Heroic ESL Teachers Part II

By mid-March 2020, the ESL industry found itself abruptly shifting from face to face classrooms to online teaching. Thousands of teachers were understandably in a panic about how to stuff all their content into super truncated hours. The short answer is you can’t. The silver lining is you don’t need to. The situation forced everyone to re-evaluate their approaches and ruthlessly prioritize learner needs. Many teachers who knew they needed help called me. This is my jam.

I created a fictitious amalgamation of these teachers’ stories and called them Every Man. Heroic ESL Teachers Part I included an evaluation, some useful tools, a place for teacher and their learners to stand and some encouragement.  Here is how the first week of class went down.

Lesson Plan 1 March 25, 2020

EM  For the first asynchronous class I created a ppt with the history timeline, consonants and vowels including a short practice exercise with the sounds that were in the book (Backpacker’s Guide to Teaching English Book 1 on Pronunciation). I also give the students an intro to the English Phonetic Alphabet, a Listening skill activity (podcast report) noting new vocabulary, cultural info, short summary, and questions for the instructor. Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks for everything.

Judy T Sounds good.

I’m interested in seeing how well you will be able to ‘read’ your students online? Look for notable shifts. At the end of the day, individual sounds don't matter that much but teaching sounds provides a good foundation for learners and a great platform for establishing your credibility as someone who can help their authentic ability to speak English.

You are on my list of heroes, great teachers who have been teaching one way for a long time and had to change virtually overnight

New subject, sort of - a great language school in Australia interviewed me about pronunciation. It's a long podcast - over an hour - but you might be interested.  https://bit.ly/3ax5mMc

First Class Done March 28, 2020

EM  Thank you!! In our very first class, the things that resonated with my group were the disconnect between spelling and pronunciation (from the History chart) and that consonants stop and vowels continue. As you know, many students will pronounce the silent e in words like machine, change and waste. In the group of 18, I heard collective sounds of Oh! as though bells were sounding! I’ll keep you posted. This week we will dive headlong into the EPA Vowel Chart.

Judy T If there is any way to email the EPA Vowel Chart to students, it holds the key to speaking confidently on five levels – Vowel Sounds, Word Stress, Sentence Stress, Linking and Expressions. (Yup, it’s all on one page but it takes more than one day to extract it). In a regular class, a good exercise is for the students to color their own copies (Henry Ford style). Olive, Mustard, Pink and Purple are typically the most challenging vowel sounds across many language groups. The other short vowels are tough too - Black and Red. But that’s it. Most of the other vowel sounds are in students’ first language.

The most important piece of the conversation puzzle that learners get from the Color/Vowel connection is the ability to determine which syllable is stressed in multi-syllable words. I'm dying to hear how your students like the Vowel Chart!

Lesson Two Vowel Sounds April 4, 2020

EM It was a bit difficult at first especially as I was learning with them. Relating to color of words was different and difficult because they were used to learning words only one way which is by sounding it out (which hasn’t worked).

We did a vowel exercise where students had to devise words of the same color/sound.

Finally, we played What Color is Your Name. It was challenging but also fun. Every is Red and Man is Black.

We looked ahead to the Conversation book (Backpacker’s Guide to Teaching English Book 2 on Conversation) and it helped my students put the entire process into perspective.

Class ended where students had to write a dialogue of their weekend plans.

Judy T The vowel exercise finding words of the same color sounded great! It all sounded good. Are they doing any Listening outside of class? (Ultimately, learning to speak English is on them).

EM Thanks so much for everything Judy. I’m having fun although it’s challenging in every way you can imagine, online and learning new skills with one of the largest Pronunciation classes I’ve had.

Judy T You are a champ. It's a tough situation but you are doing it! Every course after this will get easier and easier. Just like you tell students, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s all working out. You got this. 

Conclusion for today. A pattern I'm seeing is teachers are incorporating the simple new Teaching Speaking plan (outlined in the Backpacker Books) with their old friends, tried and true favorite exercises. It's a good strategy. It's fascinating watching these professionals wrap their heads around a Herculean task and winning. It's a privilege for me to be a part of this exciting transformation in education.

Yours in ESL,

Judy Thompson

www.backpackersenglish.com