Winter is a time for dream mongering. We reveurs and reveuses of this planet burrow deep into the cracks of our darkness to let the light shine through…

The result might be something like this:

THE VERB ‘TO BE’ IN JUNIOR CLASSES

For decades we, teachers of English, have been starting our junior classes by introducing the verb “to be” in the first units of any course book we might be using without questioning the principle behind this choice. And though I have been in the profession for decades and repeatedly frustrated by my inability to successfully teach the verb “to be” to my pupils, it was only recently that the idea solidified in my mind.

Even when we assume that learners have put all kinds of difficulties behind them and can now use the verb properly and therefore move on to more “sophisticated” concepts, forms such as I “was be” or “he be” rear their ugly head challenging any certainty about having got the verb “to be” out of the way.

In my effort to account for such an insistence on an item which seems to elude most beginners, it crossed my mind that we people in the West are possibly obsessed with existential issues to such an extent that we ignore common sense.

One may ask what common sense would dictate in this case. For one thing, we could leave the verb at “I am……… (name)” rather than insisting on both singular and plural or affirmative, interrogative and negative form. The plural is a concept which in many junior books is not introduced before the verb “to be” anyhow.  

Besides there are so many action verbs that young children would find much more straightforward and memorable. I suggest that the imperative form of the verb is a smooth way into the verb system of the English language. It allows the teacher to introduce a wealth of lexical items which perhaps cannot be easily learnt later on. For instance, teaching advanced students “pop”, “hop”, “wobble”, “tiptoe”, “wiggle”, “rumble”, “howl”, “roar”, “pitter patter” etc often feels such a strain when with juniors it is fun non-stop and cashes in on their kinesthetic intelligence.

Concrete nouns along with action verbs could still provide great learning opportunities and motivate young learners by the immediacy of the sentences that could be built as well as their effectiveness and relevance. Prepositions are also easy to present either by using children’s objects or bodies or by making simple drawings.

Without any pretensions to completeness or thoroughness, this is along the lines of what I had in mind:

run                                                                               ball

sit                                                                              chair    

sleep                                                                          floor              

throw                                                                         boat

catch                                                                            hat

train                                                                               pencil

Prepositions could be presented one by one so that each new item is consolidated and the following image could provide a visual aid for use.

Therefore, the pupils would be able to understand and produce sentences along these lines:

 Throw the ball.

Catch the ball.

Sit on the floor.

Don’t sleep.

Wake up.

Introducing “and” could lead to more complex sentences and provide children with great joy at being given the opportunity to jump and clap or skip and touch their nose or whatever combination they could come up with.

In any case, what could follow is a matter of acting on the pupils’ feedback and abilities.

Idlers

It is sad how unequal we prove in our struggle with time despite the best intentions.

IDLERS

We spent the time

On idle talk

Hardly aware

Of walls of mist

Between us rising

Year by year

A hollow yearning

Took hold of me

You peered through

Seeing nothing

My friend, fret not

It wasn’t meant

Some might say

Not torn asunder

Only drifting

Drifting away

MODAL VERBS AND INFINITIVE TENSES: A METHOD TO DEAL WITH CONFUSION

After such a long time in the teaching profession, I am becoming more and more convinced that how you teach grammar is determined by so many different factors that there are no hard and fast rules. It primarily depends on the teacher’s formal education, his/her mastery of the students’ mother tongue, the students’ grammar skills in general and the teacher’s ability to adapt their teaching to different individuals’ or groups’ needs.

Teaching grammar, like language in general, is a trial-and-error process which is constantly readapted but never finalized: only the end of teaching puts an end to it.

I will illustrate my point with an example. An area which is particularly difficult for Greek learners of English is modal verbs and infinitive tenses in English.

