Creating a brain-friendly environment through coaching techniques

Nicole Malloy describes a project with adult learners that will resonate with teachers of younger children and teenagers.

I teach German to adults of the third age attending classes at an educational charity in Wilmslow, Cheshire, mainly for pleasure. The majority of my learners have some connection with a German-speaking country, quite often with family members living in either Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Some of my learners used to work in, or with, a German-speaking country, while others did German at University.

All of them wish to improve their language skills, but, like so many British people, doubt their own ability, often highlighting that their increasing age makes learning harder. I often hear: ‘I have learnt this so many times, but can never remember.’ or ‘For every word I learn new, I forget another.’ A never-ending worry about making mistakes also accompanies their learning. 

This combination of negative feelings I have observed inspired me to research brain-friendly learning, which places the focus on reducing the factors which might push the brain out of a relaxed but active state into an anxious one, and on creating an environment shaped by learners’ wishes, needs and interests; this is what brings in coaching techniques. 

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In preparation for my research, I studied two books in relation to the topic: Paling's "Neurolanguage Coaching" (2017) and Betham's "Coaching for Language Learning" (2018) as well as a number of articles.

I read about the importance of creating a brain-friendly learning atmosphere by attempting to reduce as many fear factors as possible. Key, according to the literature consulted, was for learners to maintain a calm state of mind.

I learnt  that asking learners to set themselves goals, to identify any hurdles which might get in the way of reaching the goals, and equally drawing their attention to existing knowledge and skills which might assist them, should be beneficial tools in focusing attention,  individualising learning and building confidence. 

Armed with these ideas, I started my project by asking learners to identify their goals, and identify any hurdles they perceived. Achieving these goals then formed the basis for my systematic planning of activities, while clearly naming the fear factors was the first step in overcoming them.  

I then gradually integrated specific techniques, making the intention of each activity clear so that learners could focus, and to take away any worry.

We tried:

• listening for what learners understand (as opposed to losing focus because of information missed or not understood)
• listening with the heart (dedicating full focus to the message heard without assuming or judging, but paying attention to the information conveyed including through means beyond the spoken word) in order to predict what would happen next, or to fill blanks, or to comment on what we heard.
• reading for detail and putting cut-up text into the correct order
• reading for full understanding of the content, or for particular information, reading aloud for rhythm or reading to stimulate thinking, e.g. interpretation or discussion or personal association.
• learning grammar through self-discovery. When we are exploring new grammatical structures I invited learners to tell me what they could see and to hypothesise possible explanations for what they have observed. For example, when studying the Perfect Tense in German, we would choose an examples from a text, ‘Ich habe ein Buch gelesen’ and comment on what we saw: ‘habe’+ a second verb which has ‘ge-‘ and is at the end of the sentence. We would attempt to translate in order to determine the tense and its use, comparing to English to highlight similarities and differences. My favourite questions became ‘What is happening here? What do you think?’ As these questions merely focus on what learners think and observe (not already, or necessarily, know) their anxiety is reduced. In addition, the thinking activity may increase engagement and build stronger memories.
• For speaking and writing we tried out the FAB approach (Betham, 2018):

F- Focus - on the message you wish to communicate (in speaking or writing)

A - Adapt - fill gaps, correct spelling, change words, check the grammar

B- Be the message - believe in it, focus it on your recipient and transmit it with conviction

(In the case of speaking the three steps need to be completed simultaneously.)

To reduce fear about speaking we have two separate types of activity: speaking for fluency (where the focus is on self-expression without interruption) and speaking for correctness. I found great benefit in the first option as learners have become so much more confident, and it is a pleasure to hear them having conversations in the target language.

To support the development of real life communication we also work on simplifying what learners want to say. Often the message they think of is complex (because they are capable of expressing this in their mother tongue). So how can we reduce it to a simpler essence that can be shared in German with the vocabulary and structures learners are familiar with?

In Writing I encouraged the learners to write their message focusing first on what they would like to communicate, and then revisiting it to refine vocabulary and grammar, but always keeping the reader in mind.

