Making a study plan - time
How much time do you have to work on Delta Module One each week ?
When can you study and where (no TV, no music and preferably no media alerts, not even mail) ? No, you are not the exception that can multi task. If you think that then you are just fooling yourself because switching tasks makes you slower in and worse at all the tasks (Kirschner & De Bruyckere : 2017).
Think about this proactively. If you just wait till you have free time it won’t happen (other stuff will always be more urgent). Actually block time off in your diary that you are going to use for studying. If you don’t use a diary, start a study diary from now on. Block out work hours, lesson prep hours and other time you have already booked up for different things, then think about where you are going to fit in at least ten hours a week.
Don’t wait for entire free days as for most people that is a luxury they don’t have very often. Think about a normal week and work out where you can fit time in. If you do have free time and don’t have large commitments of any other kind (like family) to fit into it, then choose some chunks of time (e.g. Tuesday and Thursday evening 7 – 10, Saturday morning 9-12 and Sunday afternoon 1-6). Planning it in in this way with a schedule means you have to find a reason not to do it when the time comes (as opposed to having to find the motivation to do it at all). Write it into somewhere like Google calendar which will automatically remind you when a study slot is coming up.
If you have, let’s say, two jobs and children you are going to have to think a lot more creatively about how you can carve time out of your week. Think about when you can double tasks up. Can you study while you commute ? use coffee breaks ? lunch hours ? during homework supervision ? while you are waiting for the kids at swim practice ? Mark even these kinds of times into your study plan. If you are about to say that you have no idea how you spend your time in an average week then you need to make a plan to find out. So it might look like this … study slots are pale yellow
Make a list of tasks you would like to get done in the week (and have some small and easy ones and some larger ones and don’t forget to include doing the self study session notes, the course projects and individual exam practice etc on the list). This means when you get to a study window you have fixed you can choose something from the list to match how much time you have and how energetic you feel.
When you add anything new to your list of things you feel you need to know about, decide on some tasks you can to do to work on it.
You might be thinking this all looks far too regimented, but without talking control of your time you will find ten weeks have passed, the exam is looming and you have done very little.
You might also be thinking that it looks like too much work. Then ask yourself how long you are prepared to take to get ready for the exam (you don’t have to do the one following your course), but also ask yourself for how long you want your free time and your social life to be impacted by this ? It might be worth clearing your diary of some other things in order to get to grips with Module One in ten weeks.
At the end of each week, look at what you actually did achieve and whether you could have done any more and how ? What will you alter in next week's schedule ? Or in your overall approach ? How could you change your timing / schedule to make things work better ?
Making a study plan - tasks
What kinds of tasks should you be doing ?
You need to gather information (looking at books and web sites, reading).
But you also need to be able to retrieve and apply it in the exam.
You have to read to find things out, but don’t just read.
A lot of what is in here are ideas from the Learning Scientists blog and the book Make it Stick by Brown, Roediger & McDaniel.
Both of these sources (and others – I’ll add more when I get more time as there were several more books I wanted to read and blogs that had useful tips in the same area) say research shows reading, re-reading and highlighting is the least effective study method (and they quote research to prove that it is also the most often used).
So if reading, re-reading and highlighting is not effective, then what is ? Both Brown and the learning scientists quote research that says the following things are more effective
1.Retrieval (making yourself remember the information, actually retrieving it from your memory)
2.Spacing (going back to the information regularly after you have had time to forget it a bit)
3.Interleaving (not doing one thing for a long time, but mixing what you do)
4.Elaboration (making your own models / maps of ideas)
And the learning scientists say also
5.Dual coding (making visual connections to things)
6.Concrete examples
So what does that mean in terms of what to do when you study ?
Retrieval – don’t just read, test yourself.
Retrieval example with an article
For example one useful article is ‘The Lexical Approach – a journey without maps’ which is up on Scott Thornbury’s web site. (How to decide what is and what is not useful to read is going to have to be another page another day).
I read through the whole thing quickly, noted the headings, then tried to capture the sense of each sub section in as short a paragraph as I could. The result of that is here and my summary is about 600 words in place of 3500-4000.
