A teaching and learning log

[Random Review]

I haven't posted for a long, long time; partly because teaching Engish has become a bigger part of my life than learning other languages and partly because, well, the last year and a half...

But I find myself with so many thoughts I want to share about language learning from teaching and, although it's not as big a part of my life as it was, my language learning activities are not zero. I still do something almosrt every day. I don't know if anyone on here will remember me or be interested in reading this (obviously I hope so); but even if I'm just talking to myself, better here than in my head.

I want to try to commit to one post a week. In each, I will detail my learning activities for the week and anything interesting or relevant that came up in teaching. I also want to share one of my long-term thoughts about this whole language learning business each week. Among the things I'm desperate to talk about are (as much to force me to write about them as for any other reason):

How I got Michel Thomas all wrong regarding grammar rules (I remain a fan).
SaySomethinginWelsh and their method (spoiler alert: I'm a fan).
My very ambivalent feelings about the communicative method and why I wouldn't buy my own product as a beginner.
My very ambivalent feelings about Krashen.
Why I personally really don't like online teaching (including why I've had to drop a lot of my favourite techniques).
The good and the (IMO) bad about the communicative method, including a rant about why respecting the genuine wish of some students to only focus on understanding and being understood (which is obviously an ethical must for teachers) is very different from telling students that this is all that matters as a blanket statement (which is pure ideology IMHO and not true for many (perhaps most?) students).
Why being corrected should be fun but mostly isn't (for me either) because of expectations.
What to correct and what not to correct, when and how.
Charles Yang's ideas about L1 acquisition and why if he's right, beginner's curricula are mostly really bad.
Interfaces.
Why starting to learn Indonesian was probably a mistake and so was ditching it as soon as I left the country.
Several different posts about common errors of Chinese, Romance and Indonesian learners and different ideas I have had. This will include several different posts on extraneous forms of "be". I'll probably start with one of these tomorrow (the one I'm most sure is correct).
How on earth I ended up learning a little Manx and why it taught me so much.
Touch typing and features.
A lot more.

As for my learning, my main focus has been Welsh, for reasons I will explain.

So I hope to start tomorrow with an update on my current learning routine, my teaching frustrations and one idea about a reason for extraneous forms of "be" (the one I'm most confident is correct). To be clear, I think there are multiple things going on here. I'm fairly confident I understand the first one I will be writing about tomorrow and that it is basically correct; but I have ideas about the other things that underlie these phenomena that may or may not be right.

If anyone decides to read this, I want to thank you in advance.

[Xenops]

Welcome back! I remember you.

[Caromarlyse]

You've got a knack for headlines - I'd like to read all of the posts you're intending to write!

[Random Review]

Well that first post received a lot more kindness than I had any reason to expect. Thank you very much!
I'm not quite sure of the best way to format this, but hopefully I'll fall into something that works. For now:


Learning:

I'm currently going through the Say Something in Welsh (Northern) course for the second time after a 6-month (or so gap). I'm mainly doing it to explore the teaching, but I'm not complaining about lrearning Welsh along the way. I'll go into more details about the method and Aran Jones' ideas in future posts. I don't want this to get too long. I finished level 2 of the new course about a week ago and will start level 3 as soon as I finish level 2 of the old course. Currently I'm on 23/25 and doing roughly 1 lesson every 2 days (I repeat each lesson once the following day).
I have learned about 140 sentences on the free Glossika course (which, luckily for me, is also mostly northern I think).

Teaching:

I'm working for the same company as I did before the pandemic, only online now. The lessons are planned for the teacher, one-size fits all (and not very good) and the group lessons are an on-demand service for clients. In practical terms, this means that I spend most of my working life now teaching someone else's lessons to students I don't know and will probably never meet again. As an added bonus, I can't see them, but they can all see me if they choose, so that isn't stressful at all. I had a lot of group classes this week, so I'm feeling a bit drained.

Acquisition:

One of the things that have fascinated me for about 3 years now are sentences with extraneous forms of "be". I have a whole collection (anonomised: I only record the sentence, the L1 and the purported level) of these and often think about it. This post is getting too long and it's getting too late, so I hope it's not too annoying if I split it into two parts and post the rest tomorrow. I'm not quite sure what the etiquette is for that, but I really wanted to stick to my plan and post something tonight. I feel it's important to start like that.

Thanks again to anyone who actually reads this!