I normally make a point of presenting the tenses of the infinitive before I teach the Third Conditional. My reason for this is that you can’t teach the Past Conditional if you don’t break it down to its constituent parts. And its constituent parts are not would + have + Past Participle. (I find this approach too mechanical and not paying off in the long run.) Its constituent parts are would + Present Perfect Infinitive. It is very easy for students to make the mistake of changing “have” to “has” when a third person singular subject precedes the modal.

X He might has stolen the money.

In order to anticipate this kind of mistake I explain to the students that the form “have stolen” is the present perfect infinitive, which is not conjugated.

In Modern Greek the infinitive form is only used to form the perfect tenses, and most students do not even realize it is the infinitive. In Modern Greek we normally present a new verb in the first person singular of the Present Tense (there is only one present form).

However, most Greek students are familiar with the infinitive form in Ancient Greek as this is formally taught in Secondary school. The infinitive in Ancient Greek can be found in the Present, Past, Future and Present Perfect Tense.

So I often draw a parallel between the infinitive in Ancient Greek and in English to hammer it home to the students that

1.    the infinitive does not change

2.    the infinitive has tenses

In order to explain how we use modal verbs to express modes of “possibility”, “deduction” and so on, I break a sentence into parts: we find the part which allows us to think of the correct modal verb and then we spot the verb form which will be transferred to an infinitive tense. We decide on the tense of the infinitive depending on whether the verb form is in the present or past and then form the appropriate tense of the infinitive. Following this we put the pieces together so as to form the sentence.

Perhaps	he knows the truth
may	know
He may know the truth
There is no doubt	she missed her train.
must	have missed
She  must have missed her train
She is not studying	and it is wrong.
be studying	should
She should be studying.
It is just not possible	that he was driving at around that time
couldn’t	have been driving
He couldn’t have been driving at around that time.

SCREEN LURKER

All kinds of occasions may give rise

to poetry. Here is a poem I wrote some 

time ago. It is dedicated to online friends.

SCREEN LURKER

You lurk right there

In the corner of the screen

You call yourself a friend

You dissemble unabashed

When the screen gets blank

Little friend you are not enough

You are so much more than a drug

So much less than a cure

Every day your image

Fades with the tempo

Of a novelty turned

Threadbare with the use

A Greek poem

My philosophy of language(s) is perhaps similar to my philosophy towards life. We are who we are, we can surely reach out to many people and share what we can. Friendships of different kinds and order can form between people from all cultural backgrounds: there is always a side of us that can meet with the same side of another individual, and we should be able to celebrate and treasure this.

By the same token we experience life on many different levels depending on the language or languages we speak. Knowing more languages enriches us as people, broadens our scope and provides new insights into how we view things.

I write both in Greek and in English and it is in this capacity that I am posting one of my Greek poems. I hope those who share my views will forgive this transgression from the more “universal” English.

Θα στα παλιά

Θα γυρίσω πάλι

Στ’ ανθισμένα λόγια

Στις εικόνες χρόνων

Που αιωρούνται

Στις χαραμάδες της μνήμης

 Θα μου λες

Ποτάμια με πήραν

Θα είναι λέει

Ένα αγέρι μουσκεμένο

Μ’ απλωμένα χέρια

Θα είναι ένας

Μόνο ουρανός

Σκοτωμένος στο αίμα

Θ’ αντηχεί το σύμπαν σου

Μες το χοϊκό μου σxήμα

Pain

PAIN

I've felt the pain 
Of the rose
When it could no longer
Be called a bud

The sadness of the tree
When its trunk 
Bent in the wind

The yielding of the moon
Before the onslaught of the clouds

The grieving of the skin
At the loss of your touch

How to introduce an element of surprise in your class

I often find texts in course books dull or lifeless. So I like to add a personal touch here and there. What follows is a text I wrote along with some follow-up activities to challenge bored students away from their gadgets.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-K
MXd0a2V0MW8xSWs/view?usp=sharing

Methodological questions include:

·       What level is the text aimed at?

The answer is roughly above level B2 and of course it depends on your students.

