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All teachers write materials for their learners at some point. Sometimes, we are prompted by an interesting article we come across in the newspaper which makes us think: ‘That would be useful for my Business English class’. Other times, we realise a class needs more practice with some specific language and none of the resources to hand seems quite right. Whatever the reason and whatever the materials, it’s a good idea to keep a few things in mind so that the results can be optimum. Below are ten tips for writing materials:

1. Have a clear idea of why you are writing the materials

Are they to replace something you aren’t happy with? Are they to supplement something in the course book? Re-inventing the wheel is pointless but tailoring materials to suit your very specific context and needs is very useful.

2. Copy the things you like in published materials – not the actual content but the way they do things

Look at things like how much text is on a page, how an instruction is phrased or how one activity leads seamlessly into the next. Then do something similar. After all, the publisher is doing it this way for a reason, probably after a lot of input from teachers and other specialists.

3. Start at the end and work backwards. Ask yourself what you’d like your learners to be able to do because of using the materials.

Consider your aims and objectives. Then think about the stages that might be useful to reach that point.

4. Keep the end-users in mind at every stage of the process.

Think about your learners as a whole group, their interests, likes and dislikes. But also, think about them as individual learners with their differences and their unique needs. Keep asking yourself questions like Will they find this engaging? Is there anything in this (text) which might upset someone?

5. Always ask someone else to proofread what you’ve written.

No matter how good you are at writing materials, you’ll inevitably make errors. Typos are common and sometimes we think we know how to spell a word but in fact, we don’t. A second pair of eyes is invaluable.

6. If possible, pilot the materials and ask for feedback.

You can provide a checklist of things you’d like comments on, in the same way a teacher gets feedback after a classroom observation. If you can’t pilot the materials yourself, reach out to another teacher who might be happy to do the task.

7. When you finish writing your materials, look through them and think about the variety of activities.

Have you given learners opportunities for sharing information and ideas, for practising what they’ve learnt, for recycling language, for personalising a topic? Have you included different interaction types? You won’t be able to do everything every time, but variety is good for several reasons.

8. Make sure you have permission to use any content you include in your materials.

This might be a text, an image, an audio, or a video. Check who owns the copyright and what the Creative Commons license means. Always cite the source or attribute the artist, photographer, etc. There are obvious reasons for this but ultimately, as a teacher, you are a model for your learners. If they see you using anything from the internet without thinking, they might think it’s OK for them to do the same.

9. Keep things as simple as possible.

This is true for every aspect of the materials, the content, the page design, the instructions. It’s a good idea to show your materials to another teacher or even someone who isn’t a teacher, perhaps a student. If they can’t fully understand what needs to be done, you’ve probably made something unnecessarily complicated.

10. Enjoy the process!

Writing materials is an opportunity to be creative and can be very enjoyable. It’s also a great way to develop as a teacher. As we craft materials for our learners, we focus on their needs, we think about teaching methodologies and what supports or hinders learning.

About Katherine

 

Katherine Bilsborough is a freelance ELT author and trainer. She is passionate about training teachers how to develop the skills they need to write their own classroom materials and has recently set up Writing ELT Materials Ltd. with her business partner and colleague, John Hughes.

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An interview with Caroline Hyde-Simon by Vicky Papageorgiou

First of all, I would like to thank you for agreeing to give this interview and I would also like to welcome you! For people who might not know you, you are the coordinator of IATEFL’s ESPSIG. Can you please share some details about your professional background?

I work as Lecturer in English at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Zurich, Switzerland, a position I have held since 2012. My main work is in the School of Life Sciences and Facility Management, where I teach with a specific focus on EAP and ESP.

EAP has developed significantly as a field over the past few years and now it seems it will change even more. How do you feel AI will affect EAP overall?

I think the question of AI is one that is at the forefront of everyone’s minds at the moment working in the field of education. The question really should be considered from two perspectives: positive impacts, and challenges and ethical concerns. Many aspects of the more positive perspective have the potential to affect all areas of the learning process, e.g. personalised learning, assessment, language resources, accessibility, and even content creation. The one area I feel is more specific to EAP is that of Academic writing assistance, particularly the availability of feedback on cohesion, clarity and coherence, three absolutely crucial elements of
the academic writing process. On the other hand, students often now will rely on AI to produce an academic piece of work, and then will be uncertain, or not bother to check, on the quality of the content produced. As we all know, the writer needs a deep awareness of what the output should look like, and the danger of over-reliance on AI is that this step will become lost. The danger of a lack of critical thinking skills is thus a very real one, and I therefore believe that EAP/ESP courses should henceforth focus more on the process of producing a piece of academic work, rather than assessing the final output.