[Random Review]

From yesterday (sorry):

Before I start, I want to say that a lot of these posts will be me thinking out loud. I think this will make it less boring (and less arrogant!), but it does mean I'll probably sometimes say some daft things from time to time. Please feel free to point it out when I do (I won't like it, but I do want it).

Back on topic:

Some of these extra "be's" are construction specific and/or L1 specific. For example, anyone who has learned Spanish will immediately understand why Spanish speakers often say "I'm agree" and it's hardly a mystery to anyone why so many learners of all L1's say "I'm come from [country]". These are fun to explore, but I'm most fascinated by mistakes that are more systematic. The pattern I want to share today is this one (real examples from my notes, Chinese L1s and the level was "beginner"):

I'm also work hard every day.
He's still love her.

It probably ocurred to you (it certainly occured to me and few other teachers I talked to) that it could be that, in the interlanguage of these students, "I'm", "he's" etc are possibly subject pronouns. After all, it makes sense. If your language has no equivalent of "be" (colloquial spoken Indonesian*) or no equivalent of a copula with predicative adjectives or preposition phrases (Chinese), you're going to hear a lot of basic sentences like "I'm happy" and "You're from China" and it's natural that you would parse them this way:

subject pronoun (I'm/she's/you're/etc) + adjective or preposition phrase.

Eventually, I rejected the idea. Partly beacuse Chinese grammar is more complicated than that (Indonesian might be too) and partly because there are too many mistakes that don't fit the pattern, such as "Tom is fall" (I'll get to these in the future).

My angle, the part that I hope will make all this interesting for anyone reading, is the story of how Welsh and Manx convinced me that I was too hasty in rejecting this idea. The story even has a happy ending, as this particular pattern (unlike most of the others I hope to talk about) does disappear for practically every (or possibly actually every) student who makes it past "beginner".

The Northern Welsh for "help" (the verb) is helpu. At risk of annoying any Welsh speakers, I'm going to suggest the nearest equivalent pronounciation with English phonemes as something like "helpi". One colloquial northern word for "you" as an oblique pronoun is "chdi" and the SSiW course uses it a lot. Yup, that really is "ch" as in "loch" or "Bach" + dee all in one syllable. I don't know about you, but my brain doesn't like "ch" at the start of a syllable (let alone as part of a consonant cluster).


In spite of knowing full well what the actual structure was, I could not stop my brain parsing this as helpich + di.
I know that I was doing this, because I started saying "helpich" for the prompt "help", which I hadn't been doing before.
Eventually the course started using "chdi" with other verbs and with the preposition "efo" (with) and it all resolved itself in my mind, but that new input was crucial in that process. Without it, I think it would have stuck, in spite of any explicit knowledge. I have to give Krashen and co their due on that.**

In a similar way, for a long time I couldn't stop processing 'be+subject pronoun' in Welsh as just subject pronouns (or stop parsing Manx as a language like Spanish with highly inflected verbs and subject pronouns usually omitted). Here is how to say "I want" in colloquial northern Welsh:

dw i isio – I want

Literally: dw (=am) + i (=I) isio (= wanting).

Boy did my brain not like that! I was well aware that Welsh is a VSO language with verbal nouns and all that jazz; but I could not stop myself parsing this as dwi (= I) + want. Manx resolved itself quite quickly***, but Welsh took a long time (several months) for this. It was only when I started (a few months later) encountering a few things to do with negatives and questions and-most importantly- sentences with full noun phrases as the subject (like "Your dad likes it.", "My mum doesn't want it", "the boy is 10" or "the girl is 5" that it began to slowly resolve itself. ****

This made me look at beginners learning English with fresh eyes. In particular, some beginners find it almost impossible not to say "I'm" instead of "I" even if you ask them to read a sentence like "I want it"

As I said, this is not a long-lasting phase for English learners (English quickly gives enough input that starts to force a different grammar to develop); but it does seem to me now to be a stage that a reasonable number of students do go through. I hope the story of how my own language study fed back into reassessing a previously rejected idea was an interesting enough angle to have made reading this worthwhile.

Notes:

* Formal and written Indonesian has a few equivalents.

** Regarding the recent thread on here, I don't go all the way with Krashen et al. I think the weak interface hypothesis is right. If nothing else, you can use explicit knowledge to design custom input. That may sound trite, but I actually did that for the Spanish subjunctive recently.

