Dobbs, J. (2001). Using the board in the language classroom.

New York:
Cambridge University Press.

Introduction

As far as we know, the first teacher who wrote on classroom walls was
the Reverend Samuel Reed Hall (1795-1877), an innovative educator and
minister who is said to have first written on a piece of dark paper when
teaching a mathematics lesson in Rumford, Maine, in 1816. Later Hall
moved to Concord, Vermont, where, it is believed, he had the plaster in
his classroom painted black. Soon, many other teachers, following Hall's
example, painted plaster walls or plain boards black to créate a visual
teaching aid. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, enameled
walls and then slate boards dominated American classrooms. Hall, who
is also credited by American historians with inventing the blackboard
eraser and with introducing many other educational innovations, has
been honored by the state of Vermont with a memorial in Concord (see
photo, p. viii) bearing the inscription including the words "pioneer in the
use of the blackboard as a schoolroom appliance" (Levy, p. 39).
In today's classrooms, of course, it is possible to find not only black
chalkboards but also green, blue, or other colors, as well as boards of
different types of composition such as whiteboards that require dry ink
markers instead of chalk. In some classrooms, one also finds flip charts,
large tablets of paper used for many of the same purposes and activities
as boards. From here on I shall refer to public writing space of these
different kinds simply as the board.
In spite of the availability of these various kinds of public writing
space, however, I have noticed recently that board use in many U.S.
schools is declining. In some schools, oíd boards are being allowed to
decay; in many new classrooms, space devoted to boards is decreasing.
The reason is not hard to find: Many classrooms now have overhead
Drojectors, movie screens, and T V and computer monitors for student
and teacher use. A few even have electronic whiteboards (see Appendix
A). Because such equipment not only is expensive to buy and maintain
but requires electricity, varying degrees of technological skill, and
accessories such as transparencies, film, and software programs, many
classrooms - even some in affluent countries - will continué to opérate
with few or no high-tech tools. ;.
Even when classrooms have access to high-tech tools, however, we
should not use these tools at the expense of boards. Boards provide a
public writing space that is immediately accessible to both teachers and

1
 Introduction

Remains of a painted plaster wall used as a blackboard in the Fisher

School, Westwood, Massachusetts, built in 1845 and restored and
preserved by the Westwood Historical Society. (Photograph by Ralph A .
Buonopane, courtesy of the Westwood Historical Society.)

students. Teachers can use the board to record messages they especially
want their students to remember, to present new information, and to
record what students say. Writing on the board is an active, public,
physical activity: Students not only can see something happening, they
can physically make it happen themselves. Students writing publicly can
receive immediate, personal, face-to-face responses from the teacher and
% from their peers. Teachers can see not only what students are producing
(or not producing) but also can read their body language.
Moreover, because different students rely on different learning
strategies, they need a variety of learning experiences. When the teacher
writes on the board, students whose learning is strengthened by visual
stimuli benefit. When students write on the board, students whose
learning is strengthened by hands-on, kinesthetic experiences benefit.
When a number of students write on the board simultaneously and the
others write at their desks, elements of competition and immediacy are
introduced into the classroom chemistry that heighten students' interest.

2
 Introduction
Students measure themselves against their peers' public writing: Who can
write the most, or with the fewest errors, or show (off) the best ideas or
finish fastest?
By facilitating our students' use of the board, we increase their share
of classroom discourse or " a i r " time and créate múltiple opportunities
for them to interact with their peers and with us. Finally, writing on the
board is active: It gets students on their feet, it adds variety to classroom
routines, and best of all, it's fun.
It is time, therefore, that all of us, even teachers who have access to the
newest technology, take another look at the humble board. We need to
explore teacher use - how the board can be used to help us manage our
classrooms and help us teach - and student use - how the board can help
our students learn by giving them more opportunities to genérate
language, more interaction with their classmates and with us, and more
responsibility for their own learning process.

Teacher use of the board

The board can help teachers manage the classroom, can be a valuable
teaching tool, and can be a way to record student input.