Regarding the SIG, what are the challenges you have faced since you were appointed to this position? How did you manage to overcome them?

One of the main challenges I have come across is being in a position of having to manage both a group of people and a great many tasks without being seen in a superior position, which of course is not the case as coordinator of a SIG. I think it is often the case that committee members look to you as the person having all the answers, which again is not (always) true, and, at least for me, I have found the need to turn to head office for advice often. Another challenge is having to be involved in, and try to resolve, conflict, particularly when your own background is not one which includes a managerial role.

How do you see the SIG in the future? What are your short-/long-term goals?

We now have a new position on our committee, that of Outreach Officer. Our goal in this regard is to access the four corners of the Earth, in particular those in which we have not had, to date, as many contacts and members as we could have. Additionally, following the pandemic, we are starting to arrange face-to-face conferences once again, as we feel our members benefit greatly from the networking and professional exchange opportunities these afford. In fact, we are in the process of working on 2 upcoming face-to-face events, so watch this space… On a more short-term basis, we are always looking to gain more members for
our SIG, as well as committed committee members, so please do get in touch if you would like to join us!

If you could start as IATEFL ESPSIG’s coordinator over again, what would you do differently?

I would assert myself to a greater extent, albeit gently, right from the beginning, and trust that I am acting in the best interests of the SIG and the committee members as well as, of course, our members. Further, time allowing of course: I would try and invest more time in team building activities and developing strategies for conflict resolution as a group. Finally, particularly important when working with people with different cultural backgrounds, I believe, is the necessity to establish a culture of regular feedback, providing constructive feedback to team members and being open to receiving feedback as well. Continuous improvement is essential.

Thank you so much for your time, Caroline!

About Caroline

Caroline has been teaching EAP/ESP at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Zurich, Switzerland, since completing her PhD in Applied Linguistics Research Methodology in 2012. She started in the School of Engineering and has since moved to the School of Life Sciences and Facility Management where she teaches primarily students studying for their bachelor’s degree. Her current research interests include blended learning in ESP/EAP, and the development of critical thinking in the context of AI in the academic arena.

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Following his popular IATEFL Webinar in August, we took the opportunity to interview Burak Aydın further into the subject of his webinar and also his personal work. IATEFL members can view the recording of his webinar, “Reflective Practice Groups: a visionary journey of professional development”, in the Resources section of the IATEFL website.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your work?

My name is Burak Aydın. I am based in İzmir, Turkey and work as an instructor of English as a part of the preparatory English program at İzmir Katip Çelebi University. What we do is basically to provide new university students with the necessary language skills for their future academic, social and professional lives through an intensive, one-year-long program. I also work as a teacher trainer, licensed by World Learning, to deliver intensive and extensive SIT TESOL certificate courses. Apart from the course, as a trainer, I also like running projects and delivering various courses and talks for language teachers. I enjoy training teachers as much as teaching students.

Could you explain the role of Reflective Practice Groups (RPGs) in ELT?

In basic terms, RPGs are regular teacher meetings to practice reflective teaching and collaborative learning. I believe RPGs play a huge role in language teachers’ professional growth as a lot of them are completely busy teaching with scarce opportunities to catch up with quality trainings or to reflect on their teaching. By bringing like-minded teachers together regularly and rigorously, RPGs actually help teachers learn from each other through socialization and reflective cycle. Given the shortcomings of one-time PD events in terms of deep insights and proactivity in trying new teaching strategies, RPGs offer a long-lasting effect for better student learning and wellbeing for teachers with its process-oriented, collaborative, reflective and teacher-centred nature.

How do RPGs differ from other teacher gatherings?

I always like discussing this. For one, RPGs are not regular school meetings. Generally, school meetings revolve around concerns about classroom issues in an effort to find quick solutions, which is surely necessary to eliminate the bumps on the road. However, RPGs are all about enhancing students’ learning with the participation of a few teachers dedicated to try new techniques in class. To that end, RPG teachers bring specific data to the table in forms
of journals, recordings, resources, surveys and observational reflections. They continuously reflect on data to create practical ideas to be taken to their future classes. They try them and bring their reflections back to the table for the next meeting. So, there is no “fix-it” approach as in school meetings but rather a process to explore new strategies.