*** Manx is much quicker than Welsh to give you input that disconfirms the incorrect grammar. This reminds me of a paper I read on French speakers learning English and Chinese. The authors argued that they quickly learn to always put adverbs before the verb in Chinese, because Chinese input consistently disconfirms a French-style grammar with verbs high in the sentence. In contrast, they continue to say things like, "I drink often this beer." when learning English (I made this example up, so it might not be authentic), because English input is so inconsistent. Main verbs consistently disconfirm a French-style grammar ("I often drink beer"); but auxilliariy verbs and modals often confirm and strengthen the French-style grammar ("I should probably help." or "She has already eaten"). Whether or not you think English modals are verbs, French ones definitely are and French learners plausibly parse English ones as verbs. I have taught enough Spanish and Italian students to know that they definitely do.

**** The slow way this worked itself out even after I started to get disconfirming input was exactly what people like Tom Roeper or Charles Yang would expect. They argue that we all have multiple grammars (even as mature speakers and much more so during acquisition) that are strengthened when they successfully parse a sentence and weakened when they fail. I definitely need to talk more about this later too.

[Random Review]

Learning:

I finished level 2 of the SSiW old course and am now on lesson 7 (of 25) of the new course level 3. I'm also reveiwing the vocab lessons for level 2. I didn't say why I'm doing both courses. It's because the new course is pedagogically much better (it's fascinating to see how they improved so much and a credit to them) but the old course is much more complete. For example, by the end of level 2 of the old course, you have the basics of all 3 mutations; at the end of level 3 of the new course (the final level), you just about understand the soft mutation and have a vague idea that there are others. I find it helpful to follow each level of the new course with the corresponding level of the old one. I should also explain why the pace has picked up compared to what I detailed last week: now that I'm back on the new course, I don't need to review lessons as the necessary review is built in. So you can just do one a day without necessarily having to repeat any.

I'm also now on 150 sentences with Glossika.

Finally, I'd love to start expanding my vocabulary with LR (just because I find it the most pleasant way to do that, whether or not it's the most efficient). Unfortunately, although I can find audiobooks in Welsh on Audible, I can't find any English translations for them (and also don't know how literary they are). Any suggestions from anyone further down the road with Welsh than me would be most welcome.


Teaching:

I had a lot of group classes (on demand classes) again this week, which left me a bit down. I want to talk about error correction in online classes. I will try not to make this too negative and promise I will return to positive topics next week (I have some ideas already of what I want to talk about next week). In order to make this slightly shorter than Don Quixote, I want to bracket the whole debate over whether correction is ever useful and if so when and just focus on how it makes people feel.

To talk about this, I'm going to have share a bad mistake I have made. I feel safer on here than on most social media (especially given how kind people have been), but I still want to preface what I'm going to talk about by saying that, like most teachers, I take my responsibility seriously, do my absolute best and feel terrible when I get it wrong. I do want constructive feedback, but in the unlikely event that anyone new happens to come across this post and wants to post the kind of moralistic censure of the kind I've seen a lot on places like Twitter or YouTube, I would respectfully ask them not to. It's the reason why I could never be open and honest about my mistakes on platforms like those. Here goes (and thank you for listening):

One of the things I find hardest about the lesson plans provided is that they virtually guarantee that students are going to make tons and tons of the kinds of errors that don't attract the feedback of being misunderstood because they rarely affect communication and that I know from experience rarely get fully fixed at higher levels (at least for Chinese and Indonesian students) and so are likely to stick. A good example is using the present tense as a kind of default form (or perhaps something more interesting, I sometimes wonder***). This is the first thing.

The second thing is that with on demand classes, you don't know anything about any of the students and there's just no way to know how they will interpret any attempt at correction.

The 3rd thing is that you can't build a supportive, encouraging culture. Interestingly I've noticed that I myself feel differently about correction in these online and on demand classes. Pre-pandemic, in my own classes face to face with regular students, I used to feel happy to be corrected by students (invariably a spelling mistake as they weren't as good as I would have liked at spotting my grammar mistakes). In contrast, I find myself feeling annoyed and resentful if a student corrects a mistake of mine in these online classes (usually a typo). If I feel that way, how can I expect anything different from them?

I'm going to share one last week where I got it badly wrong.

