ELT in Brazil

This is a question that arose out of a discussion in our book club last Friday and that I decided to address. When working for a more traditional school, you might not be able to TBL and DOGME your way to success as I constantly advocate for on my social media channels. This might bring about feelings of frustration or helplessness in teachers who — unequivocally — strive to be the best teachers they can be for their learners. It is worth saying it again: teachers are not the problem; the system has decided to be content with 1960s PPP and to disregard over 60 years of research in second language acquisition (SLA). If, for one reason or another, you can’t abandon the grammar-synthetic syllabus and adopt deep-end TBL and DOGME, these are some of the things you can do to teach better:

1. Speak English in class

This might be tough in some contexts, but it is worth the trouble. A lot of the language that your learners will go home with will be the language they hear you use with them and their peers. Also, the extensive use of L1 in class will likely shift the focus from using English to talking about English.

2. Focus on implicit rather than explicit teaching/learning

As mentioned above, learners get a lot of language while not thinking about language, but using it to achieve communicative goals in class. Whenever learners are engaged in a task where they have to negotiate or exchange valuable, relevant, real information to achieve something together, that’s when most of the learning is taking place. When learners don’t focus on language as an object, we call this implicit teaching and learning. On the other hand, when the teacher describes how the English language works — or talks about the language as a thing — learners will acquire explicit knowledge of the language, which has much less communicative value.

3. Change the classroom discourse from IRF to real conversations

Another way you can boost implicit learning in your classroom is by decreasing the frequency of Initiation – Response – Feedback (IRF) interactions. For example:

Teacher: Is her name Ana?
Learner: No, it isn’t.
Teacher: Good. Is her name Maria?
Learner: Yes, is.
Teacher: No. Yes, IT IS.
Learner: Yes, it is.
Teacher: Excellent.

These interactions are not communicative and focus exclusively on getting learners to parrot native-like utterances regardless of where they are in their developmental stages. We know from research in SLA that stages cannot be skipped, and so these attempts are not only stressful for learners but also detrimental to their development.

Now, if you change the way you interact with learners in class to a more authentic, communicatively rich interactions, their chances of engaging with the lesson, each other, and you increase tremendously. Plus, their chances of learning language implicitly also increase due to the communicative richness of these interactions. Here’s a much better way of talking to your learners:

Teacher: What’s her name? (Points at a person in a picture the learner brought to class)
Learner: That’s Caroline.
Teacher: And who is she?
Learner: She my sister.
Teacher: She’s your sister? What does she do?
Learner: She’s a nutritionist.
…

In which of these conversations would you feel respected as an intelligent human being?

4. Plan for interaction — learners can always do gap-fills at home

You know all those gap-fills in your coursebook? Learners don’t need to spend precious class time doing them. Assign those for homework at the end of the lesson, and if anyone asks, tell them these are “systematization and fixation exercises for spaced retrieval and consolidation”. Gibberish, but it might help you carve out more time in class for what really matters.

5. Allow most of the class time to be devoted to communicative tasks

Communication is where the ‘magic’ happens! Learners develop while they interact with each other and you with intention. Use some of the exercises in your book to set the context, access some of the learners’ background knowledge, and get them talking as soon as possible. A task is a type of classroom activity where learners must collaborate to reach an outcome. Tasks are the necessary and sufficient means through which languages are learned, so make sure most of your class time is spent doing them!

6. Develop your note-taking skills to improve your feedback moments

Whenever learners are busy collaborating towards task completion, you should be monitoring their work. If you teach one-to-one, you’ll be both interacting with the learner as a partner and taking notes of their production. You should take notes of:

• interesting language use
• useful chunks
• pieces of language that are not wrong but could be said better
• non-salient features of language (those little pieces of language that carry no relevant meaning and learners often get wrong, such as third person singular -s for present simple)
• pronunciation issues
• word choice issues
• grammar mistakes.

When giving feedback, focus on learners’ successes, help them say what they said better, give them more options whenever they could’ve been more sophisticated, and help them correct some mistakes.

7. Tackle target language but focus on emergent language

Target language is the language you’re supposed to teach in that unit. Even though the grammar synthetic syllabus has been widely discredited by years of research in SLA, you will still see it around — some will even argue that its persistence is a testament to its effectiveness, as if that’s a valid argument. Take bloodletting, for example. It persisted for 2,000 years despite killing more patients than it saved.

Even though we know that what we teach is not what learners learn and definitely not when we teach it, most traditional courses are still based around the assumption of the opposite: Learners learn what I teach and when I teach it — delusional, I know. To survive in this Orwellian dystopia, employ doublethink: go through the target language quickly and then engage learners in tasks filled to the brim with communicative intentionality. Then, deal with the language that emerges from this interaction (which may or may not include the target language) and help your learners learn what they are developmentally ready to learn — after all, that’s all we can do. What learners can process is what they can learn and, therefore, what we can teach. Anything beyond that is make-believe.

8. Plan and do projects with your learners

Schools love projects — and we can leverage that in our favor. What are projects if not, well, multi-layered, multi-phased tasks? Tell your coordinator you want to work with a bit of Project-Based Learning (PBL) and design a sequence of tasks that, together, get learners to produce an end product to be presented to parents. This could be a video, a podcast, a presentation, or a portfolio to be shared with the school community on its completion.

9. When possible, invest in authentic assessment

And what is a portfolio if not an excellent form of authentic assessment! Authentic assessment refers to those assessed activities done in class that can hardly be told apart from regular day-to-day activities. Will learners do a presentation as a result of a discussion they had in class? Record that and add it to their portfolio. Will learners write a report on their peers’ presentation? Add that to their portfolio! Will they write a short paragraph answering some self-assessment questions on their development throughout the module? You guessed it — portfolio stuffing!

10. Use analytic rubrics with your authentic assessment

Now, the way you, your learners, and your coordinator will be able to tell those assessment activities apart from regular classroom activities is by your formal use of these as assessment tools. This can be done through the use of analytic scoring rubrics. Click the link below for an example of rubrics used to assess a presentation about hobbies:

Hobbies Rubric

You can use AI to generate similar rubrics for you. Make sure you review the rubrics and decide on the scoring. When asking the AI for rubrics, make sure you ask for analytic rubrics and tell it what dimensions of language you want to assess. I suggest including task achievement and some structural aspects (such as grammar, vocabulary, punctuation, etc.).

Also, if you’d like to break the chains of the PPP and the grammar syllabus for good, make sure you join our community of teachers on WhatsApp and look for our courses on TBLT, DOGME, and Authentic Assessment.