Also, differently from other teacher gatherings, there are ground rules in RPGs set by teachers such as trust, confidentiality, equality, punctuality and so forth. These meetings are facilitated rotationally by the teachers who assume total responsibility for their collaborative learning. Finally, RPGs are not in-service training programs where learning is assessed and guided by pre-planned agendas. RPGs are totally bottom-up where topics and reflections come as emerged through the series of gatherings. In short, RPGs are different from other meetings as RPG teachers hold connected meetings, come together to grow professionally and co-build their agendas. These meetings are developmental, therapeutic and action-oriented.

Is there any limitation for RPGs in enhancing collaborative professional development?

Surely, the first one is “time”. In many studies, including the one I conducted, teachers tend to raise concerns about the challenge of finding the amount of time necessary for the endeavour. To be able to break the ice, get used to the reflective system and start to grow insights, you certainly need some time for RPGs. I see it no fewer than 10 meetings based on my experience and studies I have read. Given that a meeting generally lasts no less than 2 hours, I hear the teachers’ concerns on this one.

Also, another difficulty might be to find like-minded teachers who are open to growth and a leading coach who is capable of initiating and guiding RPGs. These groups are very special, and teachers should have a good history with each other. And, to start an RPG, you certainly need a reflective teacher or trainer who knows how to guide a group through reflective practice by preventing talks going off the track and eliminating distractions on the way. The
rotational facilitation of teachers is actually guided by how strongly the leading coach sets the tone in the very beginning.

I know that you have conducted a research on RPGs. Could you tell us about that?

Yes. It was a part of my MA dissertation, and I conducted it as an instrumental case study with five language instructors. The aim of the study was to see how teachers got engaged in RPGs and the value of the construct in terms of teachers’ professional development. I was the leading coach, and I invited the teachers to the activity. Our RPG ran for 10 meetings, and I was actively involved in the first 2 to help teachers get familiar with reflective practice,
data collection tools and the dos and don’ts of RPGs. After me, from the 3 rd meeting onwards, teachers started to facilitate the discussions rotationally and preferred to talk about motivation, use of L1 and time management. They used surveys, audio recordings, journals and research to bring data for their discussions. In this process, I only collected data and guided them when needed. Based on the results of the study, I found that teachers benefited a lot from the practice in terms of exploring their self, teaching, students and the group itself. There were certain elements leading to these explorations such as “affect” as the driving force, along with “collectivity” and “action-orientation” in interplay. We truly enjoyed being a part of that group. After the study, a couple of teachers from the group consulted me to start their own groups. It was very exciting. I am also involved in online RPGs ever since. That’s a gift that keeps on giving.

About Burak Aydın

Burak Aydın is an instructor of English and a licensed teacher trainer for SIT TESOL Certificate Course. He teaches in a tertiary level preparatory English program and is also involved in mentoring and supervising language teachers. In the field of teacher training, he has been conducting research, facilitating courses and presenting talks and workshops.

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Imagine you teach a class of seven-year-olds. You provide lots of fun activities: songs, stories, crafts and games. The children appear to enjoy your lessons, but whenever you ask them to do some writing, they become quickly frustrated and bored. Picture these same children a few years on, now aged thirteen. Their lessons are no longer filled with fun and games. They have a fantastic command of vocabulary and grammar but they really struggle with speaking. They’re shy, easily embarrassed and find the topic in their course book dull. This often results in a few of the learners becoming distracted and off-task. You struggle to keep them engaged and find ways of making your lessons interesting.

Achieving and maintaining high levels of engagement is one of the challenges many teachers face in the young learner classroom. We try to stay up to date with the interests of our primary and teenage learners but, of course, they change really quickly. And, of course, our learners can see right through our attempts to reach them through trending topics.

The good news is, there is a solution. We can flip the way we teach on its head by embracing a learner-centred approach. No more spending hours searching the web for relevant topics and resources! No more groans when you hand out your latest worksheet!

How?

With inquiry-based learning. Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is an approach where learners investigate a real world topic in order to find answers to a question. Instead of deciding what learners will learn and selecting materials in advance, we can allow learners to explore their own questions about the topic and take their learning in whatever direction they choose. 

