ESOL Grammar Activities

I've added a new page for ESOL Grammar Activities to the Skills for Life website. Like the other activities pages, this contains direct link both to our quizzes and to quizzes on other people's websites.

This change reflects a change in some of my teaching this year. I am supporting a number of learners who don't speak English natively and I want to address some of their difficulties with grammar. In analysing their difficulties in initial assessment, there were a number of common factors: endings to words (both nouns and verbs), articles (or, more correctly, determiners), prepositions and conjunctions. Of course the internet is alive with quizzes and other activities for grammar for English learners, but I've not previously found them greatly useful for this group of learners. Some of these people may have been to school in the UK for at least some of the time, some may not be literate in their first language, some may not have been to ESOL classes. Moreover the mistakes are presented in English literacy, for me in their main courses, and so perhaps a literacy approach rather than an ESOL approach is needed.

The most acute difficulty is with the endings for tenses and plural nouns. I certainly don't want to teach tenses in a formal way, but I do want to help them recognise and correct their errors. So I have started writing some quizzes for endings. It has been hard work writing even a few. I have also found a few relevant quizzes for the other topics on other sites. I have used these activities for explanation as I go along, rather than for reinforcement which is how I usually use quizzes. So far the feedback from students has been very positive. I hope the page will develop in the coming months.

Literacy Changes Lives

Just a quick word to help promote the Literacy Changes Lives full report from the National Literacy Trust, (summary here.) This follows an American model to gather together a number of adult literacy-oriented statistics, particularly those from the research of John Bynner and Samantha Parsons. Two points:

• Firstly, the document firmly reinforces the notion that people with poor literacy skills are particularly isolated from the benefits of our advanced industrial society. I often think that Government gets too obsessed with the idea that poor literacy skills hinder our industrial progress, whereas the real problem is that it hinders people's lives. I get asked all too frequently why is literacy needed to do hairdressing or to be a care worker or whatever, and I usually find myself answering that you will need literacy to write records and so on. What I am thinking is that I believe you need literacy for yourself and for the families you may bring up in the future, but it is rarely the right time to talk about this.
• Secondly, it is great to have all these statistics in one place. I have done some sessions for trainee FE teachers in the past, and this document makes the whole issue clear.

Job Interviews - Video Quizzes for Support

I've added some activities to the website around job interviews, in the context of travel and tourism, which I hope will be more generally interesting. This is only part of a larger project to create learning materials for support using video as the focus. Those materials are primarily for the college Moodle site; they have been written to run using a Flash player which allows better resolution and has a working slider bar.

This project has taken a lot of my time in the past few months. The idea was to create differentiated quizzes with video; video because it attracts and keeps the attention in class and quizzes because they are easy to make and so can easily be made at differing levels to aid differentiation. I wanted to demonstrate that differentiated learning materials was a good route to go for support. Many of the learners in the target classes have difficulty with both spoken and written English. The idea was to use the same videos with a range of quizzes at different levels. Learners not being supported can do a task with the video while those being supported can do different activities which will help them do the task eventually.

I was not prepared for the range of problems this would produce. Here are just some:

• Videos already available on YouTube or some of the specialist videos for teaching sites were either not suitable or so tied up in copyright to make adaptation impossible
• Shooting our own videos was a major undertaking. After writing scripts we had a shooting day with a semi-professional crew and serious amateur actors. I did not realise how active I would have to be as producer/director and so a lot of mistakes (going off script) have come through and we are stuck with them.
• Putting video into quizzes was difficult but I got there in the end. I needed a lot of help from the support groups for Hot Potatoes and Hot Potatoes on Moodle. I grappled with file formats and free conversion programs. I learned a lot and it took a long time.
• There is then the problem of getting things working on college servers where the staff have their own ideas about how things should run and may not have been happy with the solutions I found.

If I were to do it again I might well go down the road of using students as actors, shooting very short scripts and using my digital camera to film. The results would be very different and not so generally useful, but it would be less of an investment in time.

As always I find it a delight to work with Hot Potatoes. I enjoy finding new ways to get different sorts of learning materials out of the basic software and extensions.

New Numeracy Quizzes

I've started adding some new quizzes to the Maths Quizzes page on the Skills for Life Website, and to Maths Activities. I've found I've needed some extra teaching materials for learners who are supposed to be working towards Level 1, but have real weaknesses with things like subtraction, tables and division. In an ideal world they'd work towards an E3 end test, but some are already at E3 in Initial Assessment.

