Learning in the 21st century

The topic of 21st century skills has become a buzzword in English Language Teaching recently, and although more and more people are talking about it, there is a bit of uncertainty about whether they are anything new - anything specific to the 21st century. 
Well, they are and they aren't. Learning is learning: acquiring new skills, building on and expanding knowledge, gathering experiences and so on. This has always been true, and it is still true in the 21st century. People in the past certainly used all four Cs: the four essential learning skills that are the cornerstones of 21st century learning: Communication, Collaboration, Critical thinking and Creativity. (You see? Nothing new.)
What has changed in recent decades, and certainly in my own lifetime, is the pace of change: by the time we acquire knowledge, it may well be obsolete. By the time we learn skills, we already need to update them (a bit like the shiny new software package you buy and install, which then insists on updating itself immediately before it's even willing to run, as it's already 'critically out of date'). 
So, what is to be done? What we need to become good at, and what we, teachers, need to train our students to become good at is the skill of learning itself. The skill to adapt. And that's what we talk about when we talk about 21st century learning skills. In a very tight nutshell, obviously. It's more complicated than this, but should you wish to learn more, I suggest you look up my previous related post on the subject with more details. Or download the materials I used in my recent workshop at the IATEFL Hungary Creative Café event (on 1 July, Budapest at the Libra Bookshop) with some practical suggestions for classroom activities to develop each of the four skills. (Although it goes without saying that a language class aimed at developing communication skills is already well-equipped to develop one of the Cs: Communication...)
There's still another 84 years of this century left, so I'm sure we'll have some further opportunities to explore the issue of 21st century learning - I'll keep you posted.

How to train students for success in speaking exams

Training for speaking exams is always a challenge. In an average-size class (which, for many of us, means ’a class with too many students’), we never have time to devote individual attention to all our learners during speaking practice. We may either opt for trying to simulate the exam tasks as closely as possible, and therefore train only a handful of students at a time (during which what are the other students in class going to do?) – or we do speaking exam practice as pairwork or groupwork, which allows more students to speak, but of course, makes it more difficult for us, teachers to monitor what they are doing and provide support or feedback as needed. It’s a balancing act, there’s no denying that. All the time.

In this post, I’m describing a few activity ideas that I used recently for a teacher training tour. If you like them, feel free to try them with your own students in class, then perhaps you might also like to share your experience here. Each activity targets a specific skill or strategy needed for typical speaking exam tasks.

Conversation lead-in

Most speaking exams start with a short conversation with the examiner, more often than not focusing on some personal subjects or themes immediately connected to the candidate’s own experience. This part of the exam is not always assessed, but it is the learner’s first opportunity to make a good impression on the examiner. And first impressions are important, even in a tightly controlled exam situation.

The problem with learners is that their fear of making mistakes is so strong that they begin playing a game of language avoidance – they say as little as possible to limit the chances for error. But of course that’s entirely the wrong thing to do in an exam. A speaking exam is about taking a sufficient sample of the candidate’s communicative abilities to make a reliable assessment of their competence. A learner who doesn’t speak enough is more likely to fail than a learner who speaks fluently but with a lot of mistakes.

Activity 1: Expanding your answers

1.       Give students a list of typical conversation questions/prompts together with some (again, typical) limited learner responses. For example:
How do you usually spend your weekend mornings? A: Sleeping late.
How are you planning to celebrate your next birthday? A: With a party.
What is the most unusual present you have ever received? A: A hammer.
What is your best friend like? A: She’s nice.

2.       Put students in pairs or small groups, and ask them to brainstorm what kind of information they could add to each answer so it makes a better impression on the examiner. Ask them to consider expansions that don’t make the language content any more challenging. (In other words, they shouldn’t simply rephrase the answers with more sophisticated vocabulary, but think about extra details they might be able to add easily.)

3.       In open class, elicit some ideas for the types of things added. For example: examples, reasons (why?), details of circumstances (where? when? with whom?). Students may also be able to add more adjectives (which are safe to use as they have no impact on the grammar) where they were going to use just one.

4.       Encourage students to use these ideas in the speaking exam to ensure their answers are as detailed as they can make them, without making them sound like unnatural mini-essays. 

Situational role-play

Another common exam task type is the situation role-play, either one-on-one with the examiner – where the candidate plays the more active role, and initiates exchanges, or in a paired exam format – where two candidates talk to each other.

One of the problems with practising role-play in class is that students are too familiar with each other. This means, role-playing as themselves often creates no information gap – their partners can already predict their most likely answers to most questions. Without an information gap, there is no interest, and therefore little motivation for paying close attention to each other.