·       How do I present the text?

You could read it out or let your students read it to themselves.

Alternatively you could challenge the students by leaving some gaps to be filled with the right words. Those could be words which reveal the identity of the “I” (corridors, roof, façade, shutters, paint)

The question to be asked after the first read is who is “I”.

·       The students could be invited to think of a title.

A suggestion is: If a house could speak

·       The students could engage in creative writing. What would a …………………. say if it could speak?

It could be a mountain, a tree, a butterfly, a snake: the possibilities are endless.

A teacher's reverie

Greece south east

on a warm Sunday morning of November

and a feeling that time has frozen

There was a time when we learnt foreign languages without even having heard a native speaker. Of course learning was more difficult and relied on grammar and rules since exposure was extremely limited (some cassettes accompanying a course book).


 As in every situation, however, there was a silver lining: in my case English was a dreamland, the space where I could let my imagination run away with me, the space that I could populate with my fictional characters. In my early utterances of English there was a lot of mother tongue interference but also a lot of freedom of thought. 

Learning English meant distancing myself from a tedious reality, building bridges with the rest of the world, inhabiting a universe of fairytales where hopes for the future merged with ambitions of visiting the country where this marvellous language was spoken. 

The dream was fulfilled later on in life and took away all the magic but nothing can make  the memories of those times and the feeling of longing for places unknown waiting to be “discovered” fade away.

Today my learners are constantly exposed to English through music, films, sports commentaries. There is almost a surplus of exposure, which makes learning so much easier. So much less effort is needed to achieve fluency in a foreign language. Children have the opportunity to travel much more and they are possibly closer to considering themselves citizens of the world as the social media allow them to get into contact with people from far and wide. There are so many privileges that are taken for granted.

Theory and practice in language learning

As a student and, for many years throughout my career, as a teacher, I have conscientiously delved into the theory of practically anything related to the acquisition and teaching of English as a foreign language.

My theoretical grounding has stood me in good stead all those years though not without the support of solid hands-on experience. After all one has to make a start and therefore needs a framework within which to act. At least this was my default setting.

Theoretical books as well as methodological ones are fine as far as they go. There are different proponents of different theories about how learning a foreign language takes place and if you are a novice and haven’t got the foggiest idea where to start you have no other choice but to take one on trust, which is what we also do in real life.

I have moved on from grammar and translation through  audiolingual, communicative, functional methods to multiple intelligences to what is now my own re-adaptable approach, a crystallization of all the input fortified with my own discoveries and ideas of learning. Far from suggesting that I have learnt everything, I propose here that we learn as long as we teach if only because the means available are different and our experience is being enriched all the time even if adding up the minutiae and being led to generalizations is painfully slow. I like to think that teachers’ generalisations are fed back into new theories of how we learn as everything is in a fluid state of being defined and redefined.

In order to learn from your learners you have to hold your feelers out all the time. You have to observe how students approach and process new input, what mistakes they make, how much mother tongue interference accounts for their mistakes, how much their imagination and eagerness gets the better of accuracy, or, by the same token, to what extent their lack of motivation or lack of ability or dearth of pragmatic knowledge limits their efficiency in foreign language learning.

Watching learners, both young ones and adults, taking in and processing information is an absolutely amazing experience and can only be effective if the teacher is genuinely interested in their students as people as so much depends on that. Personally I am fortunate enough to teach people from a very young age and see them through to completing a full course up to levels B2, C1 and C2. This allows me some continuity both in terms of biological growth and mental development.

Personality and ability have an intriguing way of interacting when learning – not just a language, I suppose – since personality determines whether a learner will persevere or give up or whether the learner will turn an impediment  to good advantage by becoming more resourceful and more determined to overcome obstacles.

