Teaching

If you want to send your ESL students into the business world as the complete package, you’d better not neglect chart narration skills. Without them, the student is liable to get tongue-tied in front of an audience. Here’s how to help your students hone their ability to describe charts.

Even though the United States has the world’s largest economy, the textbook publishers essentially do not produce business ESL books for that market. American instructors could use the British books that publishers import en masse, but when I’ve tried that, my students have wound up talking about employee flow in and out of the company when they meant to talk about revenue, they got other vocabulary wrong, and developed further issues.

The instructor could stop at different points and say, “We don’t use that term in the US. This is what we say here,” and provide the American terminology, but students always believe their textbooks over their own notes. So when they’d come back to class, they were always using terms unsuitable, sometimes unintelligible, in American business.

When examining business ESL textbooks for use in an American class, my quick method used to be to look for characters named Nigel and Liam. If either of those guys appeared — sometimes they both appeared — I knew the book would be unsuitable for my classes.

Everybody’s bad at charts

This dearth of published textbooks has an advantage, though:

We have to scrape together our own materials and get creative about activities. This will cause alert instructors to adapt to the specific students’ needs to a degree that never happens when a textbook is used. It also reveals weaknesses in the students’ business English skills that would never come to light when using a textbook.

One of these weaknesses is always an inability to verbally describe charts. No matter how much English they have acquired or how fluent they are, foreign speakers of English are almost always terrible at explaining what’s going on in a chart. (I can’t do it in my foreign languages either.)

A foreign businessperson might give a powerful, articulate presentation in impeccable English, but as soon as the chart comes up on the screen, he or she is reduced to “go up”, “go down”, “start”, “stop”, and other terms far below their proficiency in other situations.

Describing charts is a necessary business skill, and it should be included in business ESL courses, but evidently it’s neglected. Doing it well requires learning a lot of idioms, most of which seem to come from sledding, car racing, aviation, diving and even skateboarding.

Chart jargon 101

On a chart, a trend can rocket higher or stably chug upward, rise steadily or abruptly. If the trend reverses course, it may fall off a cliff, drop precipitously, plunge, take a dive, etc.

If the decline is slower, the trend might slide, skid or gradually decline. While the student might say a trend “stays the same”, native speakers might say it holds its level or continues sideways.

If the trend rises and flattens out, it plateaus. If it declines and flattens out, we might say it bottomed out and stayed there, or even that it’s found its level.

A stock chart might form a head-and-shoulders pattern, a flag, a pennant, a double top, a double bottom, or a cup and handle. On many kinds of charts, a trend might gap up or gap down.

Seriously, you must be kidding!

Chart reading exercises can come in handy in other ways too:

In one business ESL class I had two Indian engineers who said their most immediate issue was learning to hold people’s attention at meetings. In addition to their strong Gujarati accents – which stressed even the most cooperative listeners – they pointed out that they were very serious men and had no skill at cracking jokes. Their explicit request was for me to teach them how to wisecrack.

It turned out that one very effective way to do this was for me to print boring economic charts from the Wall Street Journal. We’d juxtapose them, and as the two students verbally compared them, we’d look for openings for funny quips. In one of the best sessions, they compared the unemployment trend with the changes in consumer spending. It turned out that spending rose at about the rate that employment was decreasing, so they put together several jokes relevant to that surprising pair of trends. More joke opportunities arose when comparing other dry economic indicators.

You can learn plenty about describing charts from watching CNBC or Bloomberg, and there are plenty of web pages explaining how to describe chart patterns.

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If you enjoyed this article, you might also be interested in teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP).

For most teachers, the best part of the job is the actual teaching. We love engaging with our students in class and creating those “lightbulb” moments of clarity. The part of the job that most teachers don’t love? Lesson planning. Here’s why, and what you can do to make lesson planning easy and effective.

Planning can be time-consuming, stressful, and overwhelming. Most dedicated teachers end up doing far more preparation than they get paid for. School directors often expect (or even require) detailed lesson planning, but give little guidance on how to go about it.

So it’s no wonder that many teachers view lesson planning as a necessary evil.

But here’s the thing – it doesn’t have to be. With the right strategies, you can plan lessons that are more effective and more fun, without the guesswork and stress. And you can drastically reduce how long it takes.

Choose ONE Main Focus

When choosing a focus for your lesson, less is actually more. My golden rule for effective lesson planning is this: It’s better to teach a lot about a little rather than a little about a lot.

Here’s why it matters.

Option 1

You teach a lesson in which the students learn some new adjectives related to jobs, then they do a listening exercise about climate change, and then they study the present perfect before writing a short paragraph about their hobbies. The lesson ends with a class debate about the pros and cons of social media.

The students leave with their heads full of new information. But because the focus was on so many different things, they didn’t get a chance to master any of it. In fact, they can’t even remember a lot of it.

