From Corpus to Classroom 2

There is great delight that the Trinity Lancaster Corpus is providing so much interesting data that can be used to enhance communicative competences in the classroom. From Corpus to Classroom 1 described some of these findings. But how exactly do we go about ‘translating’ this for classroom use so that it can be used by busy teachers with high pressured curricula to get through? How can we be sure we enhance rather than problematize the communicative feature we want to highlight?

Although the Corpus data comes from a spoken test, we want to use it to illustrate  wider pragmatic features of communication. The data fascinates students who are entranced to see what their fellow learners do, but how does it help their learning? The first step is to send the research outputs to an experienced classroom materials author to see what they suggest.

Here’s how our materials writer, Jeanne Perrett, went about this challenging task:

As soon as I saw the research outputs from TLC, I knew that this was something really special; proper, data driven learning on how to be a more successful speaker. I could also see that the corpus scripts, as they were, might look very alien and quirky to most teachers and students. Speaking and listening texts in coursebooks don’t usually include sounds of hesitation, people repeating themselves, people self-correcting or even asking ‘rising intonation’ questions. But all of those things are a big part of how we actually communicate so I wanted to use the original scripts as much as possible. I also thought that learners would be encouraged by seeing that you don’t have to speak in perfectly grammatical sentences, that you can hesitate and you can make some mistakes but still be communicating well.

Trinity College London commissioned me to write a series of short worksheets, each one dealing with one of the main research findings from the Corpus, and intended for use in the classroom to help students prepare for GESE and ISE exams at a B1 or B2 level.

I started each time with extracts from the original scripts from the data. Where I thought that the candidates’ mistakes would hinder the learner’s comprehension (unfinished sentences for example), I edited them slightly (e.g. with punctuation). But these scripts were not there for comprehension exercises; they were there to show students something that they might never have been taught before.

For example, sounds of hesitation: we all know how annoying it is to listen to someone (native and non-native speakers) continually erm-ing and er-ing in their speech and the data showed that candidates were hesitating too much. But we rarely, if ever, teach our students that it is in fact okay and indeed natural to hesitate while we are thinking of what we want to say and how we want to say it. What they need to know is that, like the more successful candidates in the data,  there are other words and phrases that we can use instead of erm and er. So one of the worksheets shows how we can use hedging phrases such as ‘well..’ or ‘like..’ or ‘okay…’ or ‘I mean..’ or ‘you know…’.

The importance of taking responsibility for a conversation was another feature to emerge from the data and again, I felt that these corpus findings were very freeing for students; that taking responsibility doesn’t, of course, mean that you have to speak all the time but that you also have to create opportunities for the other person to speak and that there are specific ways in which you can do that such as making active listening sounds (ah, right, yeah), asking questions, making short comments and suggestions.

Then there is the whole matter of how you ask questions. The corpus findings show that there is far less confusion in a conversation when properly formed questions are used. When someone says ‘You like going to the mountains?’ the question is not as clear as when they say ‘Do you like going to the mountains?’ This might seem obvious but pointing it out, showing that less checking of what has been asked is needed when questions are direct ones, is, I think very helpful to students. It might also be a consolation-all those years of grammar exercises really were worth it! ‘Do you know how to ask a direct question? ‘Yes, I do!’

These worksheets are intended for EFL exam candidates but the more I work on them, the more I think that the Corpus findings could have a far wider reach. How you make sure you have understood what someone is saying, how you can be a supportive listener, how you can make yourself clear, even if you want to be clear about being uncertain; these are all communication skills which everyone needs in any language.

 

 

From Corpus to Classroom 1

The Trinity Lancaster Corpus of Spoken Learner English is providing multiple sets of data that can not only be used for validating the quality of our tests but also – and most importantly – to feedback important features of language that can be utilised in the classroom. It is essential that some of our research is focused on how Trinity informs and supports teachers in improving communicative competences in their learners and this is forming part of an ongoing project the research team are setting up in order to give teachers access to this information.

Trinity has always been focused on communicative approaches to language teaching and the heart of the tests is about communicative competences. The research team are especially excited to see that the data is revealing the many ways in which test takers use these communicative competences to manage their interaction in the spoken tests. It is very pleasing to see that not only does the corpus evidence support claims that the Trinity tests of spoken language are highly interactive but also it establishes some very clear features of effective communicative that can be utilised by teachers in the classroom.

The strategies which test takers use to communicate successfully include:

  • Asking more questions

Here the test taker relies less on declarative sentences to move a conversation forward but asks clear questions (direct and indirect) that are more immediately accessible to the listener.

  • Demonstrating active listenership through backchannelling

This involves offering more support to the conversational partner by using signals such as okay, yes, uhu, oh, etc to demonstrate engaged listenership.

  • Taking responsibility for the conversation through their contributions

Successful test takers help move the conversation along by by creating opportunities with e.g. questions, comments or suggestions that their partner can easily react to.

  • Using fewer hesitation markers

Here the speaker makes sure they keep talking and uses fewer markers such as er, erm which can interrupt fluency.

  • Clarifying what is said to them before they respond

This involves the test taker checking through questions that they have understood exactly what has been said to them.

Trinity is hopeful that these types of communicative strategies can be investigated across the tests and across the various levels in order to extract information which can be fed back into the classroom.  Teachers – and their learners – are interested to see what actually happens when the learner has the opportunity to put their language into practice in a live performance situation. It makes what goes on in the classroom much more real and gives pointers to how a speaker can cope in these situations.

More details about these points can be found on the Trinity corpus website and classroom teaching materials will be uploaded shortly to support teachers in developing these important strategies in their learners.

Also see CASS briefings for more information on successful communication strategies in L2.