That’s not retrieval, that’s just reading.
But now I have the key to use for retrieval. Somewhere else I list the headings
Masses of words
Chunks
Two systems
A lexical syllabus
A lexical approach
In search of a theory
Dangerous liaisons
Lively debate
And one or two days later I pick up the headings and try and write a sentence or two about each heading. It is that act of struggling slightly to remember that makes learning stick. If it feels easy, it probably isn’t having any effect.
Or … when I read the first time I don’t write a summary, I write comprehension questions to myself e.g.
Retrieving the information is the important part – it makes the track for retrieving that information again at some future point stronger and easier.
This looks counterintuitive because it is going to take you a lot longer than reading and highlighting would, so you can’t read so much, but what you do read you will know a lot better. If you are reading a book, you would make this system more concise. This article is quite hard work because he assumes you know a lot of things (PPP, general attitudes at different times, some of what Lewis wrote). Most books are taking a more direct approach to telling you information so you should be able to write a paragraph for a chapter quite often, rather than a paragraph for every sub heading. Or pick and choose more carefully what you do and don’t need to read (when I was reading ‘Make it Stick’ yesterday I quickly realised the anecdotes in between the research points could be skimmed). But do something to collect the information in a framework that you can use to go back and test yourself with. You could even do both the headings (or chapter names) and the questions.
Retrieval example with names, terms, lists etc.
Some kinds of information you need to know in more detail for the Delta Module One exam. When you start work on the phonology: sounds notes (or come to the session), you will quickly get the message that people think about and organise the sounds largely in terms of how they are made and where they are made. So it helps you to understand the whole system if you just learn the places of articulation.
There is one good clear diagram from Aston University here.
But if you use Google images you will find loads .. e.g. here
And when you go through those I was going to say print one or two that have only the letters on and not the words, so you can test yourself, but then the first one I clicked on here turned out to be an online self test, so you have the choice of also doing it on paper or on screen.
Then once you know where the articulators are you can start thinking about the manner of articulation and some of those charts you see on the web and in books will start to be a lot more helpful.
So the main message here is, whether it is names of things, definitions, articles or books, don’t just read it, but do something to collect the information in a way that means you can test yourself on it later.
It takes longer but it is proven to be a lot more effective (Roediger & Karpicke 2006, though I knew to look for it from the Make it Stick book)– would you rather be aware of a lot but very superficially (having read through it fast and now only being able to recognise it when you see it) or actually know less, but know it well enough to use it in the exam (be able to talk about things yourself) ?
Spacing works hand in hand with retrieval
Spacing is the fact that you need to come back to information. So if you did the reading and made the notes you need to work out when to come back to them and remind yourself to do so. The Learning Scientists call this spaced practice and their poster on how to do it is here.
This is where the study schedule comes in. The first reading or collecting of things takes a long time – maybe a whole morning, but then you should look at the schedule and in two days and then in two weeks make a note to do your retrieval practice for X (the places of articulation, the lexical approach article or say the Gairns and Redman book Working with Words – note how the first of those would take you two minutes, the second might be ten and the last would be longer, so choose according to the time you have).
Also don’t stop when you think you know it – read the abstract, only the abstract in this article (Karpicke 2009) to see why you should have a long term plan of when to look at something again even if you think you know it.
Interleaving also works with retrieval and spacing
This one has less research to support it in terms of language study (there is plenty of support for it in maths and in practical skills). So if maths students work different types of problems in a jumbled order that has been shown to have a stronger and longer lasting effect than working on one type for a long time then another type for a long time, but Housman and Kornell (2014) found that mixing up subjects when studying flashcards didn’t help students retain the information better so with the wide range of things you need to study for the exam it is harder to see how to apply it to any great extent.