Using the board to help manage classrooms

Classroom experience soon teaches us that when we have an important
message to convey to our students, we may need to write the message as
well as say it so that our students will have a better chance of
understanding and remembering it - and so that they can write it down
if they need to. This is especially true of homework assignments,
announcements of plans or of items to be brought to class for special
purposes, schedules and timetables, and special class rules, if we have
them. When students are assigned to groups, confusión may be avoided
if we post the ñames of each group's members as well as each person's
du,ties: Who will lead the discussipn, who will record it, who will report
it, who will keep track of the time and keep people focused on the task.
If students have special classroom roles or duties on a rotating basis such
as attendance taker or cleanup, we can record them on the board.
Without being intrusive, we can keep students informed of how many
minutes remain in timed activities and tests; or we can post scores for
competitive activities. It is sometimes effective to display outlines of
lesson plans and agendas: If students can see that a fun activity is planned
for the end of a class period, they may help us keep to a busy schedule in
order to ensure that there will be sufficient time left for it. O r we may

3
Introduction

want to display information mainly as a reminder to our students and/or

to ourselves.

Pridavj: FieU tríp to Pawtuckau/ay State Park I Drew warmly.

Bn'ng your lunch-

Many of these housekeeping messages need to be communicated on a

daily basis to keep the class well organized and running efficiently.
Writing them on the board can help ensure that our students understand,
follow, remember, or record important information; moreover, messages
can be used to prevent confusión and to save valuable class time.

Using the board as a teaching tool

In preparation for the day's class, we can use the board as a "get-ready-
to-learn" tool. We can write, before or at the beginning of class,
provocative quotations or questions, riddles, tongue twisters, scrambled
vocabulary words (see Activity A.1.24) or scrambled sentences (see
Activity A.3.19). These types of activities give students who arrive early
something to get started on, and they help to get everyone focused on
English, although, of course, these activities can be used not only as a
warm-up but any time during class.
For beginning levéis, we might head the board with the day and date.
*And for all levéis, just for fun, we can write greetings and draw
illustrations to observe special occasions such as local, national, or
religious holidays, birthdays of famous people, and our students'
birthdays. O r we can invent occasions like Happy Heat Wave! or
Celébrate Spring or Let's Sing Day.
There are many ways the board can be used during class to support
teaching. We can, for example, draw stick figures or abstract forms on
the board and have students compose oral or written stories about them
(see Activities A.4.3 and A.4.6, for example). Or, we can write
vocabulary words or questions or statements drawn from a course book

4
 Esta obra es propiedad del
SiBPí • UCk Introduction

ItS

What are you readinyc

reading or other sources and then ask students to respond orally or in

writing in appropriate ways (see Activities A . 1.4 and B.3.6). You might
want to browse through the index to this book at this point for
additional, more specific ideas of board activities you might use to
support your own teaching.
Using the board helps students focus on what we are saying when we
introduce them to new language concepts, and it helps them understand
and remember what they hear. Presenting new material "live" on the
board obviously takes longer than giving students a handout with the
material already prepared - prepackaged as it were. But in most cases,
this additional time is time well invested. As we draw or write on the
board, we can explain what our drawing or writing means. When the
board is used, students get the information gradually, so that they have
the time to question anything they do not understand. If the information
is complex, the students have time to grasp small pieces of it as it evolves,
rather than looking at a sheet of paper bearing long lists of vocabulary
words or complicated instructions or rules. If students then transcribe the
information from the board to their notebooks, they make it their own.
They write down as little or as much of the information as they feel they
need; they process the information as they reproduce it.
In addition to using the board to present new concepts to students, we
can use it to explain, clarify, illustrate, emphasize, organize, drill, and list
information. We can write key words or a brief outline of our complete
presentation. We can give examples of how to use new vocabulary. We
can draw stick figures to illustrate grammar points (as in Activity A.3.16)
and webs to show relationships between concepts (see Activity A. 1.8).
We can use the board to amplify and highlight the most important
information in our presentations. Students may then elect to copy some
or all of this supplemental information into their notebooks. Supplying
them with a visual record is extremely important because many students
are unable to listen to information delivered in a second language,

5
Introduction
evalúate what they hear in order to extract the most important
information, and then record it.
We can also use board work to determine students' readiness for new
material, to review new material, and to assess students' success at
mastering this material. Frequent, quick, informal checks of students'
achievements, which many of the board activities in this book can
provide (e.g., Activities A.1.24, A.3.4, and A.7.1), help to keep us abreast
of students' progress, or their lack thereof, easily and without the stress
to students that accompanies quizzes and tests, although tests certainly
have their place in the curriculum. Furthermore, students may benefit
from seeing how well they do in comparison to their peers because it
helps them to assess their own achievement levéis more realistically.
Finally, we can use the board to quickly summarize the day's important
activities, to review a language concept that we have just introduced, or
as a lead-in to the next day's class.