The lesson plan called for them to open by sharing an account about someone they knew who fell in love and all the students had Chinese as their L1. Of course I knew that they would probably not use the past tense**, so I reminded them beforehand that they would need to use this tense and gave some examples (in a real class, I would have elicited these, but online it would take much too long). The first student shared her account. As expected, she used the present tense a few times* but she did use the past tense for more than half of the necessary times. When she finished, I ignored the errors and instead praised her profusely for the ones she got right. The second student then went and it was pretty much the same. Again, I focussed on praising her for her correct uses of the past tense. Then the 3rd student started his account and it was entirely in the present tense: he didn't use even one past tense form. This is the kind of dilemma that makes online teaching so stressful. I made a decision and as gently as I could reminded him that the story was in the past and therefore needed the past tense. I then invited him to share his story again. He did so, using the past tense about half the time. I praised him for a good story and tried to ask him a few questions about it. Shortly afterwards, he left the class.

It's clear now that this was a bad error, but at the point when I made the decision, I didn't have enough information to know that. It's not enough to just never correct, because I checked the feedback forms and many students often say they like the way the teacher (i.e. me) gave corrections. With private students, I can and do ask them if they want to be corrected; but in these on demand group classes it's not possible (it would take too long to explain why). The very fact that he didn't use the past tense even once both made it more likely that feedback would be useful and equally more likely that it would make him feel embarrassed. I feel so stressed every time I have to make these decisions. I know I said it before, but if this does turn out to be the future of teaching, I'm going back to potwashing.

Sorry this was necessarily a bit negative today. It won't be next week. Next week, I want to talk about touch typing, linguistic features and Welsh mutations. I should also clarify that the private classes are much less stressful and many of them are with regular students, which I really enjoy. To anyone who reads this, thank you for reading this and for your patience.

Notes:

* Or sometimes possibly sometimes just bare verbs. I'm interpreting it as the present tense as they used "is" and "are" in their stories.

** The context required the past tense. It wasn't one where the historical present would have been appropriate.

*** One of the most exciting and fascinating things about students from China is that they not only happily use the present tense to talk about the past (where it sounds perfectly correct to them), they are also very reluctant to use it with some contexts where it is appropriate, such as present habituals. They almost always want to use "will", or "like to" or "have to". It's true that their sentences with "will" are sometimes correct in English (but not always) and, of course, their sentences with "like to" and "have to" are totally correct (I like to play basketball on Fridays/ I have to work late on Fridays). Still, though, they massively overuse "will" with habituals and are very reluctant indeed to use the present tense for this. I have had advanced students who knew a lot of grammar tell me that they know it's correct and can use it but prefer not to as it just sounds wrong to them.

It feels like the grammar of their English, in addition to not having tense, makes a different distinction that my (UK) English doesn't.
I'd love to know what, but at the moment, I only have hypotheses (such as some kind of realis/irrealis distinction maybe?). As a clue, it's also worth noticing that an explicit adverb of frequency makes sentences sound correct to these students. "I often play basketball on Fridays" sounds much less strange to them. Finally, I can feel that my own English (and the English of other natives I know) seems to have a pragmatic tendency towards what their English has as fairly fixed grammar. While "I play football (soccer) on Fridays." sounds perfectly fine to me and not strange at all, it is true that in real life, I'd probably rather say something like "I like to play football on Fridays".

[Caromarlyse]

I found your post interesting and not negative, just reflective. I'm also not sure I'd classify it as a big mistake, either - corrections in a group setting are a minefield. Things I (as a student) have seen go wrong:

- student reacts very sensitively to being pulled up on something in front of others and/or perceives unfairness in their being corrected when others weren't/aren't
- generic feedback is given to the group as a whole in an attempt not to single anyone out - students either don't listen because they assume it doesn't apply to them, or think it does when it doesn't and then try to correct what was already correct
- honest feedback cannot be given to an individual student: you can't tell one student that they are far above the group in x but should try to copy what another student does in y, without being seen to be rude to that other student
- the student who makes the most mistakes gets all the attention (which they could either appreciate or not) because time limits mean the teacher has to focus only on the worst mistakes; conversely, an outlier student who is struggling where no others are, gets no help with their unique difficulties
- the teacher and student don't know each other well enough or at all, leading to the teacher jumping in when it is not necessary (e.g. providing a definition or translation of a word that the student in fact knew) or hearing only mistakes and not what the student is doing well, and generally to things being said on both sides that are received with too much emotion or contain judgement that is not justified

I've never been in a situation where a student objected to any correction as a matter of principle, but I understand that can be a preference too.