An inquiry is centred around the natural curiosity that children have but tend to lose as they grow older. By focussing our lessons on topics that interest our learners and inviting them to explore them through English, we can ensure that the language we teach is relevant to their interests and needs.

How does inquiry-based learning work?

An inquiry revolves around an essential question. This is an overarching question that we will keep coming back to throughout the inquiry and which learners will aim to have answered by the end of the unit. This is typically a fairly broad question which can be explored and answered in multiple ways. An example question for primary and secondary learners could be:

What makes the perfect home?

With our primary learners, we may want to focus on the more obvious elements of homes including parts of the house and furniture. But with older learners, a more suitable focus could be sustainability in the home or the technology of smart homes.

In order to answer the essential question, we need to break it down into smaller sub-topics that learners can explore. These can be based on the learners’ own questions. Before we start the inquiry, it can be helpful to determine what questions will help learners develop their inquiry and what language they will need, in terms of vocabulary and grammar structures.

We can design research activities that help learners answer their questions and practise the target language. We can provide learners with plenty of resources including books, videos and websites. Once learners have enough information and ideas, they then collate this and produce a piece of work that helps them share their answers to the essential question. This could be a presentation, a poster, a video and much more.  

What are the benefits of inquiry-based learning?

It’s relevant and based on learner needs
The language we teach learners is the language they need to carry out their inquiry, so we’re creating a real need and purpose for it. We can see where the gaps are in their knowledge and focus on emergent language that will help learners find out what they want to know.

It’s tailored to learner interests
You can choose inquiry topics that interest learners and invite them to ask questions about what they want to know. They help shape the inquiry with their questions and they are motivated to find the answers. 

It’s collaborative and fosters future skills
Learners work in groups and develop communicative and social skills, as well as teamwork. They also develop critical thinking skills, presentation skills and digital literacy.

It’s autonomous and self-directed
Learners have agency and autonomy. They get to make choices and decisions and direct their own learning, which is a key aspect of engagement. Because learners will be working independently in different stages, this allows you to provide support to those who need it.

It’s inclusive
You can adapt the level of inquiry that different learners and groups do and therefore provide a more flexible way of differentiating. Each group can work on a subtopic or question that is suitable for their level and skills. This flexibility allows you to adapt the complexity of the language and content of the inquiry to ensure it meets the needs of each learner.

Let’s go back to the imaginary classroom from the beginning of this article but now imagine you’re following an inquiry-based approach. The seven-year-olds are happily working on a poster about the perfect home. They’re writing descriptions of each part of the house and drawing pictures to illustrate them. Every day they’re excited to get started on their work. Fast forward six years and now this class is a confident group of learners who work well together and speak English (most of the time!) as they plan what to do in their project. One group wants to find out about how to build a treehouse and another group plans to design a sustainable home using Minecraft™. 

Inquiry-based learning and other learner-centred approaches are the way forward. At the heart are the learners themselves. Inquiry-based learning appeals to children’s inquisitive nature and allows them to learn and use English in real and meaningful ways. 

To find out more about inquiry-based learning, visit Michelle’s website: https://michelleworgan.com 

IATEFL members can access the recording of Michelle’s webinar (and all other webinars) by logging on to the IATEFL website and then clicking here: https://www.www.iatefl.org/resources/inquiry-based-learning-primary-classroom

About Michelle Worgan

Michelle Worgan is a primary materials writer and trainer based in Spain. She works with several international publishers and she also develops and runs her own teacher training courses and resources in inclusive approaches. She is currently Joint Events Coordinator for the IATEFL Young Learners and Teenagers SIG.

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An intreview with the past Chair of the Membership Committee, Mojca Belak, by Vicki Papageorgiou

Mojca, it has been a pleasure working with you these past few years.

It’s been a pleasure having you on the blog team, Vicky. Because of you, our work is now better organised. And thank you for suggesting this interview.

Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your work?

I teach English phonetics and British Society and Culture at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. I started teaching while I was a student, and never stopped. Even when I worked for the BBC World Service as a radio producer, translator and announcer at the beginning of my career, I was also in charge of teaching English via radio. I became an IATEFL member on my 24 th birthday, so it has supported me all my professional life; I can’t imagine teaching or thinking about our profession the way I do now if I wasn’t an IATEFLer.