[Link]

Jazz
Chants

Using the board to record student input

Just as we use the question-and-answer method to involve our students
and enliven and enhance our presentations of new concepts, we can also
elicit input from students to make our use of the board more
collaborative. We can ask students to brainstorm a topic while we record
what they say. We can record questions students ask and the answers that
other students offer. We can ask questions and record students' answers.
Michael O'Hare, a supporter of this method of teaching, points out in
his article "Talk and Chalk: The Blackboard as an Intellectual T o o l "
(1993) that the advantage of making a board record is that it can be
referred to as long as it remains visible. "What is said out loud," he
writes, "must be said to all, but any participant can interrógate the board
privately at any time" (p. 241). But, O'Hare warns, teachers should
record "participants' contributions in their own words," because if
teachers rephrase, students will feel that their comments were somehow
"wrong." He also believes that when teachers paraphrase students'

6
 Introduction

Research

Interes
re/-/ ce

comments, they are exerting a type of control over their students'

discourse that tends to "dump them back into 'you talk, we listen' mode"
(p. 245). O'Hare, however, is not writing specifically about ESL/EFL
students, who make a larger number of erroneous contributions than
native speakers do. An exception needs to be made, therefore, to allow
for the elimination or correction of erroneous statements. When a
student's contribution is not in error but a native speaker might use an
idiomatic expression or choose a more precise word, we may want to
supplement the student's phrasing with this information in the hope that
the student will make it his or her own because it expresses his or her
own idea. Of course, one way to avoid the possible problems of
paraphrasing, as well as to increase student participation further, is to let
students do their own recording.
It is the rare teacher - experienced, new, or in training - who has not
used the board as a language teaching tool or been taught by a teacher
writing on a board. But many teachers may not be familiar with students
writing on the board. Thinking back on five years of high school and
college-level foreign language classes, I find it difficult to recall ever
writing on the board as a student. I now see, however, that my own
students look forward to activities that put them at the board and that
when they become comfortable using it at my direction, they sometimes
initiate using it on their own.

Student use of the board

For students, writing on the board is a hands-on, learning-by-doing
activity. What they write publicly usually gets read and responded to
immediately. Not only the teacher but also peers become involved in
what has been written. It is advantageous, therefore, to have not only

7
 Introduction

individual student scribes use the board but also groups of students
working simultaneously while the rest of the students write at their desks.
In this way, all members of the class are challenged by the same questions.
Students writing at the board often comment spontaneously on each
other's content and each other's use of language. Furthermore, students
writing at the board often invite their peers' comments because their
work is on display and their need to know is great. As they compare their
work with that of their peers, their critical faculties are heightened. They
learn from their peers' successes and mistakes. Making comparisons,
alterations, and corrections helps students become more aware of what
revisión means. They collaborate and compete. And they become
teachers.
Some advantages of having groups of students write publicly at the
board are as follows:
• A different atmosphere is created. A group writing at the board is a
public group within the whole class, and the students interact not only
with those in their group but with the whole class. In contrast, when
students collaborate in small groups at their desks, usually little or no
interaction takes place between groups.
• N o single student can become disengaged and "disappear" without the
teacher's notice, as can students in groups at their desks.
• A student cannot monopolize the discourse because written discourse
cannot domínate "air time" the way oral discourse can.
• Spontaneous collaboration at the board is a voluntary process in which
students can particípate or leave at will, unlike the process that occurs
when students are grouped at their desks for the specific purpose of
editing each other's work or discussing content.
• The teacher's monitoring ability increases. A teacher can "sit i n " only
on one small group at a time. But, when the board is used, the teacher
can observe what is taking place at the board and circuíate among
students working at their desks, acting as a resource to both groups.
In addition, board work allows us to easily observe students in the act of
writing and see how they think in their new language. We see their false
% starts, their hesitations, and the errors they make but discover for
themselves. These observations often lead us to a better understanding
of the types of errors they make repeatedly, and of whether or not they
doubt the accuracy of their usage. Furthermore, it gives us the
opportunity, if we choose, to address difficulties as they arise - to assist
by suggesting the word or grammar structure the student seems to be
searching for, or to make corrections as problems occur. This immediacy
can be very exciting for teachers and rewarding for the students who are
intensely aware of their needs at that moment and appreciate having
those needs met.

