How can you help your student improve their English rapidly, and ensure that your lessons are focussed on their needs, wants and interests? How can you do this, and save planning and resourcing time? Here’s a great approach known as reformulation, first described in a book written by Peter Wilberg called One-to-one: a teacher’s handbook (Language Teaching Publications, 1987), which I’ve adapted for online lessons.What is reformulation?Reformulation is the process of correcting, modifying and improving student language. In a reformulation lesson you start with your student’s writing or speaking and help them to make it better. It’s a method ideally suited to the kind of one-to-one teaching common in online teaching. The focus is on your student’s language needsSince a reformulation lesson is based around your student’s language, rather than the language a coursebook or worksheet thinks the lesson should be about, it means we can focus entirely on the language your student really needs to know. The student provides the contentThe starting point of a reformulation lesson is a piece of speaking or writing provided by your student.
This might be a homework task or a piece of work previously done for school, work or simply for pleasure, meaning the content will also be related to your student’s interests as well as how they would like to use the English language in the real world. The teacher provides the languageSo thanks to the student, you have content for the lesson. Your job, as a teacher, is to provide the language to make the content better. During the lesson you work with your student to correct any errors, fill in missing language and improve their word choice. Then you focus on one or two language features that were troublesome, using supplementary texts and materials where necessary to support this language focus. The end resultBy the end of the lesson, your student will have a model text, built upon their own work, and a keener understanding of the language needed to express themselves better. Not only will it help your student learn English more quickly, but it requires very little planning and resourcing on your part.
For SATB and organ, or piano four hands, or orchestra The new organ accompaniment was transcribed by Peter Stevens for the King's College, Cambridge Nine Lessons and Carols service in 2007. The organ part is presented under Wilberg's original choral parts for an effective alternative to the already existing version for piano four hands. Oct 03, 2014 The Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s director, Mack Wilberg, is known around the world for his soul-stirring arrangements, which bring a renewed energy to well-known melodies.The 15 videos below are just a sampling of the hundreds of songs that have been arranged by Wilberg.
The Lesson StagesIn a reformulation lesson, you start with something the student has produced before the lesson, use it to create a model text and then look at the language more closely. This effectively reverses the structure of a typical English lesson such as that found in coursebooks, where we usually ask students to produce language at the end of a lesson, having first primed them with model texts and lots of language first. Here’s how it works: Stage 1: student inputIt’s a better use of time if your student emails you their work before the lesson. This could be a document or, if your student wanted to focus on speaking, an audio recording (ideally with a typed transcript) of a talk or dialogue made on their phone or computer. Copy and paste the writing or transcript into an online whiteboard or a scene-shared, word processing document and you have the content for your lesson.
Stage 2: teacher analysisBefore the lesson or at the start of it, quickly look through their language. Is the meaning clear? What grammar do they need to work on? What words and phrases could be improved? What is missing? This helps you identify what to reformulate plus a couple of language areas to focus on later in the lesson.
Stage 3: reformulationThis is the meat of the lesson. Here, the teacher provides the student with the language they lacked when writing or speaking. The teacher can ask the student questions and offer choices, suggest better language and phrases, correct mistakes and, if needed, provide explanations. The student shouldn’t be a passive bystander in this process, but an active participant whose attention is being drawn to language choices. Either you or, ideally, your student can modify the text on the screen.Let’s say your student has written a text about her family. Here’s an extract:My father pilot.
He work for Aeroflot. My mother doctor.
She work in hospital.You could correct some of this yourself, or ask your student to self-correct, which they can often do once their attention has been drawn to the errors. Another approach is to correct the first sentence (my father pilot to my father is a pilot) and, using this as a model, ask your student to correct the second sentence themselves. Ask her what’s missing.
If she needs extra help, give her choices: “Do you say ‘my mother is doctor’ or ‘my mother is a doctor’. Make her think! This draws her attention to the very language features she’s unsure about.