Activity 2: Constructing a persona

1.       Before setting any exam practice role-play tasks, prepare a series of background questions to help students create a different persona for the task.

2.       Ask students to imagine they are someone else, then make very brief notes of their answers for your questions as that imaginary person. Encourage them to take on a character as different from their own as they like. Read out the questions one by one, allowing sufficient time for students to think about their persona and write down their answers. Questions may include things like:
- Are you a man or a woman?
- How old are you? When and where were you born?
- What’s your dream job? What’s your actual job?
- What makes you happy? What makes you sad? (Mention just one thing for each question here.)
- How did you sleep last night?
- How are you feeling right now?
- What are your favourite items of clothing? What are you wearing today?
- What’s your favourite dish? What did you have for breakfast this morning?

3.       Choose a role-play task from the coursebook, and ask students to do it in pairs as their imaginary persona. As they do the activity, ask them to listen carefully to each other and try to work out what their partner’s imaginary character might be like.

4.       If you ask any pairs to perform in front of the class, you can set the same listening task for the rest of the class (and therefore ensure they keep quiet and pay attention to the speakers – which doesn’t always happen automatically otherwise, does it?) – that is, to listen and guess who the characters might be.

When students use a constructed persona, they can break down a psychological barrier which sometimes prevents them from opening up in conversation with a stranger (i.e. the examiner). In exams, we often have to talk about fairly personal subjects: personal experiences, significant people in our lives, and so on – and this makes some speakers more reluctant to speak at length about them than ideal in an exam setting. And, as I said before, it creates an element of unpredictability and interest during practice.

(Thanks to Csilla Járay-Benn for sharing this activity idea with me at the IATEFL Hungary conference in 2014.)

Picture description / Picture comparison and contrast

Almost all speaking exams feature either a picture description (working with a single image) or a picture comparison (working with two or more related images) task. One of the challenges for learners is the ’blank sheet syndrome’ – it can be incredibly difficult to decide where to begin, and then find things to say. The problem, of course, is that in this setting, there is no real communication need: the examiner can see the pictures just as vividly as the candidate, so what’s the point in telling him about what’s in them?

The other great challenge for learners is the fact they have to continuously speak about the topic at length. Again, the most typical learner strategy to avoid errors and failure is to stop speaking: that is, to stop providing sufficient evidence of their speaking skill. This is quite possibly the worst strategy to apply.

One way of helping students to overcome the ’blank sheet syndrome’ is to allow them to brainstorm ideas about images before they begin the exam task proper individually. Remind students to seek answers to the four basic questions: Who? (Who are in the picture?) Where? (Where are they?) What? (What are they doing?) Why? (Why do you think they are doing it?) This is where all good descriptions begin, and once students have answered these, it is much easier to move on to speculate about what else the image might suggest.

Activity 3: Comparing the incomparable

1.       Choose two UNRELATED photos. They can come from, say, two different units of your coursebook, or from your own collection. The point here is that they should not be connected in any obvious way.

2.       Instead of asking students to identify and describe the differences between them, ask them to work in pairs and find and describe 5 similarities between the two images. The more different the photos are the more students will need to rely on their creativity to come up with similarities.

These two images were taken from Oxford Matura Trainer (basic level) published by Oxford University Press for Poland in 2014 (copyright OUP). 

This activity helps students to notice key details in images, and therefore to get them started with their descriptions. It also makes the picture task more involving, and potentially more interesting for students to do.

(This suggestion is based on an activity idea by my fellow teacher trainer, Shaun Wilden.)

Activity 4: Just a minute

1.       Put students in groups to work. Ask them to toss a coin or roll a die, or use any other method you like to decide in what order they should do the task.

2.       One student has to speak on the specified subject for 60 seconds. This can be the subject from the current coursebook unit, one of the topics from the exam specifications (either chosen by yourself, or written up on prompt cards for students to select from at random). Or, to make the task slightly less difficult, students may choose their own topic.

3.       The point is to speak continuously and meaningfully at the same time. If the speaker hesitates, repeats a key point she has already mentioned, uses her mother tongue, or says something irrelevant/off-topic or something completely untrue, another student can challenge. The clock is stopped.

4.       The challenger, if the challenge is accepted by the group as valid through a quick vote, must then continue speaking for the remainder fo the 60 seconds.

5.       The winner in each group is the student left speaking when the clock runs down.

6.       Repeat the activity with another students until everyone in each group had a turn.

Doing this activity helps students to develop conversational strategies for gaining thinking time, and for building a coherent response. In order for the first speaker to win the point in each round, they must learn how to keep up the conversation without pauses, repetition or digression. The right to challenge, in the meantime, provides the rest of each group with a reason to listen and be involved.