8
 Introduction

Public writing allows us to emphasize the process rather than the

product. By its very nature, board writing is ephemeral and errors are
easily erased. Students seem not to become as possessive and sensitive to
criticism of their board writing as they do of "finished" writing or of
writing that is committed to paper that they can hold in their hands.
Furthermore, some students have more confidence in their written
than in their oral discourse and find it easier to participate in written
form. Some students dislike asking for help or lack the verbal competence
to express their problems and welcome the fact that the teacher or other
students can see their problems and offer help when they need it.

. Using the board in response to teacher prompts

At the teacher's direction, students can use the board for numerous
activities such as practicing and testing their grasp of new forms;
paraphrasing or. summarizing other writers; generating their own
writing; editing their own and their peers' public writing; checking
answers to quizzes and tests; playing games; sharing knowledge, personal
experiences, and feelings; or sharing information about their countries
and their cultures.
In addition, when possible, students can be encouraged to draw
illustrations on the board to accompany their writing; research
increasingly shows a strong link between drawing and language learning.
Mona Brookes, author of Drawing with Chitaren: A Creative Method
for Adult Beginners, Too (1996), writes, "[Y]ou can learn information
eight times faster and retain it eight times longer if you draw what you
are learning about" (p. 225).

Spontaneous student use, no teacher input

Students who have been made aware that the board belongs to them as
well as to the teacher sometimes write on it spontaneously. They may,
unasked, join a group the teacher has appointed to write publicly. Or,
they may, for example, decide to write the answers to a quiz on the board,
even though the teacher has not announced that this is the method of
checking answers that will be used. Still others may use the board to
communicate with their classmates or teacher or to show off newly
acquired language skills.
M y initial enthusiasm for making sure that students view the board as
part of their domain was kindled by one beginning learner, an adult who
was illiterate in his own language because he had never had the
opportunity to go to school and who became so pleased with his growing
skills that he began to write " G o o d Morning!" and other greetings on
the board each day as he arrived, making visible his pride and love of

9
Introduction

learning. This act convinced me of the power of public writing and led
me to seek ways of sharing that power with other students as well as with
my fellow teachers.

A summary
Writing on the board offers many benefits. When teachers are writing
and not just talking, the visual element stimulates students' interest in
what they hear. More important, visual materials help students
understand and remember the new information teachers are presenting.
When students write at the board, their learning experience becomes self-
centered and active. And when groups of students write at the board
simultaneously, the students feel both challenged by their peers and
protective toward them - they share with them and they learn from them.

Looking ahead
The next section of this book, Reminders, Tips, and Suggestions, may
help you to use your board more effectively and/or more efficiently.
Then the Activities sections suggest numerous activities that both you
and your students can do at the board. If you have an overhead projector
or a flip chart, or can easily make handouts or use other kinds of visual
aids, many of the activities may be used in these ways. The activities
contain sections called Preparation, Procedure, and, where appropriate,
Variations, optional Follow-up, and specific Comments. Because the
appropriate level of many of the activities is apparent or very adaptable,
and because you as the teacher know best whether an activity is suitable
for your students, I have not defined the activities according to level.
The purpose of the language-based activities in Section A is to present,
practice, or test specific lexical, phonetic, or grammatical items (see pages
25-114) as well as to help students attain increased fluency in their
writing, reading, listening, and speaking skills (see pages 115-175). In
th« first three divisions of Section A , you present target forms in
vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar and students then strive to
display or use the new information correctly. These activities also offer
the opportunity to review material you have already presented or that
students have attained by other means such as course book readings. The
activities in the next three divisions in Section A aim to improve students'
fluency and skill in generating and comprehending written and spoken
English. Section A concludes with several activities that provide a way to
review or assess students' class work in a specific área or to assess their
overall level of comprehension.

10
 Introduction

The activities in Section B are more open-ended and communicative.

They cali for the sharing of information that may then be used, for
example, to build a sense of community in the classroom, to help set an
agenda, or to edúcate both teachers and students about other countries
and cultures while offering students múltiple opportunities for language
acquisition and analysis (see pages 179-216). The activities in Section B
are focused as much on content - what is being said or written - as on
how or how accurately it is being said or written. In most of these
activities, students express their feelings or opinions or provide
information about their lives or cultures. Activities in this section are
designed to help students (1) recognize their language-learning needs, (2)
become more autonomous learners, and (3) develop increased awareness
of both the diversity and the congruence found in the classroom, the
community, and the world.
Appendix A looks to the future of public writing surfaces, when more
affluent institutions and programs will likely take advantage of
technological advances such as electronic whiteboards. In contrast,
Appendix B provides instructions for teachers who currently have no
board in their classroom but are willing to construct one, as well as
information about a product that makes it possible to créate a portable,
reusable but also disposable whiteboard surface.