You can take a similar approach to correcting the missing third person singular ‘s’.At the end of this stage, the student should have a piece of writing a little bit above their current proficiency level, something they couldn’t have produced on their own before the lesson. It’s a model piece of writing, an example of good language for them to keep, which is based on their own language, not something from a coursebook, worksheet or website that was writen by someone else. Stage 4: spot the differenceNow, paste the original document into the online whiteboard, next to the reformulated (model) text. Ask your student to highlight on the whiteboard the differences between the two texts.
Can they explain some of these differences? You could also cover up the reformulated text and ask them to tell you how they can improve their original writing. Essentially, what you’re doing here is drawing your student’s attention to the gap between their current proficiency level and native-like English. Noticing this gap is fundamental to language learning. Stage 5: language focusIn this stage, you focus your student’s attention on one or two specific language features that they need most help with or that will be most useful for them.
In the example above, we would choose to focus on the use of articles and the use of the third person singular ‘s’. This stage can involve using texts and exercises drawn from coursebooks, websites or worksheets, or simply quick activities that you put together. Here are a few activities I often use:. Gap fills: fill in the missing word, missing preposition, missing article, missing verb ending and so on, depending on the language focus (e.g. My brother is firefighter, he work in London). Correct mistakes in a sentence. Jumbled sentences (e.g.
Writer uncle my a is). Dictogloss: make up a short text, similar to the one provided by your student, and read it out two times at normal reading speed. Your student should listen and write down as many words as possible, then they should work on their own and use their list of words to reconstruct the same text that you read out. Finally, they should compare their reconstructed text with the text you read out, noting the differences between the two. (This spot the difference is crucial because it forced your student to focus on the language they don’t know.). Monster cloze: paste your student’s reformulated text, or something very similar, into an online whiteboard.Make sure you also have the text written on a piece of paper!
Cover up each individual word by drawing a rectangle over each word. Your student needs to guess the words in the text. It works like hangman, except your student has to guess words instead of letters.
You should find that your student can guess content words (e.g. Pilot, doctor) quite easily, but will struggle more with more grammatical words (e.g. The, are).Suggestions for student contentIdeally, the student’s speech or writing should be something related to what they ultimately want to do with English, whether it be giving product presentations in English, writing an essay for an exam or negotiating with a customer, but it’s also a good idea to get your student to write or talk about themselves, their dreams and their opinions, because this is what we do when having social conversations.
Contents.INTRODUCTION Who is this book for?by Peter Thiel is a must read for startup entrepreneurs everywhere. The book looks at how companies can engineer radical changes and in doing so, move the human race forward. About the authorAuthor Peter Thiel was the co-founder of PayPal, the first outside investor in Facebook and is now the co-founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies. As far as investors and entrepreneurs go, Thiel is pretty inspirational. Thiel wrote Zero to One with the help of Blake Masters, also a budding entrepreneur, Blake co-founded a legal research technology startup after graduating from Stanford and Stanford Law School. In this summaryZero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. Thiel begins by examining what the future holds and what the business scene used to look like, before the millennium.
Then Thiel looks at how all companies that are happy, are different before discussing the health of competition. Thiel discusses the role money plays in any venture before discussing industry secrets and how to build foundations. Finally, he examines company culture and how to build one before identifying the 7 key questions you need to ask before starting a business. BOOK SUMMARY WHAT THE FUTURE HOLDS It’s going to be a challengePeter Thiel describes progress in future as happening in one of two ways. Either Horizontal progress – this is easier for us to perceive as essentially it means copying things that currently work – going from 1 to n.
Thiel compares horizontal progress to the concept of globalisation, taking a product, service or process that works, perhaps on a small scale, and making it work globally. But Vertical progress is more progressive, and not as easy for us to imagine. A vertical process, Thiel explains means doing original things, things that have never been done before. It's this kind of progress that we hope for. Vertical progress means going from 0 to 1, Thiel explains that the way to do this is with technology. StartupsThiel explains that the most common source of new technology are start-ups.
These are the guys that aren’t afraid to take risks, they get stuff done quicker and are the ones to break into new industries with new technologies, they have the freedom to develop and adapt. The reason that the start-ups are creating the new tech and not bigger, well-established organisations, Thiel explains, is because these organisations are bureaucratic, they move slowly, are afraid of risks and overall, it takes a long time to get anything done. So if you want to be part of the future, get out of these organisations and get involved in a start-up.”Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future. A new company's most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think. “According to Thiel, a start-up has to continuously question received ideas and re-think business from scratch. It’s about the blank canvas and constantly re-writing the plan. And this is where the future is made.
