It’s been a long time! This blog post comes more than a year after the last one, and a few things have changed. You’ll notice a new site address, as well as a few other changes on the site. I’m also qualified with a shiny Trinity DipTESOL (yay!). This post takes its inspiration from a couple of places – an inspired piece of advice from trainer and author Lindsay Clandfield, along with Elbow song Lippy Kids – and asks a simple (if odd) question: are you building bicycles or rocket ships in your lessons?

For many candidates sitting the Unit 1 Written Paper, the first assessment in the Trinity DipTESOL, the part that fills them with the deepest sense of dread is the grammar section. Even though it only makes up 40% of the assessment, Trinity say candidates must pass this section to complete Unit 1 successfully. Theoretically any aspect of grammar or lexis could be covered in the five questions, which candidates usually need to show depth of understanding, knowledge of learners’ experience, and demonstrate how to effectively deal with it in the classroom. There are five questions – one is skippable – and around an hour to answer them before you need move on to the section 2 and 3 essays. The trick is showing the examiner the essential information; give them enough to prove that you know what you know and can teach it well. And then move on.

We prepared for these questions with hour-long tutorials called Grammar Slammers. There’s a reference in there somewhere that I don’t really understand, but they’re essentially an hour of fast-paced exam practice. Dissect the question. Brainstorm your answer. And then move on. The slammers are led by Lindsay Clandfield, whose infectious passion for the English language reminded me of the best teachers and lecturers from school and university – you know, the ones who inspire you to do something you love. Clandfield’s advice about tackling the Unit 1 grammar questions: keep it simple, keep it brief. Build a bicycle, not a rocket ship. 

It’s advice we could all learn from, and I reckon it goes well beyond the confines of a test of a teacher’s grammatical knowledge. Within my experience on the rest of the Dip, it kept coming back as a gentle reminder of how to deal with other aspects of the assessment. A year later I failed my first assessed lesson in the Unit 4 teaching practice for the precise reason that I had crammed too much into my plan in a vain attempt to show my tutors everything I knew. The final assessment, the big external one, was a very different affair. I was certainly ambitious by taking cleft sentences as the target language for a mixed group of A2 adults but kept the lesson itself simple enough that afforded us time to explore and use them. Build a bicycle, not a rocket ship. 

My current work is taking the topic of my Unit 2 Developmental Research Project – building learners’ reading skills – and exploring ways we can effectively integrate this into an exam-focused curriculum so that learners become more confident and autonomous readers as well as better exam candidates. The approach I’m taking starts small. Learners break texts up and work on them as microtexts. They slowly build in new strategies and skills. Question by question, text by text, they’re getting there. Trying to do too much at once would make it overwhelming and unusable for learners and teachers alike; it’s the simplicity that seems to be making it achievable. 

If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve got a grammar lesson coming up in your coursebook soon. My next one is expecting me to use a complex and irrelevant text on recycling to teach the passive to a group of first year B1s, and it’s a rocket in the making. They’re supposed to read, understand, decode, and answer questions. Then they must find the awkwardly framed examples of the passive, match the rules, complete the sentences, transform some other sentences, correct some more sentences, and then write their own sentences. All for a structure that is like their own L1, not especially complex grammatically, and straightforward to personalise. 

I reckon that the more straightforward our lessons are, the more potential our learners have to take the language, personalise it, and use it. The next time you’re planning, think about how you can strip back the tasks to keep them simple. Build a bicycle, not a rocket ship. 

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