Ralf Hoelzer-Germann

Teacher and Teacher Trainer

For My English Teacher Trainees

In the following I would like to guide you through your traineeship by...

1. letting you know what I consider to be essential for any lesson planning;

2. giving you concrete examples of - as I hope - interesting, student-oriented and intellectually challenging teaching units;

3. making transparent to you what I am going to pay attention at while visiting you in your English lessons and how I am going to counsel and finally assess your performances;

4. dealing with relevant issues as far as English teaching and learning are concerned (including lots of input and materials to be uploaded)

Please also take a look at my "General Pedagogy Section" and the part designed for my English classes. There you might find lots of interesting materials to be downloaded.

1. Intro: My View On Effective Lesson Planning

To me the starting point for any lesson planning is that the teacher needs to put him- or herself in the place of the learners who are likely to ask themselves the question: “What's the point in learning this particular content?“ If teachers can't find a reasonable answer to that question they will sooner or later have to face bored students and maybe disruptive behaviour in class, too. However, that does not mean that the teacher needs to desperately try to keep up with the current interests or trends of his or her students (which are likely to change very quickly anyway).

Here is an example of what I mean...

To me it is all about asking the right questions on a particular content at the beginning any lesson planning process. It means digging pretty deep as far as the didactical relevance of a certain topic is concerned. If, for instance, a teacher wants to deal with the pros and cons of social networks a good question for a teaching unit here is not “Can you make real friends on the internet?“ (because teenagers already know that they cannot!) but rather “What is it that makes social networks so attractive to especially young people though everybody knows that it's just a virtual world with lots of boasting, nerve-racking self-promotion and false pretention?“ Finding answers to such a question could, for example, be the starting point for any lesson planning dealing with the pros and cons of social networks. My tip here: Teachers should ask intelligent questions on a certain topic first (maybe from the view point of their learners) and immediately try to give answers to these questions. After that there is enough time to think about suitable contents, media and methods.

The material to be uploaded here gives you an idea how to start any lesson planning with a didactically relevant question or statement (which is the centre of any teaching unit) before moving on with the next steps (choice of contents, media and methods).

And what are relevant questions teachers might ask themselves when they check out what might be of importance for adolescent learners? Here's an example of what kind of questions teenagers might have in mind while dealing with the overall topic "The World of Work" (here: a vocational school, secondary level; students are 15 or 16 years old):

2. Concrete Lesson Planning: The Different Phases of a Teaching Unit

Language learning at school takes place in different phases which provide for teacher- and learner-centred phases and acitivities alike. A double period or a teaching unit of a few more double periods usually starts with an intro-phase arousing learner's interest for the topic (maybe also by irritating students) so that questions are being raised, and continues with a language & content input (so-called demonstration phase because the teacher presents a text, story, video-clip, song etc. which needs to be understood by learners) before it continues with a productive phase (participation phase) in which students are expected to deal creatively with the given content (in order to find answers to the given questions or to solve a problem). This is a very learner-oriented phase (in contrast to the previous and the following phases). The "climax" of the teaching unit comes when students present their learning outcome (presentation phase: for example, through presentations of different group results, a gallery walk, role plays, a panel discussion etc.) and teacher and students altogether discuss these results before the teacher makes learners dig deeper into the content (through questions or new, controversial input) (= discussion phase). The teaching unit is rounded off as soon as the learning process is being evaluated (evaluation phase) and the teacher asks the students if initial questions have been answered / the problem has been solved / the challenge has been met and what has to be done next (transfer phase).

These are the classical phases of a teaching unit and the materials to be uploaded below will give you concrete examples by paying special attention at the different language levels of learners (= individuali-zation of learning!).

Remember! Teaching young people is a little bit like being on stage. Therefore a good lesson planning builds up suspense (in order to arouse interests), leads to a climax (when learning is probably most effective) and ends with a conclusion of what has been learned and where to go to next. The following material that you can upload shows this pretty clearly!

3. What My English Teacher Trainees Need to Know

The following materials to be downloaded are especially relevant for my teacher trainees because they show what is being expected from them during their 21-months-traineeship.

Visitors and teachers who are primarily interested in teaching materials please scroll down to No 4.