What was it like?Peter uses the example of PayPal, the business he co-founded in the late 1990’s to set the scene pre-crash.Thiel was running PayPal in 1999. He describes himself as ‘scared out of my wits’.
He puts this fear down to the way that businesses were being started and ceasing to exist so regularly in Silicone Valley, he was afraid he would be headed down the same path.However, PayPal had a difference, their goal was to have PayPal replace the US dollar by becoming an internet currency. This was big picture, change the future kind of stuff. They knew the crash was coming, and they rode it out, just prior to the crash they raised $100 million, the necessary funds to keep them moving.Any entrepreneur that managed to ride out the post dot-com crash learned a few key lessons, Thiel explains that the 4 biggest lessons are still very relevant to today’s thinking;. Make incremental advances.
Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Stay lean and flexible.
All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” Try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. Improve on the competition. Don't try to create a new market prematurely. Start with an already existing customer, build your company by improving on recognisable products already offered by successful competitors.
Focus on product, not sales. Technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.The 90’sThiel describes the 90’s as a bubble for the technology world. Were people believed in going from 0 to 1. Everyone aimed for it, but not many start-ups actually made it.After the crash in 2000, the following rules were what the start-ups lived by;. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. A bad plan is better than no plan. Competitive markets destroy profits.
Sales matter just as much as the product.Thiel believes that we need some of the naivety that the start-ups pre-crash had. In order to create new technology, we have to forget about the 4 post-crash rules and learn from the past. Both mistakes and successes. HAPPY COMPANIES ARE DIFFERENT, NOT THE SAMEThiel compares monopolists and entrepreneurs. He says that the monopolists lie as a cover, they protect themselves from audits and scrutiny by keeping their monopoly under wraps, and as a result, often, giving more credit to their competition – who is likely non-existent.
The entrepreneurs are the exact opposite. They preach that they are alone in their industry, they ignore their competition. But this, Thiel points out, is a mistake.”The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.”Thiel explains that monopolies have a powerful incentive to innovate, its the profits that they have built up over time that acts as a powerful driver. They can continue to innovate with research and projects that start-ups can only dream of.”All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”.
But competition is healthy!It’s a pretty common assumption that competition is healthy. However, Thiel points out that competition, more often than not.
Means no profits for anyone, there's a lack of differentiation in the market and it means that all of the businesses struggle. Whereas, if there is a monopoly, continuing to innovate, it means new technology and products brought to market benefiting the consumer and the creator.”Competition is not just an economic concept or a simple inconvenience that individuals and companies must deal with in the marketplace. More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking. We preach competition, internalize its necessity, and enact its commandments; and as a result, we trap ourselves within it—even though the more we compete, the less we gain.” Microsoft vs. GoogleThiel examines Microsoft and Google as an example of competition. Microsoft focused on building an OS while Google created a search engine.
You’d think that different markets, different products would mean there was no competition. However, the reality is that as both gained momentum and size they started to notice each other and work to beat the other.
And as a result, we now have Windows and Chrome operating systems, Microsoft Office and Google Docs, the Surface and the Nexus. However, by focusing purely on each other, Apple was able to swoop in and overcome both of them. It only took Apple 3 years to have complete market capitalisation at $500 billion, versus the combined worth of Microsoft and Google at $467 billion.
Competition did not do well for Google or Microsoft. Competition is not always healthy. Paypal and future profitsThiel describes PayPal in the year 2001, they hadn’t made any profit but their revenues were continuing to increase.
Thiel believed that the profits generated in 2011 and further, would be where 75% of the company’s present value would come from. However, this was a vast underestimate. At the time he wrote the book, Thiel disclosed that the majority of PayPal’s value will come from 2020 and beyond!”The overwhelming importance of future profits is counterintuitive even in Silicon Valley. For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth.”Thiel explains that by focusing primarily on near-term growth is not enough. You fail to consider what the business will be in a decade from now. You need to think big picture. CharacteristicsThiel describes companies that bring in large cash flows in their future as sharing the following characteristics:.