Option 2

You teach a lesson on 8 vocabulary words related to work. The students start by having a short discussion in pairs about what kind of job they would like, then read a sample job advertisement which contains the target vocabulary words for the lesson. From there, you clarify the meaning, form, and pronunciation of the 8 words before the students practice those same words in a “describe and guess” flashcard game. The lesson ends with a job interview role play in pairs.

The students leave feeling confident that they can use all the vocabulary they learned in the lesson. They certainly don’t know all the words in English related to work yet, but they now feel much better prepared to talk about work in English.

It’s better to teach a lot about a little rather than a little about a lot.

Clearly, option 2 is more useful for the students. Option 1 had so many different aims that the students didn’t end up confident in any of them. Option 2 provided one clear focus. By the end of that lesson, the students’ abilities had noticeably improved in that particular area.

The first step in planning a successful lesson is to choose one of the following skills or systems for each 60-90 minute lesson:

• reading
• listening
• speaking
• writing
• grammar
• vocabulary
• functional language

Obviously, any lesson will contain almost all of these aspects in one way or another. The point is to make only one the main focus and then build your entire lesson around that.

Use the Right Framework

Once you’ve determined the lesson type from the list above, the next step is to use a lesson framework. A framework is basically a template or outline corresponding to the lesson type. It’s made up of a list of stages (typically with one activity per stage) and each stage has an aim (a justification for how that stage contributes to achieving the main aim of your lesson).

The framework you use is determined by the type of lesson you’re teaching. A listening lesson has a different framework than a grammar lesson. Because these are very different aspects of English, the way we approach teaching them will be different.

For example, a reading lesson framework might look like this:

Stage	Aim
Lead-in	to set the context of the lesson; to engage with the topic and warm up
Gist Reading Task	to practice skimming for the main idea of the text
Vocabulary Pre-teach	to clarify potentially blocking words in the text
Detailed Reading Task	to practice reading intensively, for more in-depth comprehension
Productive Task	to practice speaking fluency in the context of the text

So any time you teach a reading lesson, you can use this same framework – just with a different text and relevant activities for each stage.

Lesson frameworks are the #1 way to streamline your planning process and make your lessons more effective. Once you’re familiar with the different frameworks, no longer have to waste time thinking about what kind of activity to plan next or how much to include in your lesson. You simply follow the outline.

Get the Most Out of Your Material

Another benefit of using a framework is that it helps you shape your material into a cohesive, intentional lesson. If you’re teaching from a coursebook, you can now evaluate what’s on the page and determine which activities fit into your framework and which don’t. Take the activities you need, slotting them into the appropriate stages, and cut out the rest. Is the coursebook page missing a gist task? No problem – now you know exactly what you need to supplement.

Remember – less is more. Your entire reading lesson should be designed around one text. Your entire vocabulary lesson can be designed around one set of 6 – 10 vocabulary words. The beauty of this is that you get the most possible mileage out of your material, and you don’t spend time looking for a bunch of different random activities to fill up your lesson time.

You can use frameworks with authentic material as well. Perhaps you’ve found a short TED Talk you’d like to use for a listening lesson. Use the listening lesson framework to inform the activities you design around the video.

Tips for Saving Time

Once you get really comfortable with the different lesson frameworks, these will be your biggest timesaver, because you’ll no longer have to create lessons out of thin air. You’ll have a handy template up your sleeve for any possible lesson type or material.

If you’re looking to reduce your planning time even more, here are a few additional tips help you.

1. Plan backwards. Can I let you in on a lesson planning secret? Plan the most important activity first. And the most important activity in your lesson should never be your lead-in. The lead-in is just there to quickly introduce the topic and get the students engaged. In a 60-minute lesson, this should take five minutes or less.

If you start planning the lead-in first, it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole of activity options. Should I start by showing a picture or a video clip? Should the students discuss some questions in pairs? Before you know it, you’ve spent 30 minutes “planning” and haven’t even worked out the first activity yet.

Instead, start with the “main event” of your lesson. For example, in a reading lesson, this would be the detailed comprehension task. If you’re using a coursebook, this will most likely already be provided for you. Boom! That stage is done. Now work backwards from there. By the time you get to the lead-in, the rest of your lesson will be planned, and all you need to do is tack a quick 5-minute warm up activity (in the context of your reading text) onto the beginning.

2. Set a timer. If you find yourself spending an hour or more planning a single lesson, my timer trick may help. Set a timer for 15 or 30 minutes and tell yourself you have to have the lesson planned by the time it goes off. You don’t need to have the perfect visuals ready to go or all your instructions written out. You just need to have enough so that you could feasibly walk in and teach it: the stages, plus the aim and activity for each stage.

Challenge yourself to put the lesson together without worrying about every little detail. THEN go back and add any necessary embellishments afterwards, once the timer has gone off. You may even realize you don’t need to add on as much as you thought.

3. Build up your resource library. I recommend keeping a folder (physically or digitally) with your favorite activity ideas. That way, you can easily pull one out whenever you need to supplement a stage in your lesson.