Even on an individual basis, it can be tricky. I was feeling a little worn down this week after having received correction after correction. Not because I didn't want it, but because it made me doubt my progress. I reflected afterwards, and realised that the nuances I'm being corrected on are points that in traditional academic language learning settings I'd just continue with for years and years, with them only being picked up (if at all) once I'd reached an advanced stage. I suppose there is a debate to be had as to whether it is better to let things slide to allow fluency to develop or to stop bad habits in their tracks so they can't fossilise. Personally, having reflected in this way, I decided I appreciate the correction now and will put up with feeling uncomfortable for the sake of a better result longer term (I hope!). I've also got slightly addicted to watching videos that an English learner posts online of English conversation classes. The transcripts would be a very good linguistics project! It is fascinating to me how sometimes corrections are made incorrectly; either they are simply incorrect or the intended meaning gets distorted when a supposed correction is given. Also sometimes things are left uncorrected when it is clear there is a lack of understanding of a particular grammatical or lexical point, but to stop and correct would require a fairly long break in conversation, which is otherwise flowing really nicely. Thorough correction takes a huge amount of time, and I think that it's unrealistic to have both correction and a rewarding, deep conversation within the same lesson.

To finish with a disclaimer: these are just my personal, rambling thoughts triggered by your post, and I also don't wish to argue fervently for one entrenched position or another, nor do I proclaim to be an expert. This is just what I'd say if we were having a friendly exchange of experiences in a pub!

[Random Review]

Hi, Caromarlyse. Thank you for your lovely and interesting post. You raise a lot of interesting points. I started to draught a reply, but it ended up insanely long, so if I can just answer a few of the points that are most important to me personally:

1) You are so right about some correction being wrong or missing the student's intended meaning. I get that wrong too. It's a very important point.

2) You mention feeling drained and I see it as a major failing of the communicative method that corrections can often drain students rather than energise them. One of the reasons for my views on correction is that my first teaching job was with a very different method and I saw for myself how correction can be energising for the student. I also saw the exact same thing when teaching pre-school children- they loved it!

3) It's so interesting that, in your experience, the student that makes the most errors gets the most attention! Most teachers I have worked with (including me) are much more strategic than quantitative when it comes to errors. Back when I had regular classes with the same students every week, there were many occasions where I would correct student A for something that I wouldn't correct student B for or where I would correct mistake X but be completely unworried about mistake Y. I'd be happy to go into more detail about this if you are interested. I felt like the kids usually understood this and knew that correction was a good thing and not a sign of something wrong. Any time there was an exception it would be because I had corrected for the wrong reasons (e.g. because I thought I had identified an "oh-so-clever" intervention and wanted to try it out). Kids and teens are astonishingly forgiving of these mistakes if you admit it and apologise. I'm not sure if that would also be true for adults.

4)

I think that it's unrealistic to have both correction and a rewarding, deep conversation within the same lesson.

So true and I don't have a solution for this dilemma with intermediate students.

I would say that for advanced students I'd always sacrifice the correction rather than the conversation and for beginners I'd probably sacrifice the conversation rather than the correction unless the student made it clear that they preferred it the other way. I think most teachers would agree with me where advanced students are concerned. Most teachers would probably disagree with my choice for beginners, but it follows logically from the fact that I'm convinced that the communicative method is utterly, utterly, catastrophically inappropriate for beginners. I think we need to sharpen our axe before we start chopping trees (except in Minecraft ha ha).

I may well be wrong about that, but it's genuinely what I want myself as a learner. It's a sincere opinion that I have given a lot of thought to.

[Caromarlyse]

You mention feeling drained and I see it as a major failing of the communicative method that corrections can often drain students rather than energise them. One of the reasons for my views on correction is that my first teaching job was with a very different method and I saw for myself how correction can be energising for the student. [...] I'm convinced that the communicative method is utterly, utterly, catastrophically inappropriate for beginners. I think we need to sharpen our axe before we start chopping trees (except in Minecraft ha ha).

I may well be wrong about that, but it's genuinely what I want myself as a learner. It's a sincere opinion that I have given a lot of thought to.

All very interesting stuff! What was the other method called that you used? If you had the time/inclination, I'd be interested in reading, at some point, your expanded thoughts that led you to this opinion. I've been feeling some frustration recently with some teaching I've received, for reasons I haven't wanted to set out publicly, but it's led me to question whether I've been let down by method, or whether my own shortcomings are at fault!