The idea is that you shouldn’t just do one small thing till you are perfect then do the next small thing as you will almost never be asked in tests or in life to do that one small thing in that way. You need to be able to do / apply any number of small things to new situations, so when you are learning or when you are retrieving you should mix things up. The best parallel idea I could find for studying anything for Delta Module One was this …
If you are trying to retrieve the places of articulation, don’t go through the same list in the same order every time. Sometimes go from the diagram, sometimes from the words, sometimes name the places in a different order.
Elaboration
Making new meanings, organising information in new ways, connecting ideas, applying ideas to other contexts.
Practical ideas
Applying knowledge to other areas and looking at it in new ways is the single most effective way of studying.
Disadvantages of elaboration …
You have to come up with more ideas yourself (though if you do, post in the forums, others might join in).
There are no answer keys so you also have to trust your own judgement. Having said that though, asking a question on the lines of ‘is scanning more top-down processing because of knowing where to look for a particular word or more bottom up because of actually only looking for a specific physical pattern of letters or numbers’ is likely to get an intelligent and engaged reaction from other teachers and tutors that will lead to a dialogue where you have to articulate ideas, say why you think something, where you read something – remember you need to find your own voice. This is exactly the kind of practice you need.
Dual coding
This is NOT about learning styles. They have largely been debunked (we run a session on language teaching myths in Module Two if you want the reading and research for that one).
But some research suggests that for everyone combining visuals and language has more impact than just one or the other. If you want more detail on the science behind that link here. But intuitively it seems to fit with the other things. What kind of visuals ? Well some things fit with pictures (places of articulation again, but then also the visual presentation of the sounds within a chart that has places along one axis and manner along the other). Other things you could make time lines of (history of ELT, which approaches came first, second etc ? what had an impact on what ?).
Can you put the information into a chart ? some kind of infographic ? a cartoon ?
It won’t work for everything, but when it does work it gives you one more tool to use.
It also gives you one more way of transferring information into and out of different formats. Then you can use that for retrieval practice. There are some practical examples from history and science notes here.
So if you used all these ideas together you could end up with a study notebook with weekly pages like this …
How much time do you have to work on Delta Module One each week ?
When can you study and where (no TV, no music and preferably no media alerts, not even mail) ? No, you are not the exception that can multi task. If you think that then you are just fooling yourself because switching tasks makes you slower in and worse at all the tasks (Kirschner & De Bruyckere : 2017).
Think about this proactively. If you just wait till you have free time it won’t happen (other stuff will always be more urgent). Actually block time off in your diary that you are going to use for studying. If you don’t use a diary, start a study diary from now on. Block out work hours, lesson prep hours and other time you have already booked up for different things, then think about where you are going to fit in at least ten hours a week.
Don’t wait for entire free days as for most people that is a luxury they don’t have very often. Think about a normal week and work out where you can fit time in. If you do have free time and don’t have large commitments of any other kind (like family) to fit into it, then choose some chunks of time (e.g. Tuesday and Thursday evening 7 – 10, Saturday morning 9-12 and Sunday afternoon 1-6). Planning it in in this way with a schedule means you have to find a reason not to do it when the time comes (as opposed to having to find the motivation to do it at all). Write it into somewhere like Google calendar which will automatically remind you when a study slot is coming up.
If you have, let’s say, two jobs and children you are going to have to think a lot more creatively about how you can carve time out of your week. Think about when you can double tasks up. Can you study while you commute ? use coffee breaks ? lunch hours ? during homework supervision ? while you are waiting for the kids at swim practice ? Mark even these kinds of times into your study plan. If you are about to say that you have no idea how you spend your time in an average week then you need to make a plan to find out. So it might look like this … study slots are pale yellow
Make a list of tasks you would like to get done in the week (and have some small and easy ones and some larger ones and don’t forget to include doing the self study session notes, the course projects and individual exam practice etc on the list). This means when you get to a study window you have fixed you can choose something from the list to match how much time you have and how energetic you feel.
When you add anything new to your list of things you feel you need to know about, decide on some tasks you can to do to work on it.
You might be thinking this all looks far too regimented, but without talking control of your time you will find ten weeks have passed, the exam is looming and you have done very little.
