on learning?
Chunk 2
Based on these activities, how can we structure a 60-minute lesson that maximizes
student engagement and understanding?
Chunk 3
What potential challenges might students face with this topic, and how can we
address them in our lesson plan?
Chunk 4
How can we incorporate formative assessment throughout the lesson to gauge
student comprehension?
Chunk 5
Let’s refine our lesson plan to include differentiation strategies for various language
levels and paces.

Analyzing the Output

Once you receive the output from both AI as a tool and as a collaborator, analyze it as a whole. You’ll likely find that this chunk-approach yields results that are more tailored to your specific needs and context. If you don’t feel like experimenting, here is an example of output generated with the prompts above: TOOL vs. COLLABORATOR.

Go Beyond Lesson Plans!

While using AI to create lesson plans is a valuable application, the real power isn’t in generating quick worksheets or generic lesson plans. It’s in having a tireless collaborator who can help you:
– differentiate instructions for diverse learners
– generate creative solutions to teaching challenges
– adapt materials to specific contexts
– save time on routine tasks so you can focus on what makes the biggest impact

Here are a few ideas you might like to try (yes, ChatGPT came up with this list, I edited it):

1. Auditing and Improving Lesson Plans – AI can analyze your lesson plans for clarity
2. Rewriting Instructions for Clarity & Accessibility – AI can simplify, rephrase, or scaffold
3. Turning Student Mistakes into Puzzles or Mini-Lessons – AI can collect common common
   student errors and gamify them into a “spot-the-mistake” challenge or turn them into
   personalized micro-lessons for improvement
4. AI-Powered Role-Play Simulations – AI can act as a business partner, client, or manager in realistic email exchanges, negotiations, or meetings, helping learners practice professional communication
5. Differentiated Choice Boards – AI can create customized choice boards with varied business communication tasks (e.g., writing a memo, recording a voicemail, analyzing a contract) based on students’ learning preferences
6. Rubric Suggestions & Alignment – AI can refine rubrics to ensure they align with learning outcomes, providing example feedback comments for different proficiency levels
7. “Explain It Like I’m 5” – AI can simplify complex business jargon, contract language, or technical terms into beginner-friendly explanations, with options to adjust formality

AI Tools Designed for Language Teachers

While general AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are incredibly versatile, our field has seen the emergence of specialized tools designed specifically for teachers and language teaching that don’t require you to spend time thinking about how to write the best and most useful prompt.

Here are a few that you might like to test out:

Eduaide.ai
● 15 generations/month
● Limited Feedback Bot
● Enhance & Transform Features
● Has higher education options

To-teach.ai
● Up to 5 exercises, 3 worksheets, and 2 lesson plans monthly at no cost
● 5€ or 10€ per month. You can apply for a 30% discount for teachers.
● Editable output

Twee.com
● Free basic functions
● Specifically for language teachers
● 5 runs / day for Text Tools
● 3 runs / day for Media Tools
● 5-min input limit on media
● Unlimited interactive sharing

MagicSchool.ai
● 70+ tools for free
● Limited use of the chatbot
● Limited use of tools but it is unclear what that limit is
● Has higher education options

Final Thoughts

AI in language teaching can be a powerful tool when used thoughtfully. It might challenge your assumptions and push you out of your comfort zone. However, it can also be the extra set of hands you have always wanted to better support your students.

The key isn’t to use AI for everything, but to use it for the right tasks. Not to replace your teaching expertise but to amplify it. Start small, experiment, and remember that the skills you develop will serve you and your students well into the future.

So, take the plunge!
Explore, experiment with different prompts and share! I’m always interested in hearing how you use AI.

You can find me here:

Mariana’s Learning Space
hola@marianaslearning.space
https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianaaramirez

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If you enjoyed this article, you may also be interested in using ChatGPT in the classroom.

The Fine Print

Here are some important considerations when using AI:

● Environmental Impact:
While many AI tools offer ‘free’ access, there’s always a cost – if not monetary, then environmental. Each query, each generation, and each interaction requires significant computing power and energy. Reflecting on this hidden
environmental price tag, how might this reshape your approach to AI use? How could you balance the innovative potential of AI with their ecological impact? What criteriacould you develop to determine when AI use is truly warranted?
● Bias and Mistakes: AI is inherently biased and can make mistakes. Be cautious and verify information to ensure accuracy.
● Mindful Use: Ask yourself if AI is truly needed for a task. For example, do you really need AI for that email?

Disclaimer

The information in this blog post is accurate to the best of the author’s
knowledge at the time of publication. However, the field of artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving, with frequent updates and changes to AI tools and their capabilities. Therefore, the suggestions and examples provided here may yield different results over time. Readers are encouraged to experiment, critically evaluate the output of AI tools, and adapt their prompts and strategies accordingly.

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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 hardwired to focus more on visual cues 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.

Enjoy becoming the best speaker that you can be, and don’t forget your shopping bags!

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If you’d like to put the tips from this article 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.

You can find out more about Friederike Galland and her work on her website and LinkedIn profile.

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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.