An Introduction to Dogme

Last week, I led an insett at the British Council, Bilbao on Dogme.  We discussed dogme principles (see Scott Thornbury’s article ‘A Dogma for EFL' for more information) by contrasting them with a coursebook orientated approach and deciding which we agreed with more (thanks to Lee MacKenzie for this strategy).

We looked at some ideas from ‘Teaching Unplugged’ by Meddings & Thornbury (Delta Publishing, 2009) and a few I picked up from different sites on the net, of which I particularly recommend:

 - the Dogme Cookbook    

 - Dale Coulter’s Language Moments

 - Mike Harrison’s site

 Luke Meddings delivering a live lesson is also very useful to get a better idea of what a dogme lesson consists of.

At the end of the session we carried out a little survey. While only one of the teachers present felt they would like to adopt a completely dogme approach, everyone felt they would like to incorporate some of the approach into their teaching. But, as a colleague pointed out, they probably wouldn’t have come to the session if they hadn’t.

Motivating the unmotivated

This is the title of a video seminar by Ken Wilson that I think is really well-worth watching. Ken is the former director of the English Teaching Theatre and is a highly experienced teacher, teacher-trainer and author of more than thirty ELT titles.
He first outlines the six key motivational factors that have the most significant bearing on a student’s motivation in the classroom:
1. Teacher enthusiasm
2. Feeling of encouragement from the teacher
3. A sense that the teacher really believes in the student’s progress and success
4. Genuine involvement of the teacher, maintaining good class and group
relationships
5. Supportive, safe and secure atmosphere
6. Valuing student ideas and participation, encouraging autonomy, giving students the chance to make the classroom space their own

Ken then goes on to suggest ten ways to motivate students giving practical suggestions for all of them:

• Make them curious
• Challenge them
• Avoid the obvious
• Devolve responsibility
• Teach unplugged (occasionally)
• Let students use their tech and their tech skills
•  …AND their imagination
• Find out what they know and what they’re good at
• Take a break
• Turn your classroom into a spider’s web

Putting Your Vocab Bag Online: Memrise and Quizlet

Intro

This post is essentially a comparision of two websites, Memrise and Quizlet. Both sites allow you to upload groups of words, both sites have activities to help students learn the words. My main interest has been from the perspective of making our class vocab bag virtual but they are a vocab-building resource you might encourage your learners to use regardless.

Background

For a couple of years I've created a 'Vocab Bag' page for students on our class wiki. The purpose of this was to encourage more self-study. Although this proved a good reference and record for the students, it basically ended up being just a list of words. Once when I was feeling particularly keen, I found time to link some of the words to online dictionary definitions and others to howjsay.com, where they could at least hear the words pronounced. This example is as good as it got but I found it far too time-consuming in the end and really not that good. Memrise and Quizlet offer much more.

What Memrise and Quizlet have in common

• Easy sign up

• Option to sign in with Facebook

• Ability to create your own word groups

• Option to pinch other people's word groups

• Words can be either paired with their translation or English definition

• Games and activities to help learn the words

• Quick and easy to upload new words

What's special about Memrise

The sound thinking behind Memrise is that words must be revisited and recycled before being commited to the long-term memory. In Memrise words are seeds which first grow in your greenhouse and then are moved to your garden. If you don't water your words, you'll get an email informing you that 'some of your words are wilting'. Here's are virtual vocab bag from term 1 this year.

Why I like Quizlet best

Whilst Memrise is certainly more attractive-looking, Quizlet has a number of features which make it my current choice:

1. Students can listen to the words!

2. You can monitor your students by creating an online group

3. There's a greater variety of games and activities

   
   

And what the students think

From a class of 10 adult intermediate students, 6 have signed with 3 students very active on this term's virtual vocab bag. I see this as a success. What I need to do next is to find out why some of the class are seemingly not interested. It maybe that web-based learning doesn't appeal to them – this has to be accepted by the tech-loving teacher! On the other hand, it may be they're having problems getting started – a class trip to the computer room might be the answer.

I recommend giving it a try whether or not you're a tech-loving teacher - it's certain some of your students will benefit. Give me a shout if you want help setting it up with your class.

More dogme doings

If you're interested to know more about how dogme can actually work in a class situation, here's a video of Luke Meddings (co-author with Scott Thornbury of Teaching Unplugged) teaching a live session. Also included are his own reflections of how he thought the session went.

Oli Beddall offers a Dogme cookbook which is a series of useful suggestions for activities you can do in class followed up by ideas for focussing on the language that students produce. And if you're not convinced that the dogme approach is for you, check out the comments at the end of the post and you'll find that you're in good company.

In this post, Chia Suan Chong gives us an anatomy of a class in which the impetus was provided by photos her students had taken and how she (and her class) dealt with the language that emerged. And if you like her style, here's another post from her  - Only in a Dogme class… 

And to keep the balance, finally here's a post from Stephen Greene who feels that there's been an overload recently of dogme doings.

Peer teaching of grammar

Results of a questionnaire to see how my YA Advanced B felt about having to actually do some thinking and teach each other.

I had one half of the class read up on a grammar point, while the others looked at another one. They then prepared a flipchart as a visual aid to help them explain what they'd learned to students from the other group.

Finally, we did some book exercises to test their understanding of the two.

• From the survey results it's clear that they feel more comfortable with the grammar that they spent time preparing the flipchart for. This despite the fact that I felt that one of the grammar points was considerably less complex than the other.
• The group was divided on Peer Teaching vs traditional Teacher/Student dynamic, with the latter slightly more popular, and several commenting that both were valid, even if only for the sake of variety.
• Encouragingly, all but one wanted to do it again.

Conclusion: Need to find a way for the peer teaching itself to be more effective, or at least to give students more confidence in their peers as teachers.

Comments welcome on any experiences /advice how to manage this better.

Recommended class activities and lesson plans from current ELT blog posts

• Using haiku for summary tasks - David Petrie 
• Listen now – authentic listening tasks – Gary Jones 
• All about me: lesson plan on personal interests, likes and dislikes age: teenage/adult level: A2/B1 – Sally Trowbridge 
• Lesson plan on the theme of heroes with good visuals, including short videos age: teenage/adult  level: intermediate/advanced  - Kieran Donaghy Film English
• Looking to the future – practising future continuous and perfect – imaginative situations and good visuals - David Mainwood EFL Smart Blog and a list of links to online games, quizzes and tests 

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