11
Reminders, tips, and suggestions:
Using the board efficiently and effectively

Getting started
1. Start each day with a board that has been washed. Chalkboards can
be washed using just warm water and a squeegee; occasionally, add a
little window-washing solution to the water. A solution for cleaning
whiteboards is available at most stationery stores, or a window-
cleaning solution can be used.
Start each class with a board that has been erased. Vacuum the
chalk trays under a chalkboard from time to time to keep the dust that
collects there at a minimum.
Be sure to have sufficient chalk, or felt-tipped markers for
whiteboards, as well as sufficient erasers for the number of people
who will be writing. Small terry cloth towels are good make-do
erasers for whiteboards and can be washed and used indefinitely. To
be safe, carry extra chalk or markers and erasers with you in case
classroom supplies turn out to be insufficient or missing.
2. As you make your lesson plan, decide whether you will write on the
board and when you will do it. Write before the class begins if possible
and appropriate. Also decide whether to include board activities for
your students. If inspiration strikes or need arises, obviously you
would use the board spontaneously as the class proceeds.
3. White chalk shows up well against black or green chalkboards, as
does yellow. ít is possible to use other colors, but they show up less
well on chalkboards. Whiteboard markers come in a multitude of
colors that, except for yellow, show up well.
You may want to have students use a specific color for their writing;
this makes it possible for you to do your editing and correcting in
% another color. Colors also work well to set off designated spaces
(áreas in which pairs or teams can work simultaneously, for example),
or to teach the use of charts and tables, or for emphasis. If you choose
to use special colors for specific purposes, try to keep it simple and be
consistent.
4. If your students are learning the román alphabet or just beginning to
learn to write in English, you might have permanent lines painted on
part of your board space to facilitate this activity. Or you might want
permanent lines to keep your own writing on a straight path so that
it serves as a model of clarity, neatness, and legibility; slanted writing

12
 Reminders, tips, and suggestions
can confuse students who are not accustomed to the language or who
have learning disabilities.

Layout
1. Feel free to think of your board as any kind of visual space you want
it to be. For brainstorming activities and creating webs, you may want
to think of it the way an artist thinks of a canvas or the way a movie
director thinks of a screen. You may want to begin using the board
somewhere in the middle and build out and around some key word(s)
or central theme. For other kinds of work, such as writing instructions
or assignments, you may want to capitalize on the horizontal nature
of the board and define your space as being like the left and right pages
of a newspaper or a book. Using this type of layout may particularly
benefit students whose first language is not written horizontally, or
not from left to right. Draw vertical lines on the board where you
want the edges of the "pages" to be.
Group work at the board, as well as some activities, calis for
dividing the board into sepárate compartments or boxes in which the
students write. It helps if you draw these enclosures in a different color
from the one the students will use for writing.
2. Most students prefer that teachers print rather than write in script.
Except for personal correspondence, most writing in the United States
and many other countries is now done with printed letters, so do not
be too concerned if you are not exposing your students to English
written in script.
Find out what size letters your students prefer by experimenting.
Try using 1-, VA-, 2-, and 2Vi-inch (2V£-, 4-, 5-, and 6-centimeter)
letters; then ask students who sit farthest from the board to tell you
which size of lettering they need. As a rule of thumb, I find that
printing letters approximately Wi inches (4 centimeters) high allows
students sitting up to 15 feet (4Vi meters) from the board to read them
comfortably; letters 2 inches (5 centimeters) high can be read at
% almost twice that distance. With letters of this size, leave 2Vi to 3
inches (6 to IVi centimeters) of space between lines. Check
occasionally that your writing can be read by students who sit farthest
from it.
3. If you use the board frequently for housekeeping announcements
(reminders of work that is coming due or events in the offing, for
example), you may want to desígnate a portion of the board for this
purpose. If you are right-handed, you might use the upper-right-hand
córner of the board, so that, as you continué to write, your body wil!
not block your students' view, and they can refer to this space at will.