[Random Review]

All very interesting stuff! What was the other method called that you used? If you had the time/inclination, I'd be interested in reading, at some point, your expanded thoughts that led you to this opinion. I've been feeling some frustration recently with some teaching I've received, for reasons I haven't wanted to set out publicly, but it's led me to question whether I've been let down by method, or whether my own shortcomings are at fault!

Hello, Caromarlyse. Sorry for the late reply.

The first place I worked used basically an audiolingual method. It has its strengths and its weaknesses (which are much debated on this forum!). FWIW, what I saw was that it definitely can be very useful to some learners and it it can equally be a complete waste of time for others. Relevant here is that plenty of the students didn't like the method (far more in my first year than my second- which suggests that I was part of the problem), but I can ony think of two who didn't like the corrections!

It's hard to overstate this. We were told we had to correct every single mistake (something that seems close to insanity for communicative teachers!) and yet only two students I taught didn't like this. One of the two had a very high level and just wanted to talk. TBH, at his level, that's exactly what he he needed rather than audiolingual drills. He really should have just changed to a different provider (his company offered a choice of 3 providers free of charge to him).
The other student enjoyed being corrected on grammar or word choice but didn't want to have her pronunciation corrected. I don't know the reason for this.

Apart from these two, the other students either didn't mind it or, in a surprising number of cases, really enjoyed it. FWIW, I would really enjoy this process as a beginner or lower-intermediate student. If anyone was doing this for Chinese and I could afford it, I would pay for it. On occasions if the rapport was good, it was like constructing sentences together in a kind of dance.

The second place where I saw a different way of looking at correction was really young learners (around 4 and 5). They loved trying and being corrected, trying again and being corrected, trying again... They correctly saw it as a game, not as something serious where a mistake means something is wrong, nor as something competitive where a mistake might mean you look like you're not as good at it as the others. I know there are some very young learners on (for example) the autism spectrum or with other needs where this might not be appropriate (the school I was at in Indonesia took this very seriously and had a couple of teachers with special training to deal with those classes); but all of the young learners I taught (about 30 in China and Indonesia) loved it (and I did too).

Those are the facts. If I understood you correctly, you also wanted my opinion on all this (apologies if I misunderstood).
The biggest take homes for me are that expectations matter and levels matter.

Regarding expectationbs, all the best methods I know have something to change the expectations regarding errors. Pimsleur has it's ridiculously arbitrary 80% threshold, Michel Thomas and Language transfer both have a long spiel with this goal. SSiW has something at the start of every lesson, etc, etc, etc. I used to think it was fluff; but actually, it's vital.

Regarding levels, the communicative approach encourages you to learn by creatively using the language to communicate something real. This is exactly what advanced learners and strong intermediate students need IMHO. When I went to China for my second job and saw the communicative approach in action, I was flabbergasted (by both the good and the bad). I remain pretty astonished to this day.
Talking about this in detail would make this too long, but for me, control should be passed over gradually as students grow in competence. In the beginning, the teacher should be in complete control and by the advanced level, the student should be in complete control. In the months and years in between, the teacher should be gradually and strategically* passing over more and more control to the students. This is what I would want if I could afford classes. IMHO the communicative approach excels at the latter end of this process and is actually damaging at the start. I once saw a communicative teacher criticise Michel Thomas for not giving his students more freedom. His students had been learning for 2 days by the end of the CDs. You can imagine what I think about that criticism.

You didn't say what level you are or what approach your classes follow.

I want to leave you with an anecdote about building a culture of correction in a long-term class. For complicated reasons to do with parental expectations, the Progress Advisor for one of my classes asked me to teach a couple of extra sessions. The students were all around 12-14. Since the course had already finished, I was free to teach what I wanted! I decided to teach a class of compulsory "Chinglish"** In this class, they weren't allowed to speak correct English, they had to speak "Chinglish"**. Before we started, we ran through the grammar they would have to use (bare verbs, forms of "be" with verbs, bare singular count nouns, etc) and they were encouraged to correct each other as much as possible if any of them made the mistake of using standard English grammar. I've never seen kids that age have so much fun in a class (and they were constantly correcting each other and laughing their heads off). For me, it was an investment in building the culture I wanted (and it succeeded very well in that) and I like to think that maybe it also helped the language awareness of a few of the weaker students (leading to long-term benefits), because they really had to think! That group of students became one of my favourite classes.


* In terms of the level, individual and class needs and development, what they are ready for, etc.

** I know this is offensive, but it was their term not mine.