To reduce anxiety further, I offered my learners options in completing tasks such that they could attack them as they viewed best for themselves. I made sure ‘mistakes’ and questions were viewed as learning opportunities with a positive focus throughout, and I strongly discouraged comparison between learners.

Key new learning information was explored step-by-step, constantly linking it to existing knowledge, so as not to overload the brain, and to avoid confusion. 

Throughout I strongly encouraged learners to get involved in the design and flow of our sessions by bringing queries and making suggestions for topics which reflected their goals. 

From the feedback I received from my learners I learnt that they found the integration of these coaching strategies and techniques beneficial. They felt that the process increased their confidence in their abilities, and their motivation and offered them encouragement. Some said they felt they had progressed better and were more satisfied with themselves.

They saw that the process had assisted them in gaining clarity about their motivation, their strengths and areas for development, and given them focus. Setting goals and identifying hurdles created a basis for measuring progress. Teaching and learning was perceived to be more structured, more relevant, more responsive to learner needs and hence more inclusive.

They appreciated that the techniques and approaches supported their learning for the following reasons:

-     being very closely linked to the use of language in real life situations

-     representing a natural and more inclusive approach

-     providing a basis to understand the target language by giving insight into vocabulary and grammar, at times by comparison to English

-     teaching useful strategies, such as simplifying the message to focus on communication

-     maximising focus on the task in hand

-     inviting learners to engage in using the language without fear

-     supporting basic understanding and creating a basis to develop from

-     encouraging them to take risks, to just ‘go for it’.

Betham (2018) states that the approach would be best suited for B1 level learners, and some of my lower level learners did indeed feel that the techniques and strategies required a certain level of language competency.

(A small number also felt that techniques like listening and reading for gist, were not that useful for them as ‘they wanted to know everything’ !).

Overall I concluded that my project positively answered the research questions. The integration of coaching-based strategies and techniques increased learner confidence and facilitated more individualised learning. It structured teaching and learning and was combinable with more traditional approaches. Above all, it seems to have supported learner satisfaction as highlighted by many in their feedback questionnaires. So an overall positive outcome, which will certainly influence my teaching moving forward.

German at The City Lit

I really enjoy being a German tutor at The City Lit in Central London. The learners are all adults with various motivational reasons for wanting to learn German, from enjoyment to travelling or family needs.  Some are beginners with no German whatsoever, others have ‘rusty’ German from previous learning at school or college, whereas others are skilled linguists who are accomplished in one or more language and just want to learn another one. This creates a great class dynamic, everyone is focused and they support each other really well.

As a German teacher, this makes it a particularly interesting role: some learners need lots of encouragement and respond very positively to praise and feedback, others understand grammatical concepts very well and are able to apply their knowledge in a new context or help other learners to understand things more clearly. All are especially interested in learning about the cultural and everyday aspects of life in each of the German-speaking countries, so planning my lessons always involves looking for opportunities to bring in those cultural elements or idiomatic phrases that I know they will enjoy learning.

Neil Hillman (German Tutor, The City Lit)

Here Sahar Y.I. Alshobaki (PhD student, University of Roehampton) shares her research in progress on her approach to teaching Arabic by starting the engagement with a new student by asking them to create their personalised Learner’s Vision.

 Alshobaki Arabic as one

A recording of the celebration event 2021 for Express Yourself in Lockdown is available here: https://www.britishcouncil.org/school-resources/languages/express-yourself-lockdown 

Express Yourself in Lockdown was organised by the British Council and ALL with our cultural partners in early 2021.

Language learners of all ages can benefit from awareness of linguistics: https://www.tes.com/news/teaching-linguistics-improves-language-skills

ALL members might also like to read this article : https://www.all-languages.org.uk/languages-today/languages-today-extended-content/how-do-we-talk-about-grammar-and-texts/

https://www.all-languages.org.uk/secondary/clie-and-uklo/

Click here for Exploiting video resources.

Songs are attractive and versatile resources to use with learners of all ages and abilities. The key to using them to support language learning is in the interaction teachers devise. Here are some ideas from Steven Fawkes.   