I also believe that IATEFL members would be interested to know more about the work you have done as Chair of IATEFL Membership Committee these past six years.

In a nutshell, my work and the work of my team were all about gaining new members and keeping the existing ones happy. For the first three years, I was very involved in creating different membership rates depending on where teachers come from. In this, I was greatly supported by Gerhard Erasmus, who has now succeeded me as Chair of MemCom. In the end, membership rates stayed the same mainly because of Covid and the crisis that followed.

In the last three years, I worked a lot on making the IATEFL Webinar selection more inclusive. I also made sure that the webinar programme ran smoothly. I have my dedicated MemCom team (Syke Annamma Kumaran, Maria-Araxi Sachpazian and Božica Šarić Cvjetković) to thank for hosting the webinars and helping with webinar selections.

I was one of the three volunteers who work on this blog – read articles, suggest edits and in the end publish them online. I immensely enjoyed it. It was great to work with you and Syke on this.

I led the New Ambassadors Working Party on the Board of Trustees. We changed the job description and introduced the first four ambassadors in 2022, and two more this year. It is a scheme that will help promote IATEFL in various parts of the world.

I also started a Working Party which is searching for a new IATEFL patron. It is hard to find a person who will succeed David Crystal: we’ve looked and looked for a suitable patron in the last two years but couldn’t find one for several reasons. What I was also heavily involved in was the Free IATEFL Membership Competition last summer. IATEFL received a donation from Rob Howard, an IATEFL volunteer, that covered eight IATEFL individual memberships. MemCom suggested teachers worldwide write a blog article of 1,000 words for Views, and eight lucky winners would become our members for free. We advertised this in social media – the IATEFL Facebook Group alone has 22,500 members – so we expected a lot of contributions. In the end, we only received eleven articles. It’s popular to moan about how expensive the membership fee is, but, unfortunately, when given a chance to become members for free in exchange for a short article, there was not a lot of interest.

What is the biggest challenge you have overcome while you were on the IATEFL Board of Trustees, Mojca?

I can think of three big challenges. The first one is very personal: just days before I was to set off for the Harrogate Conference I had a bicycle accident and fractured my shoulder, so I had to stay at home. I wasn’t in Harrogate to attend my last conference as a trustee and couldn’t part with my fellow trustees the way I wished (We were such a good team.), and I couldn’t meet up with many friends and colleagues. It was hard to cope with all that and stay positive. Luckily I could watch the plenaries online, and I attended the AGM via Zoom.

The greatest challenge that involved the Board of Trustees and IATEFL, in general, was the Covid crisis. Trustees usually meet four times a year, but in 2020 and 2021 we had a long online meeting practically every month. It was very hard, but as a fellow trustee remarked recently, we are the team that will go down in the history of IATEFL as the Board that saved the association.

The third challenge happened a year ago when IATEFL suggested that IATEFL- named Associates change their name. It was something that previous Boards didn’t deal with even though it had been on the agenda for years. It was very challenging because there was lots of emotion and history that the Board of Trustees had to deal with in an effective manner. You can read a little about that in the March-April issue of Voices.

Despite these challenges I feel that what I have learned and experienced from being a trustee outweighs the negatives by far.

Can you share with our readers any exciting plans for the future that you have?

I used to volunteer as a translator of texts by Tony Samara, my spiritual teacher. Recently Tony’s team contacted me again because they need someone to provide spoken translations in Slovenian for Tony’s meditations online. The work will combine translating and working with voice, which as a former radio person I really like. In a way, it is like coming home.

Mojca, thank you for your time.

It was my pleasure.

About Mojca Belak

Mojca Belak is a long-standing IATEFL member and volunteer – she used to be TD SIG newsletter editor and later coordinator as well as a member of Fundraising Committee and Scholarship Working Party. Until recently she was Chair of the Membership Committee and sat on the IATEFL Board of Trustees. She teaches at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

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An interview with the new IATEFL Chair of the Membership Committee, Gerhard Erasmus, by IATEFL Ambassador Syke Annamma Kumaran:

You are the new Chair of the Membership Committee. Could you tell us about yourself and your area of work?

I am quite excited about being the Chair of the Membership Committee and I hope we can do good things for our members over the next 3 years. I am also looking forward to working with some of the amazing people we have on the Board of Trustees, in our Head Office, as well as on our committee and the other IATEFL committees.

