In celebration of the publication of Discussions and More Second edition, a fully updated and revised edition of Penny Ur’s classic handbook, Discussions that Work. We joined Penny Ur for a cup of coffee and a chat at the Cambridge office to find out what inspired Penny to update the handbook and get some top tips!
Penny, your latest book, Discussions and More Second edition, is a new edition of a title that was first published over 30 years ago. How has life in the ELT classroom changed since then, and how does the book reflect that?
I don’t think it’s changed that much, essentially. Some things remain the same through the generations, like the problem of getting students to talk in a language which is not their own. That’s the first big problem I came up against in my own teaching (and tried to solve, but I’m sure we’ll talk about that a little more later).
One difference has been the growth of the communicative approach. It’s a lot more important for teachers now to do a lot of talking and listening as well as fluent reading and writing activities – rather than focusing on grammar and vocabulary. In a sense, that has worked in my favour because it’s become something that people are really interested in. As I said at the beginning, though, I think more has stayed the same than has changed.
In the book, you talk about the importance of motivating students to take an active role in classroom discussions. Do you have any particular suggestions on how to motivate students, particularly reluctant speakers?
That’s the big problem: students who don’t want to talk, whether because they’re very weak in English, because they haven’t got any confidence, because they’re afraid of making mistakes, or they’re just shy. That was really what got me writing this book: the problems that I encountered. There were some students who were talking and participating, and others who just sat at the back and didn’t say anything, didn’t want to talk for whatever reason, or if they did, then they spoke their mother tongue.
There are a few basic things that you can do to help them. Most importantly, make sure that what you’re asking them to do is well within their ability and clearly so: you want to make them think, “I can do this!” Very often it’s something as simple as basing a talking activity on something they’ve learned by heart, so that most of it they can just come out with immediately. Use a dialogue they’ve learned by heart, that they can improvise from or expand on. If they’re very unconfident, they can just keep to the basic dialogue.
That way, they start from a position of confidence: they know what they have to say, and they know they can say it. The big advantage of using material they’ve learned by heart is that they know they’re not going to make a mistake, and they don’t need to use mother tongue.
Another is to make sure that even if they’re improvising their own speech, the vocabulary and grammar they’re being asked to produce is something you know that they know. For example, describing pictures or answering questions, where I know they have got the language and they can do it very easily.
A third point is not demanding very long stretches of speech. I don’t want them just to say yes or no – I want a bit more than that – but at the same time, if they come up with a sentence, I’m not going to ask for long speeches, because that’s too challenging and discouraging. If they know that they can just say a short phrase or a sentence, as long as it’s meaningful, and I’ll be pleased, then that’s fine.
I guess that’s closer to real life as well – in situations other than interviews, you’re not generally going to have to be speaking for long periods of time.
Exactly – so it’s both more authentic and easier for the student.
You can read part 2 of our interview with Penny here.