Harmer Parr’s  Best Ten things to hang on to …

Harmer Parr was a French teacher, then Adviser and later HMI, now retired. He responded to ‘Our Best Ten things to hang on to’ in LT 38 by contributing this: 

It’s been a long while since I’ve thought about this, but …

General things first: 

1 I’d teach more verbs, from the very first minutes, not as grammar but as vocabulary. If approaches tend to focus on a set of nouns related to a topic, it leads to a pocketful of words with no way of stringing them together into a sentence. I’d like to get learners  talking in sentences from the beginning. I remember that phase when giving a whole sentence answer to a question, usually using a lot of the words from the question, was frowned on because it wasn’t ‘natural’….  as if learning a language in a classroom is natural.

2 Use symbols and sign language to build up oral stories. I once saw a bloke who taught by stapling sugar paper round the walls and then building up a story on it, using pictures and agreed symbols to stand for words not representable by pictures. He built up the story with the class, recapping it the whole time, and at the end of the lesson got the kids to tell the story from the pictures. As a further refinement of that, he later dropped some of the symbols and then the pictures out, so that pupils could tell the story from memory.

3 Going on from that, using pictures or words, teach the class to talk from notes. This stage can be reached by composing a whole text with the class and then dropping words out progressively, until you are left with a set of single words to act as prompts. This is a great way to prepare for talks and presentations by the kids. The activity can lead to writing the original story from the notes.

4 Teach vocabulary guessing strategies. A guide to how to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words by a series of check questions: ‘Is it like English? Do the words around it or the sentence as a whole give a clue? Leading to teaching some simple etymology: l changing to u, c changing to ch, b changing to v, French circumflex meaning s dropping out, and so on, encouraging kids to try the change to see if it helps.

Brian Page once wrote a couple of little books I used in the classroom at Sudbury (in the early ‘80s) about how to teach reading. They were excellent, and hardly used at all anywhere. A good example of ideas getting by-passed when the latest whizzy scheme comes up. It would be worth as well having a look at the supporting publications for languages produced for the National Curriculum. There were a lot of excellent ideas in there, which were maybe never read.

5 An idea: teach the imperfect tense by means of alibis. What were you doing when the crime was committed? I was watching TV in my room. Etc. A good crime to kick it off helps.

6 An idea: teach ‘être’ verbs by moving a little character up and down the shaft in a large hotel. He went up to the fifth floor, down to the second floor, went in a bedroom, came out of the bedroom, etc. More interesting if there are activities, or people, or strange creatures in the different rooms. I used to have a little cardboard cut-out figure to put on the OHP, which I guess don’t exist any more, but one day when I was ready to do the activity Monsieur Machin had gone missing. I screwed up a ball of paper and called it ‘les aventures de Blob’. Poor Machin was redundant after that. Il est mort, in fact.

(Finally, a humorous suggestion for teachers of a certain age, and fans of Eddie Izzard.)

If all else fails, get a series of pictures showing a monkey stealing a picnic and someone falling in the river as a result. It’s an absolute winner. The story could start: ‘Par un beau jour d’été, le soleil brillait dans un ciel bleu, sans nuages’. When days start like that, the fall into the river is inevitable, so the only proviso is that it might spoil the surprise when the splash comes.

Yu Bei from the ALL Mandarin Zone volunteer group has shared a link to a website with a range of Powerpoint templates  

https://tekhnologic.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/10-powerpoint-games/?fbclid=IwAR2p_lxssdQS83NLBIoXX8Kd3SAKCDssJUQyr_5G5xZdR0iRxZOqLWgIpW4 which she recommends. 

A forthcoming report on research findings on the economic value of languages skills in SMEs

Lifelong Education Commission
https://www.respublica.org.uk/event/lifelong-education-commission-launch/

Twenty skills
https://www.thebalancecareers.com/list-of-soft-skills-2063770#:~:text=Soft%20skills%20are%20the%20skills,keep%20or%20promote%20an%20employee.