(I learned this activity idea from my good friend and colleague, Jeremy Bowell.)

Stimulus-based discussion

This task type is specific to the Polish Matura exam (taken at the end of upper secondary studies, normally at the age of 18), but similar tasks appear in other examinations. In the task, students must consider two (or more) stimuli, including images, complex visuals like posters, web pages or leaflets, or text input, and select and justify the selection of one of them that in their opinion best meets the task parameters. There is no correct answer – the task focuses on the learners’ ability to consider alternatives and reason persuasively about their choices.

Activity 5: Reverse engineering

1.       Choose a suitable task (as described above) from your coursebook.

2.       Ask students to cover the task instructions and look only at the stimulus provided.

3.       Put them in pairs to speculate on what might connect the two (or more) alternatives. Ask them also to find and describe similarities as well as differences.

4.       Based on their brainstorming in the previous stage, ask them to write down what they think the exam task may be.

5.       Ask them to reveal the instructions, check their predictions, and then do the exam task.

6.       Alternatively, you may like to allow students to choose whether they want to do the actual exam task as printed, or the task they wrote down as their own idea. This gives learners a bit of freedom in selecting their challenge, and it makes them more personally engaged (and more motivated) to complete the task. Also, students completing slightly different tasks with the same stimulus makes it more interesting for the rest of the class to listen to their performances when you ask some pairs to perform the task in front of the whole class.

Controversial statement

Some higher-level language exams feature a task where candidates are required to argue for or against the ideas given as a statement, as a short text quote/extract expressing someone’s opinion or other form of text input.

Many learners find it very stressful to defend an opinion against someone who disagrees with everything they say. Which is exactly what happens in an exam setting, as the examiner’s goal is to provoke/inspire as much discussion as possible by disagreeing with the arguments given. Students should perhaps therefore train themselves not to argue automatically for the side of the issue they personally believe in, but for the side that they can introduce more arguments for.

Activity 6: Random opinions

1.       Ask students to read the input. Give them a minute to think about about some possible arguments for and against each statement.

2.       Put them in pairs to work.

3.       Students in each pair (Student A and B) take turns to start discussing the input.

4.       Give the following instructions.
Student A: Use a coin. Before you discuss a statement, toss the coin. If it lands on tails (the number side), you must give an argument FOR that statement. If it lands on heads (the picture side), you must give an argument AGAINST the statement.
Student B: Disagree with whatever your partner says, and use one of your own ideas to support the opposing view.

5.       Ask students to swap roles and repeat the task the other way around.

6.       As a variant, you may like to act as the playmaster. Allow a minute or so for the students to do the discussion one way around, then simply announce: Switch!, and ask pairs to switch sides in the argument, and start defending their partner’s previous position – and vice versa. Encourage stronger students to try to come up with new arguments rather than reiterate what they have already heard from their partner previously. (You may even like to ask them to switch more than once.)

This activity helps students anticipate counter-arguments better. It also reduces the element of personal involvement, and turns the task into a demonstration of communicative ability – rather than a battle of views.

As I said at the start, feel free to try any of these ideas in your exam preparation classes, and perhaps you might even like to share your own speaking exam preparation ideas with me? 

Good luck with your classes, and all the best for the new school year – if you’re one of my colleagues in the Northern Hemisphere, facing the imminent start of the 2015/2016 school year!

21st century skills: hovercraft to school and robots for teachers?

First impressions

When I first heard the latest buzzword in ELT: ’21st century skills’, what immediately sprang to mind were those flawed visions I grew up with (in the 1970s to the 1990s) of the impending new millennium: space holidays, permanent bases on the moon and possibly on other planets, cities under the sea, hovercraft or spaceships transporting us to work and school, robots replacing teachers as well as those of computers in every home... (oh, hang on, that’s actually happened!) and home schooling by computers... (which also seems to be happening to some extent – with adaptive learning, online learning platforms, LMSs and whatnot, more about all of which probably in a later post).

Then I looked into what the term meant and I found out it was something quite different. (Being an ardent sci-fi fan, I was a bit disappointed it had nothing to do with spaceships.)

Back in the 20th century 

The reason we didn’t talk about ’20th century skills’ when I began my learning then teaching career then was twofold: 1. we were too near the end of the century to name anything after it, and more importantly 2. the difference between the speed of change in the world we lived in. Our teachers’ generation and our teachers’ teachers’ generation passed on their accumulated knowledge and life experience to a new generation, safe in the knowledge that most of their skills are still relevant and useful for the young. Of course, there were changes and developments, shifts in priority, but in broad terms, the skills they could teach us, drawing on their own personal experiences, were the skills we needed to learn.