13
Reminders, tips, and suggestions
Or, if you are taller than your students, desígnate a space about 12
inches (30Vi centimeters) wide along the entire top edge of the board
as "yours." Then always use this space for similar purposes. Students
will become accustomed to checking this space for your messages.
Erase out-of-date messages immediately so that students don't lose
interest. Write new messages in a different color, perhaps, and draw
students' attention to them and/or read them aloud.
4. When recording the answers and comments students make in
response to discussion questions, you may wish to write them
randomly - thus nonjudgmentally - all over the board as they occur.
As the discussion winds down, you may wish to highlight some
responses that seem particularly relevant or accurate by underlining
or circling them or checking them off. You may even be able to
organize and rewrite the rest of the responses in some kind of order -
to reflect their merit, for example, or a progression in the thinking that
has occurred, or a summary of the discussion.
5. To help focus students on a board activity or task, write a caption, a
title, or a question at the top of the board as you begin. Here are a
few ideas on how to emphasize these or other special words or
phrases:
Use a different-colored chalk or marking pen.
Write in L A R G E R letters.
Turn a short piece of chalk sideways to créate broader letters.
Underline the words you want to highlight.
• Draw boxes around them.
Draw "fat" letters like those graffiti artists use.

14
 Reminders, tips, and suggestions

lllustrations
Sometimes the best way to make instructions come alive or to provide a
practice activity for students to do at the board is to draw illustrations.
The basic rule for drawing on the board is to keep it simple. You may not
be an artist, but you can créate almost any illustration you need based
on circles, ováis, rectangles, triangles, and straight lines. Here are some
principies that have been followed in the Une drawings that accompany
some of the activities in this book:
People: A standing male figure doing nothing in particular can be
indicated by drawing a circle for the head and five lines for the torso,
arms, and legs. Add a triangle (skirt), and you have a woman doing
nothing in particular.
If the figures are doing something with their arms, bend the elbows.
Note that elbows bend at the waistline.
Forget the hands unless the purpose of the illustration is something
they are doing with their hands.
If the figures are moving, bend the legs halfway down, at the knees,
and add feet. Point the feet i n the direction the figure is moving. If the
figures are sitting, bend the bodies at the waist.

Esta obra es p-opiedad del

SIBDI - UCR

15
Reminders, tips, and suggestions

Faces: To save time, omit features unless their expression is the reason
you are drawing the illustration. Practice drawing raised and lowered
eyebrows, up- and down-turned or wide-open mouths, until you
achieve the mood or feeling you want the face to express.
Animáis and objects: Draw rectangles to represent the bodies of most
animáis when they are walking. Sitting or lying down, their bodies can
usually be represented by triangles or circles. Buildings are squares or
rectangles; roofs are triangles. Trees are straight lines topped by circles.
Vehicles are four-sided figures (trapezoids) or half circles with circles
for wheels. You will seldom need to be concerned with perspective. If
your drawing needs perspective, just remember that things look
smaller the farther they are from the observer. A wide road may narrow
to a single, fine line at the "horizon."

16
 Reminders, tips, and suggestions

For more help with basic illustrations, see Wright and Haleem, Visuals
for the Language Classroom (1991, pp. 110-116), whose advice forms
the basis of much of what I have outlined here. Other helpful t'exts
are Wright, Pictures for Language Learning (1990) and Shapiro and
Genser, Chalk Talks (1994), which contains a dictionary of easy-to-draw
symbols.
If you fear drawing even a simple stick figure, or if, on the other hand,
you wish to tackle more ambitious drawings but believe that you lack the
ability, see Edwards, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1993) or
Drawing on the Artist Within (1986), in which the author shares her
method of teaching drawing by having the would-be artist copy a
drawing that is upside down. (Try it. It works.) Finally, determine which
of your students love to draw and enlist their help.

Ensuring students' success at the board

1. Before you ask students to write on the board, check their access to
%it. Be sure that the board is easily visible from each student's desk.
Also make sure that students can stand at least two deep in front of
the board so that pairs can work comfortably when one student is
writing and the other is editing or advising. Students will not feel that
the board is truly part of their domain if a teacher's large desk blocks
them from it, as is the case in many classrooms. Whenever you can,
move any obstacle that inhibits students' access to the board(s).
2. When you introduce a board activity to a class, you can do a number
of things that will help to ensure that the students will come to
appreciate and enjoy the experience. One way to begin is by assigning