Soft skills
https://languagelearnersjournal.com/2017/05/12/24-soft-skills-required-for-language-learning/

Top ten reasons
https://www.leadwithlanguages.org/why-learn-languages/top-ten-reasons-to-learn-languages/#:~:text=The%20many%20cognitive%20benefits%20of,multitask%2C%20and%20better%20listening%20skills.

Boost your career
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2015/nov/09/all-talk-five-ways-to-use-language-skills-to-boost-your-career

DfE employer skills survey 2019
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/employer-skills-survey-2019  

Extract from the Queen’s Speech May 2021

(Page 50)

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill

“Legislation will support a lifetime skills guarantee to enable flexible access to high quality education and training throughout people’s lives.”

The purpose of the Bill is to:

• Legislate for landmark reforms that will transform post-16 education and training, make skills more readily available and get more people into work as set out in the Government’s Skills for Jobs White Paper.
• Enable people to access flexible funding for Higher or Further Education, bringing Universities and Further Education colleges closer together, and removing the bias against technical education.
• Deliver the Prime Minister’s new Lifetime Skills Guarantee, as part of our blueprint for a post-16 education system that will ensure everyone, no matter where they live or their background, can gain the skills they need to progress in work at any stage of their lives.
• Increase productivity, support growth industries and give individuals opportunities to progress in their careers.
• Strengthen the powers of the Office for Students to take action to address low quality higher education provision.

The main benefits of the Bill would be:

• Offering adults across the country the opportunity to retrain in later life through the Lifetime Skills Guarantee, helping them to gain in-demand skills and open up further job opportunities.
• Realigning the system around the needs of employers so that people are trained for the skills gaps that exist now and in the future, in sectors the economy needs including construction, digital, clean energy and manufacturing.
• Improving the quality of training available by making sure that providers are better run, qualifications are better regulated, and that providers’ performance can be effectively assessed.

 The main elements of the Bill are:

• Putting employers at the heart of the post-16 skills system through the Skills Accelerator, by enabling employers and providers to collaborate to develop skills plans aimed at ensuring local skills provision meets local needs.
• Introducing the Lifelong Loan Entitlement, which will give individuals access to the equivalent of up to four years’ worth of student loans for level 4-6 qualifications that they can use flexibly across their lifetime, at colleges as well as universities.
• Strengthening the system of accountability by extending existing powers for the Secretary of State for Education to intervene where colleges have failed to meet local needs, to direct structural change where required to secure improvement, and by amending the regulation of post-16 education and training providers to ensure quality.
• Strengthening the ability of the Office for Students to assess and regulate Higher Education provision in England, ensuring that they can regulate in line with minimum expectations of quality.

Territorial extent and application

• The provisions in this Bill will extend UK wide. Most provisions apply to England, however some also apply to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

Key facts

• Only 10 per cent of adults aged 20-45 hold a higher technical (level 4-5) qualification as their highest qualification, compared to 20 per cent in Germany and 34 per cent in Canada.
• Only four per cent of young people achieve a qualification at higher technical level by the age of 25, compared to the 33 per cent who get a degree or above.
• New findings have shown that more people would now prefer their child to gain a vocational qualification ahead of a university degree.
• A third (34 per cent) of working age graduates are not in high skilled employment.
• In 2019 employers were unable to fill a quarter of all vacant positions (214,000 vacancies) because they could not find people with the right skills.
• Skills shortages account for 36 per cent of all construction vacancies, and 48 percent of all Manufacturing and the Skilled Trades vacancies.
• Men with a higher technical (level 4) qualification earn on average £5,100 more at age 30 than those with a degree (level 6).
• 80 per cent of the 2030 workforce are already in the workforce today – so reskilling the existing workforce is a key opportunity.
• The Government is investing significant amounts into further education - £1.5 billion to improve our college estate; £2.5 billion (£3 billion when including Barnett funding for devolved administrations) in the National Skills Fund; and £650 million extra into 16-19 further education.
• The Skills Bill forms the legislative underpinning for the reforms set out in the White Paper, ‘Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Skills for Opportunity and Growth’ which was published on 21 January 2021.

From ‘Background Briefing Notes’ https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/queens-speech-2021