You might also be thinking that it looks like too much work. Then ask yourself how long you are prepared to take to get ready for the exam (you don’t have to do the one following your course), but also ask yourself for how long you want your free time and your social life to be impacted by this ? It might be worth clearing your diary of some other things in order to get to grips with Module One in ten weeks.
At the end of each week, look at what you actually did achieve and whether you could have done any more and how ? What will you alter in next week's schedule ? Or in your overall approach ? How could you change your timing / schedule to make things work better ?
Making a study plan - tasks
What kinds of tasks should you be doing ?
You need to gather information (looking at books and web sites, reading).
But you also need to be able to retrieve and apply it in the exam.
You have to read to find things out, but don’t just read.
A lot of what is in here are ideas from the Learning Scientists blog and the book Make it Stick by Brown, Roediger & McDaniel.
Both of these sources (and others – I’ll add more when I get more time as there were several more books I wanted to read and blogs that had useful tips in the same area) say research shows reading, re-reading and highlighting is the least effective study method (and they quote research to prove that it is also the most often used).
So if reading, re-reading and highlighting is not effective, then what is ? Both Brown and the learning scientists quote research that says the following things are more effective
1.Retrieval (making yourself remember the information, actually retrieving it from your memory)
2.Spacing (going back to the information regularly after you have had time to forget it a bit)
3.Interleaving (not doing one thing for a long time, but mixing what you do)
4.Elaboration (making your own models / maps of ideas)
And the learning scientists say also
5.Dual coding (making visual connections to things)
6.Concrete examples
So what does that mean in terms of what to do when you study ?
Retrieval – don’t just read, test yourself.
Retrieval example with an article
For example one useful article is ‘The Lexical Approach – a journey without maps’ which is up on Scott Thornbury’s web site. (How to decide what is and what is not useful to read is going to have to be another page another day).
I read through the whole thing quickly, noted the headings, then tried to capture the sense of each sub section in as short a paragraph as I could. The result of that is here and my summary is about 600 words in place of 3500-4000.
That’s not retrieval, that’s just reading.
But now I have the key to use for retrieval. Somewhere else I list the headings
Masses of words
Chunks
Two systems
A lexical syllabus
A lexical approach
In search of a theory
Dangerous liaisons
Lively debate
And one or two days later I pick up the headings and try and write a sentence or two about each heading. It is that act of struggling slightly to remember that makes learning stick. If it feels easy, it probably isn’t having any effect.
Or … when I read the first time I don’t write a summary, I write comprehension questions to myself e.g.
- What are the two different ways he describes of teaching Maori ?
- What was the attitude to vocabulary teaching in the 1960s ?
- What did Anne Peters discover and how was it different from Chomsky’s ideas ?
- How did Pawley and Syder describe a native speaker’s linguistic competence ?
- What two systems coexist to make up communicative competence ?
- What two kinds of things did computer research show about language in the early 1980s ?
- What did the Willises base their course on ?
- What does Lewis suggest in the lexical approach in place of grammar teaching ?
- How does Lewis see his lexical approach as being different from earlier approaches to vocabulary ?
- According to Richards and Rogers what makes an approach ?
- What does Lewis say about theory of language ?
- What does Lewis say about theory of learning ?
- What dangers does Thornbury suggest lie in the lexical approach ?
- Why does he feel the books have a value anyway ?
Retrieving the information is the important part – it makes the track for retrieving that information again at some future point stronger and easier.
This looks counterintuitive because it is going to take you a lot longer than reading and highlighting would, so you can’t read so much, but what you do read you will know a lot better. If you are reading a book, you would make this system more concise. This article is quite hard work because he assumes you know a lot of things (PPP, general attitudes at different times, some of what Lewis wrote). Most books are taking a more direct approach to telling you information so you should be able to write a paragraph for a chapter quite often, rather than a paragraph for every sub heading. Or pick and choose more carefully what you do and don’t need to read (when I was reading ‘Make it Stick’ yesterday I quickly realised the anecdotes in between the research points could be skimmed). But do something to collect the information in a framework that you can use to go back and test yourself with. You could even do both the headings (or chapter names) and the questions.