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Reminders, tips, and suggestions
written work for all students to do at their desks. Then circuíate,
looking over shoulders, reading, and perhaps commenting or asking
questions. When you have seen enough to determine that a particular
student's writing has been fairly well done, tell the writer that you are
going to ask a number of students who have written a good response
to copy on the board what they have already written and that he or
she is one of the selected ones.
Another way to begin is simply to announce that one of your
teaching strategies is to have students write at the board, that you
usually have a number of students write at the same time, and that
you will begin this activity by selecting some good responses to be
written there.
What seems to get students off to a good start is knowing that
everyone is busy doing something other than staring at them while
they write on the board and that they are not going to be working
there alone. It also helps if students know that all of their classmates
will eventually be writing at the board.
Turn taking can be handled in a number of ways. Here are a few:
• Ask for volunteers to begin, and then cali on the rest.
• Have students who have completed their turns at the board select
students to replace them.
• Assign turns based on where students are sitting or where their
ñames fall in the alphabet.
• If pairs or groups are already working together because they
speak different first languages, use these existing groups for
board activities.
Even students with no history of public writing soon learn that
writing at the board is not as intimidating as they might fear because
public writing is "common property" in a way and is easy to borrow.
Often a quick glance at a peer's board space is all that is needed to get
students off and running with their own ideas. Thus, public writing
done simultaneously has a built-in safety net; and students seldom
need suffer the embarrassment or failure that frequently occurs in
verbal discussions when students called on are forced to remain silent
or to admit, "I don't know."
3. Students writing at the board often benefit from working in pairs. You
may want to pair students with differing levéis of ability for the
purpose of having the more competent student help the other. If you
have students with different first languages, consider whether the
practice of English is crucial or whether, for the task at hand, it would
be more helpful if the partners speak the same first language. In all
cases, observe whether the peer tutor is doing too much of the work
for the partner. If this happens, allow only one piece of chalk per pair,

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and make a rule that the peer tutor's role is to advise verbally rather
than to write.
4. Most students enjoy board activities, and these activities have many
beneficial features; but like everything else, they can be overdone. Be
careful not to kill your students' enjoyment by overusing them.

Correction and evaluation

1. Where correction is concerned, consider the following:
Before your students write at the board, you must decide how much
correction of their writing is enough and how much is too much. Ask
' yourself questions like these: Will all writing on the board be
corrected? Who will correct it? H o w much correction will they do?
M y rule of thumb regarding the correctness of work done at the
board is this: Although there are times when correction is not the most
important issue, in general, work that is presented publicly should be,
or at least should end up being, essentially correct. Students frequently
copy into their notebooks what appears on the board and sometimes
refer to these examples later, using them as models. Therefore, make
a special effort to ensure that the final product is correct.
Preselecting good student writing to be displayed on the board (see
Ensuring Students' Success at the Board, page 17) is one way to
minimize the amount of correction that will need to be done on board
work. But the object of some board work is to check for errors and
to publicly address the question of how to correct them. If this is the
objective, I often proceed in this fashion: First, I ask the writer
whether he or she can correct the writing; then I ask the students
whether they can do the correcting; finally, if errors remain, I correct
the work myself. But very often a student corrects another student's
board work. This is one of the advantages of public writing. To
encourage students to continué to look critically at a piece of writing
after they have "corrected" it, announce that there are still X number
of errors and ask whether they can find them. Quite often they can.
(f they need still more hints, use a colored chalk or marker and circle
or uñderline the mistakes. As a last resort, make the corrections
yourself.
But you may not always want to take the time to correct everything.
For one thing, writing at the board means that events proceed very
quickly. Unlike other kinds of writing activities or assignments, it
can move - or can seem to move - at almost the speed of oral
communication: A number of students may be writing
simultaneously, and students who are working at their desks may
require your attention at the same time as those writing at the board.