As far as ELT was concerned, the teacher was the primary, and in many countries, the sole source of knowledge and of learning materials in English. Often, the teacher was one of the few people, if not the only person, learners could communicate with at all day to day, using the foreign language they were learning. Books, magazines, newspapers in English were difficult to come by – and they were often expensive. (At least to us in the Eastern Bloc – we’re talking about the 70s and 80s when we’re talking about my student years.) Teachers were therefore the access points to English as well as the primary role models of non-native language users.

21st century developments

Not so in the past decade or so. With the spread of the internet, access to materials in English is unlimited – written, audio as well as visual materials fill the web and spill over into the real world. Knowledge and learning experiences can now be shared among learners around the globe 24 hours a day, thanks to social networks. A lot of this flood of English is free of charge, too. ... and a lot of it is rubbish. What has changed quite significantly therefore is that learners no longer really need a provider of English, but they need a guide. They need someone to show them how to locate relevant information, filter what is irrelevant or unreliable and to use critical skills to judge the value of whatever is left to use.

The role of teachers is changing, and publishers all seem to be queueing up to ride on the ’21st century skills’ bandwagon. A lot of this activity brings benefits to the learning experience: there is more variety in content and media, more integration of language and other disciplines than ever before. Judging from some of the most recent frontlist publications, there is also a renewed enthusiasm for original (or neatly updated) teaching concepts after a couple of decades of ’if it works, don’t fix it’ formulaic curricula – especially in schoolbooks publishing. 

Find out more about 21st century skills

Steve Taylore-Knowles provides a rationale for why ’21st century skills’ (or ’life skills’ in their preferred corporate parlance) are vital (Why should we teach Life Skills?) on the Macmillan Life Skills website, while Robert Balaguer Prestes gives an informative overview of how learners fit into this whole paradigm (21st century students and skills) on the Pearson 21st century learning website, where there are also a number of related articles by Nick Dawson which I’ve found quite useful. OUP meanwhile runs workshops on the subject, some of which I recently delivered myself in Indonesia and Serbia.

What educators and policy-makers need to bear in mind about 21st century skills is that it is originally a business initiative, a sort of corporate think-tank project (The Partnership for 21st Century Skills) to groom the next generation of workers especially skilled at being adaptable. It was probably quickly realised by the stakeholders that if the scheme is to work, introducing these flexibility skills must obviously start much earlier on – when school education begins. They drew up a helpful diagram to illustrate how this all fits together (image taken from www.21stcenturyskills.org).

What's in it for us?

But what exactly is new about teaching our students the value of Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration or Creativity (the famous 4Cs of ’21st century skills’)? Well, as far as I can tell, nothing really. It is the application of these skills to how language is used as the medium of interaction rather than as the subject of analytical study, to how classroom skills become transferable to life skills, to how ICT skills become integrated with language skills, that makes 21st century skills meaningful to education.

In my opinion, the idea is certainly worth exploring further – especially how it could be applied to benefit language learners. But the concept of ’21st century skills’ is not without its sceptics. CUP organised a debate in 2013 (21st century skills - a 21st century problem?) where some of the speakers questioning whether there was anything novel about these skills at all before exploring its implications for assessment especially. One of the most vocal opponents is Diane Ravitch who outlined her criticism in his article on the subject subtitled An Old Familiar Song (21st century skills - an old familiar song). Ravitch went on to dedicate her blog (Diane Ravitch's blog) to the subject, where she even proposed the promotion of ’19th century skills’.

Like it or not, though, 21st century skills are here to stay. And if you’re a teacher, you’ll no doubt find a meaningful role of it all in your classroom – as you always do with each passing trend in the profession.

Language Testing: The Road to Perfection

Language testing is an unavoidable part of the language teaching experience. 

Some of us have to create classroom tests to check progress in the material, others join full-time testing teams charged with the task of creating an assessment syllabus and a complex exam system for an institution. At one point or another in our careers we all find ourselves in situations where the responsibility of measuring students’ performance is thrust upon us – often without much support or advance preparation. Which is precisely why we must seek opportunities to exchange experiences with like-minded fellow professionals – more often than not to find that the issue you have long been struggling with has already been solved in someone else’s institution. And vice versa.