And remember – just because the activity doesn’t focus on the exact grammar point you need, it doesn’t mean you can’t use it. Many activities can be easily adapted to practice different language. For example, a game like Find Someone Who can be used to practice anything from the present simple (“Find someone who plays tennis / has a dog / speaks 3 languages”) to the present perfect continuous (“Find someone who has been studying English for more than 5 years / has been living in the same house since they were a child”).

If you like the format of the activity, you can save a lot of time by creating different versions of it rather than trying to find something that’s already tailor-made for the exact language point you’re teaching.

If you’re looking for more guidance on your teaching and planning, feel free to stop by teflhorizons.com. You can also download the free Guide to Lesson Frameworks here for an easy reference.

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Like many western countries, Germany is becoming increasingly multicultural and diverse. Sophia Burton from Migration Matters explains how we can raise awareness about the complex reality of migration in the classroom and help students have healthy, evidence-based discussions about it.

Do you see Germany as a country of immigration? This question can be looked at through various perspectives:

• how much diversity we (think we) see on the streets around us
• whether political parties acknowledge immigration’s importance and create laws and policies around it
• or even whether someone personally feels welcome as an immigrant

If we want to focus on the numbers, they can tell us the following: About 14% of Germany is foreign-born, a figure comparable to that of the United States. And over one fourth of Germany’s residents have a so-called “migration background”, a term denoting someone with at least one parent who did not receive German citizenship by birth.*

Students in Germany indisputably live in a diverse society. However, the reality of Germany as an immigration society is not systematically reflected in curricula.**

Thus, migration-related challenges and issues of diversity and identity are rarely addressed. As a result, students often have limited tools to participate in debates about diverse and inclusive societies. So how can we introduce migration as a topic in the classroom and foster healthy, nuanced discussions about it?

Migration: Go beyond pro and con…

Migration is often presented as a divisive topic with a pro vs. con framework that does not honor the complexity of the debate nor people’s far more nuanced perceptions on the topic. Very few people feel entirely “pro” or “con” about migration – they can see both benefits and challenges.

Since migration is a topic with no clear answers or solutions, we don’t need to attempt to solve the debate in every discussion. It can be more productive to acknowledge we don’t have all the answers and share different arguments around topics like integration, borders, climate change’s relationship to migration, or identity.

The tools students can learn through these kinds of open discussions can also transfer to conversations about other difficult topics.

… but keep it evidence-based

While it’s important to acknowledge various opinions and perceptions around migration to be inclusive of different views and spark discussion, it is also critical to keep the discussion evidence-based. Incorporating facts, research studies, and scientific findings is one big part of this equation. There are scholars from various disciplines who research migration from the perspectives of social science, political science, psychology, and more.

Studies and research findings alone are however often not enough to spark debate – teaching materials should have an approachable and accessible character to appeal to young people.

Incorporate a variety of  “expert” voices

Sharing multiple voices with students can make the topic of migration more approachable and accessible. Personal stories, for instance, can help capture students’ attention and draw them into the topic (Example: Our I Am European series that shares the stories of 17 young people across Europe).

Debates about migration and refugees are also often lacking those most affected: migrants and refugees. At Migration Matters, we believe that those with lived experience are expert voices in their own right.

Incorporating digital storytelling into the classroom

Digital storytelling can be an effective tool for building understanding and empathy when it comes to complex topics like migration. It can make evidence and research more accessible and challenge misconceptions and stereotypes. Amplifying the voices of migrants and refugees helps to encourage dialogue and the sharing of diverse perspectives.

It can be something you “import” into the classroom (Migration Matters has over 150 videos for you to pull from!) or  a task you can have students do on the topic, creating their own digital stories – even in the very basic form of a TikTok or Instagram reel – about their communities and surroundings.

Start with a bold statement, end with a question

It can be tempting to start off a discussion with a question and try to end with an answer. At Migration Matters, we tend to format our educational videos and materials in the reverse way. We start with a bold statement, either from someone on the street or an academic or migrant, and end our videos with a question. The former serves to provoke interest and kick off debate and the latter encourages reflection and further discussion.

About Migration Matters and getting involved

Migration Matters e.V. (MM) is a media NGO founded by four migrant women in 2016 in response to media coverage about the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ with the mission of helping the public navigate complex issues related to migration.

Through media productions and events, the MM team makes research, evidence, and original perspectives on migration and diversity issues accessible to the public to encourage evidence-based debate and, ultimately, to combat increasing polarization and discrimination.

Get in touch with us if you’re interested in learning more, inviting us to your classroom, or have feedback on our videos: team@migrationmatters.me. We are currently looking for a handful of schools in Berlin for which to conduct migration-focused workshops in 2023.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like Richard’s story of teaching English for charity in the Philippines.

References

*Statistisches Bundesamt: Mikrozensus, 2021

** MIDEM Lehrplanstudie – Migration und Integration, 2021