How to be a PhD student (by someone who just was), Part 2: Managing your work and working relationships

After submitting and successfully defending my thesis a few months ago, I’ve decided to share some ‘lessons learnt’ over the course of my 38 months as a PhD student. 

In Part 2 of this series, I’ll talk about best practices for structuring your work, managing your relationship with your supervisor, and my experience with teaching undergraduates. If you missed “Part 1: Preparing for the programme”, you can read it here


hypothesis

Structuring your work

I believe it’s healthy to treat your PhD—as much as possible—like a job. Like any job, a PhD has physical, social, and temporal boundaries.

Try to create a PhD ‘space’. Make use of your office if you’ve been given one at your university, and create a space within your home that is a ‘work area’ if you haven’t been given one. Working from bed, from the sofa, or from a café means that your PhD is infiltrating all areas of your life. While some degree of this is inevitable, it’s best to keep physical boundaries as much as possible, even if you can only keep it to your desk.

By the same token, making friends outside of your department or your field is helpful in many ways. I adore my friends from Linguistics and I couldn’t have finished my doctorate without them, but you wouldn’t solely hang out with friends from work when you’re at home, and this is the same situation. In a group of people who have a similar background, you might end up talking about your field ‘outside of hours’. This can be stimulating, but also exhausting. You may want to vent about your department, or talk about something other than your PhD or field, even trashy TV! It’s easier with friends from other areas. As a nice extra feature, the connections that you make outside of your field can also help you inside your field. I’ve had very good advice from friends working in statistics, gotten ideas from historians, and been inspired by literary scholars, even though I might never venture into these areas in the library.

If you can, also create a routine for yourself, even if this isn’t 9-5. It’s best if this routine involves physically moving locations, but even if it doesn’t, physically change something: take a shower, get dressed for work. Pick 8 hours within the day that you work best, and work during those hours. Don’t be too hard on yourself if you have a short day or miss days out entirely…a PhD is ‘swings and roundabouts’ as they say around here…it’s long enough that you will make up the time to yourself. As much as possible, take the weekends and holidays off. This might mean working longer than 8 hours on weekdays, but personally, I think it’s worth it. Many people study in a place far from where they grew up, and a PhD is one time in life where you can be flexible enough with your time to enjoy a bit of sightseeing and tourism.

During this routine, set clear goals for yourself. I’ve seen people arguing for and against writing something every day. I found it very helpful to set a daily word count goal for myself, then sit in front of a computer until I at least came close. The number isn’t important: at the start of my PhD, I aimed to write 200 words per day; at the end of my PhD, I was able to write 1,000 words per day. What is important is getting into a routine. You will sit down some days and feel horrible. You’ll have writer’s block. You will struggle through each word of those 200, and know that you’ll delete most of them. But it’s much easier to get 40 great words out of 200 bad ones than to write 40 words completely cold. I’ve written entire chapters three times as long as they needed to be, and hated them. But paring them down is cathartic—it’s like sculpting. The bonus is that when you get into the habit of writing every day, you slowly get into the habit of writing something good every day. Soon, you’ll be writing 100 words and keeping 50 of them. Then you’ll be writing 1,000 words and keeping 900 of them. The important part is keeping the pace: just write! Your supervisor will also appreciate having something tangible to mark your progress (see next section).

As far as the structure of my own work, there are three things that I would do differently, if I could do it all again:

  1. Decide on a reference manager and stick to it diligently from Day 1. At the start of my degree I used EndNote for reference management, as this was offered for free by my university and came in both desktop and web versions. For my whole first year, I used EndNote to create an annotated bibliography—an extremely useful tool when drafting your literature review. However, EndNote began crashing on me, and papers were no longer available. In my second year, I stopped keeping track of references and just kept haphazard folders of PDFs. In my third year, I just used in-line citations, believing that sources would be easy to find later on. Not true! The month before submission I decided to make the leap to Mendeley, a truly amazing (free) reference manager that allows you to build and share libraries, store your PDFs, search other people’s collections, and select from a vast array of output styles (I favour APA 6th edition). The transition was extraordinarily painful. Exporting from Endnote was problematic and buggy, scanning PDFs in Mendeley was error-prone, and finding the corresponding works for those in-line references was impossible in some cases. I wasted a solid week just before submission sorting out my references, and this really should have been done all along. It would have been so painless!
  2. Master MS Word early on. In my final year, I finally got serious about standardising the numbering of my tables and figures, which means that in the eleventh hour, I was still panicking, trying to make sure that I had updated everything to the proper styles and made appropriate in-line references to my data. Had I set my styles earlier on and made the best use of MS Word’s quite intuitive counting and cross-referencing mechanisms, I would have saved myself days of close reading. If you are using MS Word (sorry, I can’t say anything about LaTeX) and you are not using the citation manager or cross-reference tool, learn how to do that immediately. Today. Your library might have a class on it, or, like me, you can brush up in an hour of web searching.
  3. Put down the books earlier. At a certain point, you need to generate new research and make a novel contribution to knowledge. Your first year and much of your second year will be dedicated to making sure that a research gap exists, and that you can pay tribute to all of the giants whose shoulders you will be standing on. However, burying yourself in a library for three years reading everyone else’s great works is a good way to paralyse yourself. Of course you will always need to keep up with the times, but a certain point, your rate of writing will overtake your rate of reading. If I could do it again, I would follow a pattern more like this:

readwrite

After the first year, you won’t be missing anything totally fundamental. After the second year, you won’t be missing anything peripheral. If, in the third year, you’ve missed something very fresh, your examiners will point it out. But the more important thing is to make a contribution. Most of the PhD is research, not literature review. Your supervisor will be able to help you with this, and with other things (but not really others), as I discuss below.

Managing your relationship with your supervisor

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