I am currently the Academic and Course Director for Inspired CPD and Inspired Kids. Inspired CPD is a training and consulting company that delivers Trinity-validated and bespoke teacher training, corporate training, management consulting, Chinese lessons and English courses for business professionals. Inspired Kids has English classes, after school classes, and we are also a chess academy. My main duties involve overseeing the day to day running of the companies, the overall strategy, and I teach chess. I am quite enjoying teaching chess and I am hoping I can get a few good chess players together here in Taiwan.

Can you tell us about the overall responsibilities of the IATEFL Membership Committee?

In my opinion, the main responsibilities of the Membership committee are monthly and strategically. Monthly, we run a Facebook group, the IATEFL webinars, and work towards ensuring members have access to their member benefits while also preparing our webinars, available to non-members, in order to meet our charitable objectives as an organisation.

In terms of strategy, we are looking at ways of increasing the member benefits, making sure members are actually aware of what the benefits are, and working towards increasing an overall uptake on member benefits to ensure people really experience the value of being a member of IATEFL.

Can you speak about the IATEFL membership benefits?

I personally think the greatest benefit of IATEFL is the networking opportunities. When I joined IATEFL many years ago I was doing an MA and read an article that I found in the Voices magazine. The author’s email address was in the article, and I emailed them. We still speak to this day and have actually co-authored a few things. Being able to serve on a committee is also a great way to network, meet people in the industry, and become friends with people who can offer advice and insight from a range of different perspectives.

A second important benefit is discounts. There are discounts on events, publications, and sometimes even on courses. Over the years I have built up a substantial library of magazines and books through IATEFL which has come in very handy at times. Publications are another big benefit. Members receive Voices every second month, Conferences Selections once a year, and publications and blogs from SIGs. And actually, being able to join a Special Interest Group (SIG) of your choice is another benefit. You can also join more than one (I have for many years) and for 23GBP extra get access to additional publications, more networking opportunities and a large archive of publications.

Further benefits include a searchable archive of webinars and articles, being able to submit articles to IATEFL Voices and SIG publications, the opportunity to submit proposals to speak at IATEFL events or present webinars and making yourself more visible in the industry.
I feel that members who enjoy being part of IATEFL the most are those that make use of as many of the benefits of being a member as they can. So, the more you use your member benefits, the more you will feel a part of IATEFL!

Tell us about your experience as the coordinator of LAMSIG?

My biggest disappointment as LAMSIG Coordinator (Leadership and Management Special Interest Group Coordinator) is that I only actually got to attend one conference as Coordinator. The first year as Coordinator, we had the conference online. The following year, in Belfast, I was unable to attend due to Covid restrictions in Taiwan, and Harrogate was my last conference as LAMSIG Coordinator.

However, I think the positives far outweigh the negatives (or single negative). We had numerous panel discussions during Covid and beyond, and these were often very well attended. Our scholarship winner in Harrogate delivered a fantastic talk and it was great having Anju Moses there as we didn’t have a scholarship winner the year before in Belfast. This was simply because we couldn’t find an applicant that met all the criteria. So, if you are reading this and you think you can apply for a scholarship, PLEASE DO!

I think being on a committee of a SIG gives you the opportunity to bring new ideas, learn from others, and contribute to the SIG and IATEFL. Currently, the LAMSIG committee is 90% different from what it was when I joined the committee, and by Brighton next year, it will be 100% different. Being on a committee is one of the best networking opportunities available.

What are the challenges you face in your new role?

I think that is a little early to say. I am still coming to grips with all the systems and procedures before deciding what to change, what to keep and how to move forward. There will be a few changes and I feel the most important will be to streamline what Membership Committee members do and how to either share the workload or find ways to generate expertise within the committee. I am leaning towards the latter and as soon as we have a full committee, we will be able to put this in place. A further challenge will be to ensure we improve both member benefits and how members access and take advantage of the benefits, and hopefully that will result in a growth in membership. I have a personal membership target that I would rather not share here, just in case I fail horribly, but it would be great if we can break the 5000 member barrier.

About Gerhard Erasmus

Gerhard is currently the Academic and Course Director of Inspired Kids, a language and after school centre for children, and Inspired CPD, a teacher training, corporate training, and consulting organisation. He is also an Educational Doctorate student focusing on Organizational Leadership. Gerhard has been living in Taiwan for more than two decades. He is married, has three kids, and is a hobby magician.