Proprietary technology– making your product almost impossible to copy. Network effects– this means that a product is increasingly useful, the more people use it. Think Facebook. Economies of scale– when businesses get stronger as they get bigger. Software startups are a great example because the cost of creating a copy of the product is practically zero. Branding – creating a strong and powerful brand is the best way to grow a monopoly. Apple is the perfect example of this.Thiel explains that the ”first mover advantage” is when you are first to the market, you have the opportunity to gain market share while the competitors are still rushing to get started.
However, Thiel explains that moving first is not necessarily the end goal, it’s a tactic. The goal should be generating cash flow. You can be the ‘last mover’ and still take over. The key is to find a niche market and scale up. MONEY Are you an optimist or a pessimist?Thiel talks about one’s perspective on the future as taking one of four possible views;”You can also expect the future to be either better or worse than the present.
Thiel talks about how everyone at PayPal in the early days was nerdy and shared a love for science fiction. It became their culture.
Regardless of age, race, gender, looks, as long as everyone loved science fiction, then they fit in just fine.Thiel encourages handling your staff as individuals and making them unique in their role and responsibilities. Therefore, if they are solely responsible for one task, then they can easily be assessed and evaluated. This strategy worked for Thiel as a way of simplifying the management process. However, it can create unease as employees compete for the same responsibilities. Watch out for this particularly in startups, Thiel warns, as roles are a lot more fluid in the beginning.
It’s important to define who is responsible for what and how this will be assessed. Will they come if you build it?Earlier in the book, Thiel discussed having one superior distribution plan. Regardless of how good your product is, it needs to be distributed effectively.”The total net profit that you earn on average over the course of your relationship with a customer (Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV) must exceed the amount you spend on average to acquire a new customer (Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC). In general, the higher the price of your product, the more you have to spend to make a sale—and the more it makes sense to spend it.” Distribution methods can be viewed as follows:.
Complex sales – this happens when the average sale is above 7 figures. The kind of sale that occurs once a year. Complex sales are, as their name suggests, complex. But it’s the key to selling products of high-value. Personal sales – when the sales are between 10,000-100,000, it’s important to have processes in place so the sales team can sell to a wide audience. This also means when new people join the sales team, it’s easy to pick up and continue.
Distribution doldrums – this is what Thiel refers to when a product is not worth enough (e.g. $1000) to have a personal salesperson complete every deal, but the marketing is not targeted enough. You get stuck in the dead zone. Marketing and advertising – this non-personal selling approach is for products with low value that appeal to the masses.
When salespeople cannot be hired to sell small value items, companies turn to advertising to get the message out there. Viral marketing – a new, fast, cheap, effective way to gain momentum. When a product goes viral, current users are engaging with their friends and spreading the message, the chain continues exponentially. This only works in certain industries but when it works it can be highly effective.It’s important to understand the different strategies and which one works for your particular product or service, consider the value, the price and the necessary manpower involved. Computers are substitutes for humans”Everyone expects computers to do more in the future—so much more that some wonder: 30 years from now, will there be anything left for people to do?”Thiel emphasises that it’s not that computers are going to replace humans, but continue to complement our human abilities. Businesses of the future will use technology, not to remove the necessity for humans or eliminate jobs, but to empower people to be able to do more.
This is the business model of the future.As an example, Thiel discusses teachers. A good teacher knows that all students have individual needs, and often, they need their learning to be structured differently. For a long time, teachers were only able to teach in one medium, but computers and technology are allowing them to adapt and cater to more needs. It doesn’t replace the teacher but provides the teacher with a platform to do more. SINGULARITY?”Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better—to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself.
Only by seeing our world anew, as fresh and strange as it was to the ancients who saw it first, can we both re-create it and preserve it for the future.” Conclusion Key takeaways. If you want to be part of the future, get out of these organisations and get involved in a start-up.
This is where the technological advancements are made. Thiel explains that moving first is not necessarily the end goal, it’s a tactic. The goal should be generating cash flow.