Retrieval example with names, terms, lists etc.
Some kinds of information you need to know in more detail for the Delta Module One exam. When you start work on the phonology: sounds notes (or come to the session), you will quickly get the message that people think about and organise the sounds largely in terms of how they are made and where they are made. So it helps you to understand the whole system if you just learn the places of articulation.
There is one good clear diagram from Aston University here.
But if you use Google images you will find loads .. e.g. here
And when you go through those I was going to say print one or two that have only the letters on and not the words, so you can test yourself, but then the first one I clicked on here turned out to be an online self test, so you have the choice of also doing it on paper or on screen.
Then once you know where the articulators are you can start thinking about the manner of articulation and some of those charts you see on the web and in books will start to be a lot more helpful.
So the main message here is, whether it is names of things, definitions, articles or books, don’t just read it, but do something to collect the information in a way that means you can test yourself on it later.
It takes longer but it is proven to be a lot more effective (Roediger & Karpicke 2006, though I knew to look for it from the Make it Stick book)– would you rather be aware of a lot but very superficially (having read through it fast and now only being able to recognise it when you see it) or actually know less, but know it well enough to use it in the exam (be able to talk about things yourself) ?
Spacing works hand in hand with retrieval
Spacing is the fact that you need to come back to information. So if you did the reading and made the notes you need to work out when to come back to them and remind yourself to do so. The Learning Scientists call this spaced practice and their poster on how to do it is here.
This is where the study schedule comes in. The first reading or collecting of things takes a long time – maybe a whole morning, but then you should look at the schedule and in two days and then in two weeks make a note to do your retrieval practice for X (the places of articulation, the lexical approach article or say the Gairns and Redman book Working with Words – note how the first of those would take you two minutes, the second might be ten and the last would be longer, so choose according to the time you have).
Also don’t stop when you think you know it – read the abstract, only the abstract in this article (Karpicke 2009) to see why you should have a long term plan of when to look at something again even if you think you know it.
Interleaving also works with retrieval and spacing
This one has less research to support it in terms of language study (there is plenty of support for it in maths and in practical skills). So if maths students work different types of problems in a jumbled order that has been shown to have a stronger and longer lasting effect than working on one type for a long time then another type for a long time, but Housman and Kornell (2014) found that mixing up subjects when studying flashcards didn’t help students retain the information better so with the wide range of things you need to study for the exam it is harder to see how to apply it to any great extent.
The idea is that you shouldn’t just do one small thing till you are perfect then do the next small thing as you will almost never be asked in tests or in life to do that one small thing in that way. You need to be able to do / apply any number of small things to new situations, so when you are learning or when you are retrieving you should mix things up. The best parallel idea I could find for studying anything for Delta Module One was this …
If you are trying to retrieve the places of articulation, don’t go through the same list in the same order every time. Sometimes go from the diagram, sometimes from the words, sometimes name the places in a different order.
Elaboration
Making new meanings, organising information in new ways, connecting ideas, applying ideas to other contexts.
Practical ideas
- If you have read about listening and reading, make a chart yourself (don’t find one on line, the key is in you doing it, if you read someone else’s then it won’t have the same effect) to show in what ways the two skills are the same and in what ways they are different.
- If you have read about five different teaching approaches, do the same on a bigger scale (compare them – find ways to break them up into elements and decide which of those elements are the same and which are different).
- If you have read about translation as a teaching tool, make a list of advantages and disadvantages then search on line to add to the list.
- If you think you have cracked the phonetic alphabet, try transcribing some words, then check if you got it right or not using dictionaries or an on line tool.
- Make diagrams to show how the different lexical sense relations terms relate to each other.
- If you think you are good at grammar, take the first paragraph of a Guardian article and name all the elements in every sentence, from word to clause level commenting on form, meaning and / or use.
Applying knowledge to other areas and looking at it in new ways is the single most effective way of studying.
Disadvantages of elaboration …
You have to come up with more ideas yourself (though if you do, post in the forums, others might join in).