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If you are a member of IATEFL and would like to contribute to the blog, we’d love to hear from you at [email protected]. We’re looking for stories from our members, news about projects you’ve been involved in, and anything else you think those connected to English language teaching would be interested in reading. We look forward to hearing from you! If you’re not a member, why not join us?

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On 4th February 2023 I presented the webinar “Word (hi)stories: making lessons memorable and engaging”. More than 200 participants attended from all over the world and I wanted to thank them for the heart-warming emails I received after the webinar. It was based on the talk I gave at IATEFL conference in Belfast in 2022. The main idea at the heart of this webinar is that many of the apparent inconsistencies of the English language that puzzle students, often have a logical or historical explanation. Each variety of English (American English, Australian English, British English…) will have been influenced by different historical events: my webinar focused on British English.

Note: IATEFL members can access the recording of this webinar (and all other webinars) by logging on to the IATEFL website and then clicking here: https://www.www.iatefl.org/resources/word-histories-making-lessons-memorable-and-engaging

This article is follow-up to my webinar, which was recorded for the benefit of those who could not attend live on 4th February. In this article, I will give a brief overview of a few selected topics of the webinar and try and address the interesting questions I was asked at the end of my talk and provide a list of further reading for those who wish to know more about the development of English.

How can the historical development of English lexicon and grammar help students?

Students often ask us why English is so inconsistent in its grammar, pronunciation and spelling, especially students whose native language may have a more predictable pronunciation, in that a given spelling may correspond to a single sound – as in German or Italian, for instance. It is therefore useful to talk them through a little of the history of the development of the English language to show them that many of such apparent inconsistencies can often be explained by looking at the history of English. This does not mean that we need to be experts in the field; sometimes it is sufficient to explain a few historical events and tell the stories that lie behind a few selected words, grammatical constructions, spelling or even pronunciation and intonation.

In order to do so, it is best to start out by providing students with an overview of the languages that contributed to shaping English, and the mechanism that are at play when two languages are in contact for a long time. Two of the main mechanisms worth mentioning are borrowings and calques, and a third – more complex one –is grammaticalization, all of which are briefly described in the next sections.

Lexical Borrowings

 A borrowing (also called loanword), as the name suggests, is a word that was adopted from another language. English has borrowed extensively from many languages, mostly from Germanic languages, French and Latin. 

For example, debt is derived through ME word dette (pronounced /det/, as in French). However, during the Middle Ages, scholars added the letter “b” to show Latin etymology. The letter “b” in “debt”, therefore, was never pronounced in English but the spelling became established. Of course, people continued pronouncing the word as they used to, and this partially explains why there are silent letters in some words to date. The same happened with doubt (from French doute + Latin dubitum), plumber (O.F. plommier + Latin plumbum), subtle (O.F. sotil + Latin subtilis ), and island (German «Eiland» meaning”small island« + Latin insulam), just to mention a few.

Calques

A calque is word-by-word translation of a phrase or a grammatical structure from another language. For example, the English periphrastic construction going to + infinitive, used to talk about the future, is a calque of the French form aller + infinitive.

Il va pleuvoir=it is going to rain

When foreign words are borrowed, new sounds are borrowed as well. After some time, though, when the new word is fully assimilated into the borrowing language, the pronunciation may change to a more anglicized version, and this explains why there are often two or more ways of pronouncing a word.

The general principle is to adopt and then adapt.

Going back to borrowings, it is interesting to know that many words were borrowed more than once from the same source language in different periods in history. This gave rise to etymological twins, or doublets – words which share the same etymological root but have developed different meanings. A few examples are reward-regard, ward-guard, flour-flower and grammar-glamour.

Grammaticalization

During the webinar, I briefly introduced the phenomenon of grammaticalization. I must say many participants were really intrigued by it. Grammaticalization is the process by which some words lose their semantic content (this is called semantic bleaching) and acquire a grammatical function. An example is the modal verb “will”.

“Will” entered the English language with the meaning of “want”, as it comes from comes from Anglo-Saxon willan, meaning “to want, wish”. If I wanted to say “I want some bread” in Old English (500-1100), it would probably correspond to something like “Ic will bread” (invented example, I hope experts in Old English will forgive me for any inaccuracy!)

In modern German “I want” can still be translated as  “Ich will”, followed by a direct object.