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Reminders, tips, and suggestions

For another thing, if a board assignment produces numerous kinds of

errors, you may want to be selective in the kinds of errors you address
so as not to confuse or frústrate students by overcorrecting.
When time is limited or many errors have been made and you are
unable to correct everything, decide on priorities. At a mínimum,
errors involving meaning should be dealt with, as should errors that
pertain to the specific board assignment. Thus, if a number of students
have gone to the board to write all the idioms using colors that they
can think of, you would correct any inaccurate phrases (e.g., "as green
as gas" or "paint town red" would be corrected). But if students were
writing examples of sentences containing irregular past tense verbs,
you would correct errors in those verbs and possibly not correct
spelling errors or faulty syntax.
If the board is filled with student writing and you are utterly
without time to elicit corrections from students or to make corrections
yourself, remember the erasen A whisk of the eraser through any
imperfect writing eliminates it. But if the class is ending and no other
class will use the room, consider leaving the offending writing on the
board until the class meets again and dealing with it then.
2. Here are some points about evaluation:
A great deal of teacher talk is concerned with making valué
judgments. We need to encourage our students when their response is
correct or their work is good. But these responses can become
automatic; if we use them too often, they lose their impact. Listen to
how many times per class you say, " G o o d " or "That's a good guess,
but it's not quite right," or something similar. When dealing with
public writing, we have options: We can use verbal responses or we
can silently reward what is "good" by checking, underlining, circling,
or starring it, perhaps with a contrasting color of chalk or marker.
Likewise, when something written publicly is incorrect or insufficient,
we can silently correct it or cali students' attention to it by using chalk
or a marker in a color that is different from the color we use to indícate
good work, and with our correction marker write a question mark or
an X or underline the problem.

Extending the board's usefulness

In Visuals for the Language Classroom (1991), Wright and Haleem
describe a number of ways to extend the usefulness of the board. They
point out that pictures and other realia may be displayed on the surface
of a board that has been magnetized. On a whiteboard, in particular, you
can use adhesive tape or Blu-tack (a plástic adhesive). You can also
display objects by propping them in chalk trays or by running a wire

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 Reminders, tips, and suggestions

along the top edge of the board and clipping objects to the wire. The área
of the board above or below these displayed objects can be used for
writing comments. You can also hang a sheet from the wire or clip a large
piece of paper to it in order to conceal writing on the board that you do
not want students to see until some appropriate time during the class
(Wright and Haleem, pages 25-26).

Obviously, it would be possible to mount quite an elabórate

production using the board and its extensions. But unless you are
convinced that the results are going to be worthwhile, it is better to keep
your board productions simple. LL , ' g Q QZZ

9 494160
Miscellaneous tips
1. Do your board writing before class begins or during a scheduled break
if you can. Or, when feasible, have student scribes write on the board
for you. They can write key words that you díctate; they can record
questions or comments made by their peers. Of course, student scribes
write more slowly than you do and may not write as clearly or as
accurately. O n the other hand, you don't need the writing practice,
and they do.
2. Except when students are acting as scribes for the class or when who
wrote what is not important, students writing on the board,
in^ividually or in pairs, should sign their ñames or, to save space, their
initials to their work. You have enough to attend to in a typical
classroom without having to try to remember, after they sit down,
which student was responsible for which piece of writing. Get them
in the habit of signing their work from the beginning, and life will be
simpler.
3. Writing on a chalkboard is not without problems. Chalk creates dust,
it wears away quickly, and when mishandled, it - as well as fingernails
- can produce some almost unbearable sounds. To help avoid
unwanted chalk noise, use soft chalk; and once the end of a new piece

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of chalk has taken on a rounded shape, break the chalk and write with
the sharp edge.
4. The whiteboard does not lack for drawbacks either. Be sure to use dry-
erase markers made especially for whiteboards and not regular,
permanent markers, or you will have to clean the board with a
solvent. Be aware, as well, that even dry-erase markers can be difficult
to erase, that they stain fingers and clothes, and that they have an
annoying habit of getting lost. Uncapped markers dry up quickly, so
check that caps are securely on the pens. Store markers in a vertical
position with their tips pointed down, or they will seem to have dried
up when you next try to use them.
. 5. N o matter how attentive your students are, you will not want to turn
your back to them for long periods of time. Stand with your body at
a right angle to the board as much as possible. (It's something like
keeping a car on the road while looking out the side window.) If you
are speaking to your class while you are writing or drawing, you will
naturally increase the volume of your voice; but if your writing takes
more than a minute or two, you might want to altérnate writing and
speaking.
If you need to concéntrate on what you are doing at the board,
assign students an activity to do at their desks so that they have
something more to do than simply watch. If the activity can be done
with a partner, so much the better. Talking with a peer will probably
involve them more than watching the teacher.
6. When you complete a board activity and start a new one, erase the
entire board, not just enough for your immediate needs. Board
leftovers can be very confusing to students.
7. Finally, if other teachers use your classroom after you leave,
professional courtesy dictates that you erase your board at the end of
your class.

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