I'm reflecting on why I've not felt a need to have these before. I suppose it's because I'm not able to work with these learners one to one this year and therefore cannot work with examples I hand-write off the cuff as the need presents itself. The published stuff is not much help: Maths the Basic Skills covers most of this need but progresses too quickly, Carol Roberts' Level 1 Numeracy assumes they've all got E3 well sorted and the examples are much too hard, and Skillswise also mixes harder examples on the same sheets, and the E3 part is not comprehensive enough. These learners, who frequently express that they do not like maths, quickly get too discouraged when they cannot do things.

Another direct issue is that multiplying and dividing by 10 and 100 does not enter into the curriculum until L1 (N1/L14 and N2/L1.6) , and you really have to be able to multiply and divide by 1000 as well in order to convert units in the same system (MSS1/L1.7). This makes the step up to L1 from E3 quite severe. Yet this skill underpins a lot else of Level 1.

Spelling and Predictive Text

I was struck when a student told me she used Predictive Text on her mobile to help her with her spelling. I've not come across this before, but it seemed like such a good idea. She added that a spellcheck on the computer was a better option but not so convenient. Of course, if you're trying to complete records at work then having a mobile in your hand is not too embarrassing. I remember when some students had Franklin-style hand-held "spellmasters," but spellchecks seem to have driven them away. I'm now trying to think of ways of using this in my teaching, but I'll have to learn how do it myself first.

Curiously, the only Google link I could quickly find for this idea was some report quoted in the Daily Record, which stated, I think, that predictive text was the favourite reason why people's spelling was poor. As if poor spelling was so recent.

Initial Assessment

For any support tutor, initial assessment is an important time. In my college we try to initially assess all full-time and important part-time courses during induction with the online bksb assessment. It's an intense and busy time, as you try to print out results and give at least a minimum feedback to sometimes anxious people. Then you try to analyse the results and see who might need support.

This year several curriculum and personal tutors have asked me what they are supposed to do with someone who scores E3 on bksb but got a C at GCSE - could be either English or Maths. Such anomalies are really rather common. I sometimes think that maybe as many as 10% of results are anomalies. I use the paper-based BSA Initial Assessment as well, and don't get quite the range of odd results, but some are still odd and it does not go above Level 1.

Initial assessment is a broad tool and bksb in particular is very broad. You quickly move on and judge the learner in a more person-centred way as you get to know them. And, yes, I do support generic basic skills initial assessment, because without that there would be much less support offered and taken up.

Literacy and Literacy Support

I was asked over the summer what I do and I answered mechanically that I teach literacy to over 16s. However it has bothered me ever since that I’m not sure that that is still true. Sometimes, especially when I work a lot with dyslexic people, I wonder if I am really helping people get by on their courses without improving their literacy. Perhaps a literacy support teacher becomes an anti-literacy teacher.

So I’ve been reflecting on what I actually do with my working life these days. I can give support which is classified as literacy, numeracy, dyslexia or language according mainly to the needs of the learner, though there are funding issues which determine the exact classification. Numeracy support largely consists of teaching the skills of numeracy. The rest largely has two outcomes: the learners do better on their courses and the learners improve their skills. I teach in two main modes, in class and one to one, and the emphasis varies between these two. With all the learners I have support plans detailing the skills to be developed and regular reviews to check how the skills are improving. For some there is a certificate at the end in literacy or numeracy but not for most. For the learner, progress on the course is usually more important, though not necessarily.

Additional Learning Support has become a fairly diverse speciality, defined largely by the funding which enables it to happen. As such it remains something of a Cinderella discipline, and it could all disappear with the funding at midnight.

Here are some observations:

* Status and pay differ greatly from institution to institution. I work for a college which treats ALS staff as equal status lecturers and encourages them to get Level 5 qualifications. I know there was a move to develop a Level 4/5 specific qualification for ALS, but I have lost sight of that. Some colleges use lower-paid, lower status learning support assistants to do some of the work.

* Our work is clearly less rigorous than that done by Skills for Life tutors, but it can also be more wide-ranging and perhaps more holistic. For me it is closer to the literacy work I was doing twenty years ago than to the modern classroom. Some will say that is a good thing and some will say it is a bad thing.

* It’s very easy for an ALS teacher to concentrate too much on the enabling part. Equally it’s very easy for an ALS teacher to read a diagnostic report off a computer and try to teach those skills highlighted for improvement in isolation.

* There is precious little published to support the work of Additional Learning Support teachers. There is nothing in the way of learning resources, strategies, quality standards, etc, at least nothing that has come my way.

* There are alternative ways of delivering support. Some colleges have made a lot of progress with embedded skills for life. Some do it well and some not so well. It is also possible to have Skills for Life tutors delivering contextualised group learning. These methods put emphasis on the skills improvement. Learners may still need specialist help with their coursework.

On reflection, then, I feel renewed confidence that the work I do in literacy support is real literacy work. I believe it is a method which can be very effective. I hope it is a method of delivering literacy which can be supported and developed.