Over the centuries, will underwent semantic bleaching in English, i.e. the meaning of the verb was lost, and the verb simply retained a grammatical function: since it meant “want/wish” and wishes are projected in the future, it started being used to talk about the future. However, we can still see a remnant of the former “want” meaning in: have the will to do something, if you will (= if you wish), my car won’t start (=refuses to=doesn’t “want” to start). Of course, this is a very simplistic account, but I hope I will be able to tell you more about grammaticalization in future talks/webinars.

Questions & Answers

After the webinar I was asked many interesting questions, which I will try and answer as best as I can.

Do similar mechanisms exist in other languages?

Of course! There are endless examples of borrowing in other languages too. For instance, in Italian architecture the word “bovindo”, is taken from English bow-window. However, the letter “w” in Italian tends to be pronounced as if it were “v”, hence “bovindo”.

Do we need to be expert in HOE?

Not necessarily. Just pick a few interesting (hi)stories and many of your most curious students will almost inevitably develop an appetite for knowing more and more!

Should we teach etymology in class?

No – the purpose is not to teach etymology. Etymology – or perhaps a more descriptive account of the history behind words, grammatical constructions or pronunciation – is just a springboard to show that there are reasons behind apparent inconsistencies. Some students tend to be demotivated by too many “exceptions”, but if they see them as part of a natural process of language development, they will see the logic behind these exceptions and feel more comfortable.

Who decides about change in spelling?

In the Middle Ages it was scholars who had to make decisions as to which form to record in writing, in an attempt to “tidy up” the language. There were no written rules and scribes wrote down words trying to reproduce at best the sounds they heard. This resulted in multiple spellings. 

Over the centuries, many factors have contributed to changes in spelling: The Great Vowel shift, processes of standardisation, spelling reforms, the invention of the printing press, the compiling of the first dictionaries.

Today, as in the past, there can be many triggers for change. Sometimes it may simply be a natural process of language change, unintentionally brought forward by its users and consolidated by frequency of usage: people simply start using a form that is convenient, because it may be short, easy to use or simply fashionable. This may result in new spellings, new words, acronyms being used as words or verbs, verbs being used as nouns and vice versa. For instance, we google words (where the name Google has become a verb); we PM someone on social media: the acronym for “Private Message” is being used as a verb; we shop for clothes in the womens department: the grammatically correct form women’s, made up of the irregular plural noun women + the Saxon genitive ‘s, has become a single word in most department stores.

Other times, there may be official attempts to reform spelling, but it does not mean that all the changes will catch on. Most people will continue writing words as they used to.

Will the pronunciation of English change in the future?

This is a difficult question to answer. It may well change, especially considering the fact that there are more non-native than native speakers using the English language every day for international communication. International English is more accent-neutral, therefore pronunciation may change to simpler forms that can be understood by everybody and connected speech mechanisms may not be such a big part of the way English will be spoken in the future. Another major factor driving change is the speed at which linguistic trends catch on (but also disappear) due to video-based technology: reels/TikTok… Everything is faster nowadays, and while it means that trends spread quickly, it may also mean that trends change so quickly that they do not have the material time to stick.

Further reading

As for the history of English and borrowings, there is a wealth of interesting resources, it is difficult to make e selection. Here are just a few:

• Crystal, D. (2012). Spell it Out: The Singular Story of English Spelling. London: Profile Books.
• Durkin, P. (2014). Philip Durkin. 2014. Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Fennell, B. A. (2001). A history of English: A sociolinguistic approach. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.
• Hogg, R. M., & Denison, D. (2006). A history of the English language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

If you are interested in grammaticalization, there are many papers you can access on the internet about both grammaticalization and degrammaticalization. I suggest you have a look at the work of Martin Hilpert http://members.unine.ch/martin.hilpert/

Books:

• Ledgeway A. & Roberts I. (Eds.) (2017), The Cambridge Handbook of Historical Syntax (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, p. I). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
• Narrog, H. & Heine, B. (Eds) (2011). The Oxford handbook of grammaticalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.  

About Jennifer Lowe

Jennifer is a tutor, teacher and teacher-trainer. She conducts academic research in Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University and is a regular speaker at International conferences on English Language Teaching and Linguistics. She is part of the ELT Research team’s freelancer network at Cambridge University Press and runs her own private language school near Milan – founded in 1996 and employing 8 teachers.

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