Knowing Me, Knowing You

Personalisation in the EFL classroom

Richard Rooze

British Council Hungary

A short (personal) introduction

The status of personalisation today - 1

Teacher training – one of the last recorded sightings…

“When doing personalised practice activities, it is a good idea for the teacher to carry our ‘spot-checks’ to make sure the students are telling the truth… for example, in the activity above, the question ‘Do you like listening to records?’ can be followed up occasionally by the question: ‘What’s your favourite record, then?’”

A Training Course for TEFL, 1983

Why no mention? Three Possible Interpretations

1. Everybody uses interestingly relevant and personalised activities in the classroom all the time, so there’s no need for trainers to draw attention to it.

2. Modern coursebooks are so well designed that even the least competent teacher is forced to use interestingly relevant and personalised activities in the classroom all the time.

3. Nobody cares about personalisation any more – it’s an outdated idea.

My (personal) interpretation

1. Coursebooks are better than they used to be. (But some are much better than others…)

2. New teachers have grown up with more of the principles of communicative language learning (hopefully) and are more instinctively inclined towards personalisation.

3. Teachers are focusing on goals like exam success and don’t have time for personalised work.

Assumptions

• Real communication has more impact than artificial tasks.

Artificial means…

Real means…

More impact means…

• Relevant material makes Classroom Management easier

• Chunks of language help – more on this later.

Assumptions 2

1. Motivation Matters

2. People are interestinginteresting… you, the students and everybody else

watch films

talk to foreigners

pass exams

have a laugh go on holiday

get good marks

Motivation 2

I would like to learn the first conditional because:

1. John and Liz Soars think it’s useful and have put it onto page 47 for me.

2. My teacher, acting under orders from the Ministry of Education, has to teach it to me anyway.

3. I often worry about the possibility of rain when I am planning to go to the park and I would like to share my thoughts about alternative programmes with English-speaking people.

4. I would like to know what Justin Timberlake means exactly when he says:

Dirty babe (aha) You see these shackles

Baby I'm your slave (aha) I'll let you whip me if I misbehave (aha)

It's just that no one makes me feel this way (aha)

The status of personalisation today - 2

New Headway Pre-Int Unit 2 ‘The way we live’.

Student’s book: ‘Give some similar facts about your country.’

Teacher’s book: ‘The aim here is… to personalise the activity and have a short discussion about students’ own countries… In a monolingual class, get students to work briefly in pairs to come up with a few sentences.’

The status of personalisation today – 2 (cont.)

Cutting Edge Advanced Module 7 ‘Living Together’

Student’s book: ‘Discuss in groups:

- Do you live, or have you ever lived away from your family?

- If not, would you like to? Under what circumstances?

- What are the advantages/disadvantages of living alone or with friends, rather than with family?

Key Ingredients

1. The Right Atmosphere

• Ground rules – tolerance, respect, humour

• Your example – mutuality

2. Planning and Course-book analysis

3. Needs Analysis – yours, theirs, striking the bargain

4. Signposting

Where and When to use it?

1. The expected places: warmers + no. 3 P.

2. Other ideas: pre-presentation chunks

3. Skills work – source of texts

2. Write down five…

• megastars

•superheroes or computer games

• places where your relatives live (not Budapest)

• films in the cinema at the moment

•countries you want to go to (and why)

3. Personalised Texts: Song of the Week

What you need:

Internet/Google (Photocopier/OHT) Tape/CD/MP3 player

Some ground rules (e.g. not more than 5% swearing; nothing advocating violence, drugs)

How it works:

They nominate a song a week in advance and bring it in an agreed format. You Google the lyrics and prepare an activity e.g. gapfill, line or chunk ordering, discussion.

Possible Problems

• My students don’t want to talk about themselves.

• There’s no time to fit in personalised work.

Conclusions and Principles

1. What does the target language really mean?

2. How might your students actually use it in their lives?

3. What prompts or scene-setting do you need to help get the conversation going?

4. How can you adapt the syllabus / course book to fit it in?

5. ‘Write down 5…’

My choice of this topic

Use of personalisation embodies an approach that says:

• Students are at the centre of your teaching. Whatever the constraints of the syllabus, what you teach is visibly relevant.

• Teachers lead by example and don’t ask for behaviours they don’t model themselves.