By way of illustration, I will provide an example of a young dyslexic learner in one of my classes. The child is eight years old and apparently aware of her difficulty in reading. A couple of weeks into her first year, she has already developed some strategies to get round the problem. She listens intently to me and the audio aids used in class without looking in the book so that she can learn the new lesson by heart. (I normally make a point of exposing learners to the sounds of new words first and then to their written form.) She whispers sentences while someone else is reading and when the class focuses on some written exercises and she gets stuck at a word that she can’t decipher, she will always ask me to tell her what the word is so that she can continue with the exercise. In other words, the child is making every effort to learn and she shows a will and inventiveness that one might be surprised to find in a child of her age, which is admirable. Class dynamics is also very important. In the case of the girl, what further motivates her is an underlying competition with a friend of hers.

All in all, every learner has a story to tell which perhaps is part of their life story.

Presenting a poem: Silverly

Presenting poems does not follow rules; on the contrary, I would say that it all depends on the poem of course, on your class and on your strengths or weaknesses as a teacher or as a person.

I am not the world’s most extroverted person, but when it comes to reading stories and poems to children I have had so much practice with my own children that I am a natural! I will change voices, I will exaggerate movements, I will bring the poem alive, I will do all I can to draw the students into it.

One of my favourites is a short poem called Silverly:

Silverly

             Silverly,                                Dozily,

         Silverly,                                Dozily,

         Over the                       Deep in her

         Trees                                           Bed

The moon drifts,                   A little girl

         By on a                Dreams with the            Runaway         Moon in her

         Breeze.                                     Head

                                                                                            

There is a mesmerizing quality about it not just in the images it evokes but also in its enunciation. So here is how I go about it:

I ask my pupils, young ones normally, to rest their heads on the desk and close their eyes. I switch off the light, I put on my soft mellow voice and read dragging the words out and maintaining a tempo throughout the reading.

Then I ask the pupils to draw an image of what they make of the poem. It is not essential that they know all the words so they can do so. They will want to hear it again so that they can draw the picture, which reinforces listening skills.

I get some original pictures in response to the poem – often of a disproportionately large moon hovering in the sky with a little girl lying in bed far below and her long orange hair loose all over the bed.

I then show them a powerpoint slideshow, which you can see below and I focus on “drift”. As my pupils are quite young, I only elicit the literal use of the word by drawing

·       some food cooking, the smell of which drifts down the stairs

·       a boat drifting in the sea

·       a woman whose perfume drifts all over the room

and asking them to write a sentence for each picture using the word “drift”.

Methodological choices must be made all the time and they all depend on what one’s aims are. Mine was to provide a Friday evening break from the routine while exposing my pupils to spoken language and exciting their imagination as well as presenting the lexical item “drift” through the motion of the slideshow.

Back to clouds

Back to clouds then. Clouds like tornadoes get their fair amount

of adulation and an obscure --to me-- horde of loyal watchers.

This poem of mine is dedicated to a cloud chaser. 

A cloud chaser

His eyes pinned

On the celestial sphere

Pursuing ever elusive

Fugitives

Be it lucid or be it leaden

They never tire

They stow away

Behind peaks

They leap onto

The glistening lakes

A hostage to their erratic ways

In bondage to a trivial pursuit

His days aimlessly flutter by

His path fusing with their flight

Resistance

Winter has just set in for all of us in the northern hemisphere. I feel the chill in my bones and the dark spreads relentlessly leaving little space for dream-mongering. Body and soul put up token resistance against the rule of nature, but I soon let go, fortifying myself with fabrications of the summer gone and the light that will be again.

Here is a fabrication of mine:

A summer night’s vision

The drifting moon

Was gazing down

A seamless blue

The sleepless sea

A swelling lull

The slightest signs

Of life subdued

In its arms

An eerie stillness

The cosmos ruled

A trail of dreams

Wrestling free

Like sailing boats

Under a breath of wind

Their skyward course

Across the nightly cloth

With eagerness pursued

The restless vision

A flight of fancy

Unchecked

In its inception

A  ruthless rift

Insidiously wrought

In the nocturnal harmony

There is one supertool in teaching:flexibility

This time I would like to share some thoughts which might sound self-evident but might not be so for many of us.

