Episode Thirty-nine

Interview with Jackie Bolen: Tips for Making Lessons Student-Centered

Show Notes

Jackie Bolen taught English in South Korea at private institutes and universities for over ten years. She now lives in Vancouver, Canada where she is (as I like to say) a TEFLpreneur: she teaches, writes, and runs two successful websites: eslactivity.org and eslspeaking.org. She is both CELTA and DELTA certified and strongly believes in the value of communicative, interactive language teaching. She is particularly interested in using games in the ESL classroom, and she's published several games and activities books, which you can find on Amazon. In her spare time, Jackie is usually on the hunt for the most delicious kimchi she can find, which isn't that easy to come by in Vancouver!

This is the second time Jackie has joined me as a guest on Expand Your Horizons, and I'm very happy to welcome her back. In this episode, we're talking about strategies for maximizing student talk time, minimizing teacher talk time, and making lessons more student-centered in general. 

““If students are active and engaged… then their brains are active, and they’re going to remember what they used in the lesson.” ”

— -Jackie Bolen

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In this Episode…

Why is it important to make lessons student-centered?

• It makes the language is more memorable

• It's more engaging and fun (students don't zone out)

• It provides actual, hands-on practice for the students – real learning is taking place as opposed to passive observation

• You get feedback from your students! If you don't involve students in the lesson, you have no way to know how they're doing in their language development. Increasing student talk time means you get regular feedback and can check whether students are retaining the information, following you, and enjoying the lesson.

How can we make lessons more student-centered? 

 Consider task-based learning 

• An example of a task-based speaking lesson: planning a three-course meal

• What constitutes a "task" in a task-based lesson

• Why having a communicative goal for a task or activity is important

• Why having a group presentation or asking students to share "results" of a task adds a healthy amount of pressure to the lesson

• How to do feedback in a task-based lesson

• How task-based learning allows the students to choose the language they learn

• How task-based learning takes some of the pressure off of you as the teacher

Other ways to make lessons more Ss-centered

• Choose activities wisely (surveys, board games, pair work)

• Why it's important to put students in pairs and small groups rather than doing everything as a whole class

• Why you should ask yourself "can I avoid this?" whenever you are planning to talk in front of the whole class

• How to minimize teacher talk when you do need to address the whole class

• Using a test-teach-test approach to decrease teacher-centeredness

• Link to test-teach-test resources

• Tips for making clarification stages more student-centered

• Why you should see the word "explain" as a red flag on your lesson plan 

Fun activities to involve students in class

·       Using surveys to get students involved 

·       Using board games

·       Getting students to do informal presentations 

·       Giving the "listeners" a task for a presentation 

·       Getting students to give and request feedback on each other's presentations 

Where to find Jackie:

Let’s Talk TEFL podcast

Books on Amazon

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Which of these ideas are you excited to try out? Let me know in the comments below!

Episode Twenty-four

How to Teach Speaking

Show Notes

We know that helping students develop their speaking fluency is important, but are students really getting better at speaking EVERY time they're talking in a lesson? How can we measure whether students’ speaking skills have actually improved during class? In this week's episode, we look at how to devote an entire lesson to speaking fluency. We’ll walk you through the stages of an effective speaking lesson, break down exactly what to do and why, and give you practical advice for helping students experience a boost in their fluency— even from a single lesson.

In this Episode

• Why teaching English isn’t just teaching grammar and vocabulary: it’s about skills, too!

• The productive skills: speaking and writing

• How teaching a skills lesson is different from teaching a systems (grammar or vocabulary) lesson

• How students speaking in the classroom is different from practicing speaking outside the classroom

• How you can make sure your speaking lesson is more than just “speaking and leaving”

• The suggested structure for a speaking lesson

• Why starting with a lead-in still matters (because it always matters!)

• Why ANY speaking activity isn’t THE speaking activity in a speaking lesson

• How to set the speaking task with intention (and how this differs from students actually doing the task)

• Why a speaking task needs a communicative goal

• How to design a speaking task that will motivate students to speak

• Why a demo of the speaking task is important and how to set this up

• Why it’s helpful to give students “useful language” for the task and what kind of language that might be

• How to plant this “useful language” in your speaking task demo

• Why you should think of this language input stage as “language light”

• How to let students prepare for the speaking task (brainstorming time!)

• Why there’s a lot that goes into a speaking lesson before students even get to the speaking task! (But also why you don’t want to make your speaking lesson too “top-heavy”)

• How to pair or group your students for the speaking activity (why it’s helpful to be deliberate here)

• Why you’ll want to stay out of the way while students are actually doing the speaking task

• What to do while the students are speaking/ engaged in the task: monitor (but stay aloof!)

• What to listen for as you monitor

• How to prepare for a delayed error correction stage (why you don’t want to correct errors on the spot in a speaking fluency task)

• What to do immediately after the speaking task and before delayed error correction: content feedback

• How the communicative goal (that you set up for the task) contributes to content feedback

• How to maximize content feedback and ensure everyone is engaged

• How to get the most out of delayed error correction

• A summary: the three keys to a speaking lesson that make it truly effective

• The ideal way to extend a speaking lesson: have students repeat the task after error correction

• A variation of how to structure the speaking task(s) if you have a longer lesson

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Want to teach this speaking lesson? Enter your email address and we’ll send you the party planning speaking task we referenced in this episode, so you can try it out in your classroom!