There are no answer keys so you also have to trust your own judgement. Having said that though, asking a question on the lines of ‘is scanning more top-down processing because of knowing where to look for a particular word or more bottom up because of actually only looking for a specific physical pattern of letters or numbers’ is likely to get an intelligent and engaged reaction from other teachers and tutors that will lead to a dialogue where you have to articulate ideas, say why you think something, where you read something – remember you need to find your own voice. This is exactly the kind of practice you need.
Dual coding
This is NOT about learning styles. They have largely been debunked (we run a session on language teaching myths in Module Two if you want the reading and research for that one).
But some research suggests that for everyone combining visuals and language has more impact than just one or the other. If you want more detail on the science behind that link here. But intuitively it seems to fit with the other things. What kind of visuals ? Well some things fit with pictures (places of articulation again, but then also the visual presentation of the sounds within a chart that has places along one axis and manner along the other). Other things you could make time lines of (history of ELT, which approaches came first, second etc ? what had an impact on what ?).
Can you put the information into a chart ? some kind of infographic ? a cartoon ?
It won’t work for everything, but when it does work it gives you one more tool to use.
It also gives you one more way of transferring information into and out of different formats. Then you can use that for retrieval practice. There are some practical examples from history and science notes here.
So if you used all these ideas together you could end up with a study notebook with weekly pages like this …
New things to work on 8th October Recycle 8th October week
Cohesion – devices (discourse analysis) Types of text (discourse / writing)
Connected speech (elision) Intonation
Ways of teaching listening Noun phrases
Relative clauses Sense relations terminology
Learner output group project
Exam practice G
Session notes on testing
Reflection
It is also important at the end of each week to think about what you did and which of those things were effective (and if something wasn’t, why it wasn’t and what you could do instead).
You don’t have to do all of this. Doing any of it is better than doing none of it.
Talk to us in the forums about which things you have tried and which helped.
Brown, P. Roediger, H.L. & McDaniel. M. 2014 Make It Stick: the science of successful learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Hausman, H., & Kornell, N. (2014). Mixing topics while studying does not enhance learning. Journal of Applied Research in memory and Cognition, 3, 153-160.
Karpicke, J. D. (2009). Metacognitive control and strategy selection: deciding to practice retrieval during learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138, 469-486.
Kirschner, Paul & De Bruyckere, Pedro. (2017). The myths of the digital native and the multitasker. Teaching and Teacher Education. 67. 135
http://www.learningscientists.org/
Roediger, H.L. & Karpicke, J.D. 2006 Test- enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long term retention, Psychological Science 17, 249– 255.
Sternberg, R 2003 What is an “expert student ?” Educational Researcher Vol.3 2, No. 8, pp.5 -9
Cohesion – devices (discourse analysis) Types of text (discourse / writing)
Connected speech (elision) Intonation
Ways of teaching listening Noun phrases
Relative clauses Sense relations terminology
Learner output group project
Exam practice G
Session notes on testing
Reflection
It is also important at the end of each week to think about what you did and which of those things were effective (and if something wasn’t, why it wasn’t and what you could do instead).
You don’t have to do all of this. Doing any of it is better than doing none of it.
Talk to us in the forums about which things you have tried and which helped.
Brown, P. Roediger, H.L. & McDaniel. M. 2014 Make It Stick: the science of successful learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Hausman, H., & Kornell, N. (2014). Mixing topics while studying does not enhance learning. Journal of Applied Research in memory and Cognition, 3, 153-160.
Karpicke, J. D. (2009). Metacognitive control and strategy selection: deciding to practice retrieval during learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 138, 469-486.
Kirschner, Paul & De Bruyckere, Pedro. (2017). The myths of the digital native and the multitasker. Teaching and Teacher Education. 67. 135
http://www.learningscientists.org/
Roediger, H.L. & Karpicke, J.D. 2006 Test- enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long term retention, Psychological Science 17, 249– 255.
Sternberg, R 2003 What is an “expert student ?” Educational Researcher Vol.3 2, No. 8, pp.5 -9