Now that you have already started teaching your own classes and the time has come to plan my visits as your teacher trainer I want to inform you about your assignments:

a) Lesson Planning

Here are my recommendations for your lesson planning. They are in German:

b) Best-Practice-Examples (Lesson Planning) of Some of My Former Teacher Trainees

c) Different Ways to Give Your 10-Minutes-Reflection After Your Lesson a Good Structure

The following materials give you an idea how to give your reflection after your lesson a good structure:

-> Elementary Level

-> Intermediate Level

Students might want to give their refection a structure like this (written on prompt cards)

-> Advanced Level

d) Assessment of Your Teaching Performances as an English Teacher Trainee

The following assessment tools to be uploaded show you my assessment criteria for your English lessons:

e) The Written Paper in English

Here are my recommendations and assessment criteriafor your written paper in English ("Pädagogische Facharbeit")

f) Second State Exam

Here are some typical cases that I designed in the past. They are based on the individual portfolio of the examinee. In your exam you have got 30 minutes time to prepare the case, then 15 minutes time to present your findings before there is another period of 45 minutes when the exam board asks you questions related to that particular case and to your teaching experiences:

Here are my assessment criteria for your oral exam which is the last exam on that very long day of the Second State Eexam:

f) Literature

Here is list of relevant literature with my individual recommendations.

4. English Teaching and Learning: Relevant Issues - Tips - Creative Ideas

Welcome back, my experienced colleagues?

Now this section here is for English teacher trainees and also more experienced colleagues. The materials you can upload here are related to different challenges English teachers have to face while teaching a foreign language. I hope that the materials here do not only raise awareness for these challenges but also provide you with relevant practical tips and ideas how to teach English more effectively.

a) Communication: Languages are there to be spoken! But how do you get especially reserved or weaker learners talk?

The first and probably most important challenge for any language teacher is how to make it possible that your learners communicate more in the target language. Therefore it is interesting to put oneself in the place of the learners themselves first and ask WHY some people prefer to keep a low profile in class when it comes to communicating in another language.

Let me get this straight first: Hearing an utterance and immediately referring to what someone has just said is a big challenge for the human brain. And this is even more so the case if spontaneous communication is required in a foreign language! The poster that I recently developed hopefully shows the complex process of perceiving a message and immediately responding to it:

So, what it basically comes down to is that we need to give especially our weaker learners MORE TIME to respond in the target language by...

- being at least patient as a teacher (That is why we should avoid picking the first students who raise their hands to respond to our questions. I know that waiting a bit longer and coping with the silence is not always easy.);

- picking them first whenever you ask easier questions. Easier questions are, for example, "What can you see in the picture"? "Who can read out the task? Please do so!", "Who are the main characters in the short story?" etc.;

- letting them perhaps take notes first before they are expected to say something;

- providing them with special discussion phrases visualized in the classroom and which they are expected to make use of ("Please take a look at the phrases on the wall. Take you time. Which phrases can you use in order to say that...? Please use them now");

- letting them work in smaller groups so that they are not exposed to an audience of 25 people whenever they want to say something. I recommend making them use special language tickets during the group work which they are required to put on the table after having used them. The group is expected to give each group member a feedback on how much every single group member communicated in English during the group work. That is how you can also promote self-responsibilty among your learners.

Next you will find some useful methods to make your learners speak more English in class:

Of course, there are lots of more methods (see my literature above).

b) Grammar: "Can't we do more grammar, Mr Hoelzer-Germann?"

"Yes, of course, we can", and my students are definitely right about it (but probably not the way they think)!

I hold the view that grammar (and vocabulary) teaching and learning must be part of almost every English lesson. Sometimes I wonder why grammar and vocabulary teaching and learning seem to be regarded as less important on upper-secondary level as if there was no longer any further need for focus-on-form phases in the classroom after six or seven years of learning English (and dealing with grammar) at school! However, what my students are likely to have in mind is that grammar teaching and learning have to take place rather isolated from the rest that happens in a language course. They expect some sort of pattern-and-drill grammar teaching and learning in the hope that if they just fill out correctly enough gaps in grammar exercises they will be able to transfer their "knowledge" to new (stupid) "fill-in-the-gap" or other exercises.

I am of the opinion that grammar and vocabulary teaching and learning need to be content-based since no reasonable communication on Earth takes place just for the sake of producing grammatically and semantically correct but stupid utterances! Therefore, teachers must provide for interesting, cognitively stimulating, student-oriented, intellectually challenging (in the sense of problem-solving) and life-like settings that automatically include grammatical structures to be examined in class. And this is exactly where the problems begin because most English textbooks for vocational full-time students lack these meaningful, content-based settings in which grammatical features are being revised or newly introduced. As a consequence even ambitious teachers are likely to stick to the traditional way of teaching grammar because they simply lack the time to come up with their own highly meaningful, content-based settings (including good exercises!) whenever there is a grammatical feature to be dealt with in class. So there is still much to be done!

However, I want to give you some examples how grammar can be "done" in class in a meaningful and content-based way. So please check it out...

Let us assume you're dealing with topic "The American Dream" or "Love and Friendship". This example here is advanced level. Find out yourself what the particular grammatical structure is you have to occupy yourself with. Of you go...

Sorry, I could not find my original document anymore, so I had to take some pictures. The topic here could also be "The American Dream" or "Love and Friendship". Tenses are being revised here through the pop song "Picture" by Kid Rock and Cheryl Crow.