A big no-no. They gave me dirty looks...

Last year I gave a presentation called The Big “No-Know”: Why Students Still Make Basic Errors at the Illinois Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages - Bilingual Education annual convention.  The presentation comes from my course The Language Sport. About midway through my talk I touched on the P from The Practice Plan: prioritize.   

When I told the attendees to consider leaving more of their class readings for homework and to spend more time on monitored speaking, the disapproving looks on a few faces didn’t surprise me, but if there is such a thing as an eye-scolding, I definitely got eye-scolded from a few let's say "extra-experienced" instructors. 

The irony was that I did a big no-no with them, apparently.  But that's okay.  I’m confident that the points I illustrated convinced most of the audience to at least think about it logically as part of the whole point I was making with The Big No-Know.  That was my goal that day in support of my larger mission to help English language teachers increase their effectiveness and maximize their time in the classroom. 

If too much time is allotted to reading and the accompanying exercises or discussion, the same class time could be spent much more efficiently for language training.  Students (especially adults) have such varying levels of comprehension, often coming from different language backgrounds, education levels, and even stress levels. Think about the different reading levels that kids in the same grade possess.   

Instructors often jump to the reading questions before all of the students have fully grasped the reading itself. For the sake of time there can be pressure to move along when minutes are tied to a lesson plan. The fastest readers with the most vocabulary can dominate the conversations.  Conversely it also can take too much time to get the whole class to the same point, which becomes boring for the "faster" students.  

So back to prioritizing.  Prioritizing doesn’t mean you should throw reading out the window. Just don’t prioritize it at the expense of monitored speaking practice (unless the focus of your class is literacy). That’s the core that the students cannot work on as easily at home.

Task-n-tip:

Task: When you give your class a reading, first ask them to circle the words and phrases that they don’t know.  Check to see how much it varies from student to student.

Tip: Create an awareness of the variance in cognitive processing that you’re asking each student to do in the same amount of time.

I hope you’ll join me on my mission.