TEAM 2014, Kayseri

I recently gave a series of talks and workshops at Meliksah University in Kayseri, Turkey which hosted a three-day training event, in co-operation with SELT Academy and IDP Education, called TEAM 2014: Testing, Evaluation and Assessment Masterclass. Professionals from 13 universities around the country came together to share their insights. My fellow trainer Dr. Simon Phipps and I were in equal measures pleasantly surprised and thoroughly vindicated when, on day 2, one of the trainees stood up before a plenary to suggest they all get together informally to continue discussing their testing experiences. In their free time! It is precisely these grassroots initiatives that will provide us with the support that we all need when we design tests.

A three-way tug-of-war

No matter what the context is, there are some shared principles that apply to us all. Creating a language test is always a balancing act between three major forces: validity (how closely the test scores correlate with the students’ real-life abilities as well as the teaching curriculum), reliability (to put simply, how well it measures those abilities) and practicality (how user-friendly our test is).

It is impossible to create a test where all three forces operate at 100%. To give you an example: you can increase reliability by reducing the margin of error. The more test items you devote to checking a particular structure (or skill), the less likely it is that the obtained score are a result of a random factor – like blind luck. However, as you increase the item count, your test will gradually become less and less valid. The more items you devote to a single structure the more you are also shifting the bias towards this single structure – to the detriment to all other aspects of language. And the higher the item count, the more time candidates will need to complete them – which will also negatively affect practicality. It will simply not be worth using a test if it takes so long to get a reliable score.

All we can do is accept the best available compromise. Provided, of course, that the compromise doesn’t involve sacrificing any of the measurement qualities.

What are we testing?

Before we begin developing a test, we must first and foremost pin down what it is what we want to find out. I often define testing as „the systematic gathering of information for the purpose of making decisions” (Weiss 1972, quoted in Bachman 1990) – so the questions are:

1. What decisions do we want to make?

For example: a) which candidates have the required skills and knowledge to enter tertiary education; b) which candidate is most suitable for a particular job, and so on.

2. What information do we need?

For example: a) how much do they know about the foundations of their chosen subject, how developed are their research and academic writing/speaking skills; b) what would they do in a typical workplace situation, how well do they co-operate during teamwork, and so on.

3. What’s the best way of collecting that information?

Now, the point here is that the answer won’t always be: "through a test"! Multiple-choice tests, for instance, are all very impressive and professional-looking, but they will never give us a complete picture of someone’s complex set of skills. The trick is to select those particular sources of information and evaluation methods that give us the information we need. And not something else completely. And not a jumble of a lot of factors that we cannot untangle. And not a lot of irrelevant information just because it was easy to measure it.

What we do with our test must always be appropriate to our purpose, and do just what we need it to do rather than become a burden on candidates. We shouldn't test for testing's sake - we should test because there's information without which we can't make that important decision.

It cuts both ways

But let’s not forget that testing and teaching both have an impact on each other. Tests should reflect prevailing teaching practices (otherwise they are not measuring what candidates have learnt and how they have learnt it), as well as they should have a positive effect on the teaching process – a positive "washback”. (I will blog more on washback later - being a hobby-horse of mine, it would soon become a considerable diversion here.)

The importance of using yardsticks

Obviously, our responsibility doesn’t only extend to what measurement tools we use, but also to how well we use them. Which is why following accepted standards (like the far-from-perfect but nonetheless essential Common European Framework of Reference, CEFR) and, within their internationally transparent framework, establishing our own standards is so vital. To quote Alderson et al. (1995), we need „an agreed set of guidelines which should be consulted, and as far as possible, heeded in the construction and evaluation of a test”.

(In case you want to find out what I meant in my comment above, see my presentation from TEAM 2014 on Slideshare at: http://www.slideshare.net/SeltAcademy/21-applying-standards-to-testing-plenary-ctsacademic.)

The long road to perfection

Test development is a long, time-consuming process. I’m not suggesting here that, for a ten-minute flash test you must go through all the stages of test planning and writing – simply that you don’t forget about what goes into the development of a good test and take some time to consider all the key factors. The principles are still the same, no matter how big or small your test is.

Test development doesn’t finish when the first complete test is finally written. It’s a cyclical, on-going process, which – I’m sorry to say – never actually ends.

The key to developing good, reliable, valid and practical test is never to rest on your laurels. Plan them well, write them with due care and attention, use them wisely – but never forget to look back on the testing experience, to analyse your data and use them to make improvements to your test before it is used again. In order to find out what needs improving, we must learn the art of feedback - which will, again, be the subject of a future post on this blog. (For those who attended our training, a gentle reminder: remember "sandwich".)

Test development is an ever-rising spiral, with our tests becoming better and better as we go on. Perfection may be far off yet, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be travelling towards it all the time.