Time does funny things; at times it feels like there's so much of it, at others it's distinctly limited. How pushed for time do you feel with your classes? Do you meander gracefully through the units or is it more of a race against time? How quickly should we move through the material? How important is it to finish the book? Shouldn't we be teaching the students rather than the book? How can we square this circle?

The TEFLeris a fortnightly companion for language teachers written by Simon Pearlman and brought to you by Active Language Teacher Training. Subscribe to The TEFLer on LinkedIn or receive a copy direct to your inbox by emailing training@activelanguage.net with the header “Subscribe to The TEFLer”.

It's the end of January, the back-from-holiday dust has settled, we're getting well into this second (and unusually long) term. Now is a good time to check in on your progression through the material. Are you going through it all quickly or slowly? Does the pace feel right for your students? Does your school need you to finish the book? Do these pacing aims match up? So often they don't, what should we do?

Get a real sense of where you are

Probably the first action to take is to get a sense of where you are and if you're on track.

Many of us, rightly, take our time getting to know the students and easing into it all in September and might be into unit 3 of a nine unit book by the time the tinsel comes out for Christmas. We might start back in January in the middle of that third unit. The weeks are passing, the progress might be slow. That's then 6 units in 6 months, right? Easy. But actually it's not, we're nearly finished with January, June finishes for many of us around the 20th, there are exams, holidays, local holidays, etc, etc, there are lots of things to take into account. Instead of 6 months we're realistically looking at 4 months, or 16 weeks, 32 classes to do 6 units, that's about 5 lessons a unit. Yes, just 5 lessons a unit. This is different for everyone, we all need to do the maths ourselves in our context.

Check on requirements

How important is it that we finish the book? It's worth checking in with your managers and coworkers here. In some language schools its essential that we finish the book, ot others it's hoped for and in some it's not a major issue at all. Ask, flag up the issue, then you know the rules of the game better.

What happens where you work? Does it feel easy or is it a challenge?(Feel free to share thoughts in the chat here.)

Teach the students not the book

Of course we should always teach the students and not just get through the book. We're always making choices about what to do (and what to leave out), we're often adapting our coursebooks and finding supplementary materials. We need to focus on the students’ needs and the school’s expectations, sometimes they align, sometimes they don't. When there is friction between these, what can we do? It's time to focus sharply on what really matters, on what's essential and what's extra.

Focus on the mini-dialogues, focus on the Q and As.

We can't do everything. We need to limit our scope and focus on what's really important. We can't do every page in the book, nor should we.

In our primary classes we should have super clear the mini dialogues we want our students to be able to have by the end of each unit.

Identify the questions and answers and make choices based on that. If the material helps us, do it, if not, don't. This normally means we keep the flashcards and song (lesson 1), the story (lesson 2), the Q and A using the target language in the unit (lessons 3 and 4). Great we've still got a lesson left, this could be a revising or testing class. And we're on to the next, great. Or is it? Increasingly our coursebooks have two language focuses (or is it foci?) so it becomes a little more difficult to cover it all in 5 lessons. Check out your coursebooks and work from there.

What do we leave out then? Most of the CLIL stuff goes, the projects, the literature pages, etc, do we test less? It's such a shame to leave out some of favourite parts because we're pushed for time but it was ever thus, don't forget most books are written for double the amount of classes we have. Don't feel bad, just get focussed.

Trust the process

Do our students need to “get it” before we move on? If so, do we mean all of our students? How can we really know who's got it? Of course it's important that our students have a handle on it and understand the mini-dialogues they're using and at the same time we need to trust the process.

Most coursebooks series are designed to build on student knowledge year on year and of course students are getting English in other ways too, at school, in their free time through gaming, sport, music, news, etc, etc. Perhaps we don’t need to get too worried if students haven’t “got it” yet, let’s just keep moving through the process.

Meet language, play with it and move on.

In terms of planning a series of classes one approach is to 1. Present the language, 2. Play with the language and then 3. Keep revising the language. The presentation is often done through the books, through the songs and stories, hopefully. Students can therefore meet the language in context and begin to get a feel for it. Then in part 2 we can focus tightly on those mini-dialogues and work with them in different ways with more or less support as required for our students. In many classes this might mean eliciting the questions and answers, writing them on the board for all students to see with blanks for them to make choices, eg. “What’s your favourite…..? My favourite….. is …..” Then we can remove prompts, remove the scaffolding as students become more comfortable with the language, it could end up with “… favourite…?” or something similar. And then we can move on. When we move on, we can’t just turn the page and forget about it, we need to add it into our routine revision and recycling.

In routine revision we trust.

We all feel uncomfortable moving on when there’s so much still to do with a topic or language point, but the lessons tick by, the weeks tick by and we need to progress.

Routines should be much more than just rattling through the date, the weather, spelling names and asking how we all are, it’s a chance to do some meaningful revision to make contact again with previously met language. Here we shouldn’t just think about the last class or the current unit, we should be touching again and again on the work done thus far through the year and indeed that from previous years too.

How can we build these meaningful recycling moments? And when we’re in a hurry to get through the material, how much time should we give it? Arguably these moments are the most important in our learners’ journeys, we should give it plenty of time. We might aim to get it in every lesson, perhaps plan it for the end of the first lesson a week, if we do it great, we can do another activity in the second. If we don’t manage to get it into lesson one, let’s start lesson two with it, that way we know we’re doing it once a week at least. These revision moments might last for 10 minutes or so and we might want to alternate between accuracy and fluency activities which touch again on as much previously encountered language as possible.

For a fluency activity, we can have a series of slides with different questions to practice and students can play Q and A games in pairs practicing the language.

An accuracy based activity can be a “Disappearing words” type game where we elicit and correct target language sentences and drill them, then take away a few words in each sentence, sts remember them in pairs and then feedback as a whole. We can then repeat the process until there are no words on the board and students have to remember and repeat every single word.

What revision routines do you use? Are they fluency or accuracy based?(We'd love to hear your thoughts and activities, please share in the chat here)

Sometimes rushing through the book to get it all done by the end of the year can be stressful and sometimes we can feel that we’re not really doing our job properly. Hopefully this edition of The TEFLer has been useful to help you plan the rest of the year, keep things in perspective and move forward with confidence.

Happy TEFLing!

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