In my experience, those of us who teach have somehow associated certain methods with specific functions or parts of the teaching process. Perhaps exams, which are always standardised, have contributed to this attitude.

What I posit here is that different teaching aids or tools and different methods should be used to introduce, explain or test the understanding of each text. The teacher sets their goals in using a text and decides on ways to get their students to reach those targets.

By nature I am a maximalist, but I have learned how to lower my sights and get the most out of what I decide to be my priority in using a text. There are no hard and fast rules as to how we can make sure that our students comprehend what they read. Importantly we might want to limit ourselves to checking only gist. Personally I doubt the validity of the multiple-choice exercise though I admit I have created many all those years as part of my job involves preparing students for exams.

I will provide an example of the point I am making. I found a short news story on BBC (see links at the end of this post) which I chose to use with a group of students at level B1. I knew that my students had enough words to understand the story. At the same time I needed to test gist first before moving on to the gapped-text exercise. Therefore, I asked them to read the story and make a sketch of it in their notebooks. I wanted to elicit the father’s leap with his children in his arms and the way the children miraculously escaped almost certain death. To facilitate the process I asked my students to think of the natural features in their picture (wooded land) and include them in their picture.

My point is that we normally associate pictures with illustrating vocabulary items or as stimuli for conversation, but they may be used for anything depending on the circumstances. In this case the picture was designed to test gist.  

As for the words in the gaps, I normally choose them on the basis of what I have covered in this particular class or what has been taught recently that needs reinforcement or even what is a problem area and needs checking again and again.

I normally make a point of creating a vocabulary exercise so that my students see the words I want to focus on in different context.

You can see the student’s sheet and the teacher’s version here:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KUnhEQnRsR2hhT2c/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KZFhpMVN6b2VDUU0/view?usp=sharing

Grammar in teaching foreign languages

Following some feedback my last post prompted, I will attempt to respond to the issue raised concerning the teaching of grammar to foreign language students. I am aware of the enormous scope of the issue, but I’ll try my best.

My attitude towards learning and in effect teaching is not prescriptive. I acknowledge the value of learning through exposure to the language and I ensure that my students read and listen to as much authentic English as possible. However, there are a few considerations to be taken into account. I will briefly cite them here though each one of them deserves a whole book rather than a short paragraph:

First of all I teach English as a foreign language: there is no immersion learning. This automatically poses the question of the choice of language material at different levels.

Secondly I teach people of different age groups with different goals or even with different time limits. This defines to a large extent the material and the methods I use.

For children and teenagers who are learning English as part of their general education, I use a course book as guidance to language input and plenty of supplementary material which is adapted to my students’ level (stories, songs and factual books) but also original stuff which I consider accessible by my students.

I do not exclude grammar from my teaching. I am convinced that grammar provides a shortcut to accuracy and it is a tool which most of my students use in their first language learning so it makes sense to take advantage of it in foreign language teaching. Grammar functions in various directions: it generates accuracy in many similar contexts; it confirms learners’ generalisations extrapolated from their exposure to the target language; it raises questions the answers to which further elucidate the understanding of the foreign language; it promotes and enhances abstract thinking.

Grammar is not external to language; it is a set of rules the understanding of which allows speakers to decode the intended message or the application of which allows them to successfully encode and convey their message. Even when a grammar rule is violated, there is some intention in doing so: it probably explains a lot of great poetry!

Adult learners with specific purposes not only appreciate the use of grammar but are of the mindset that takes it for granted because of the way they were taught at school.

I do not get stuck with grammar when the age or maturity or the ability of my students for abstract thought make it irrelevant but by the same token I do not eschew it when it can speed up the process of learning and internalisation. One point I need to clarify here is that by grammar I do not mean the memorization and regurgitation of rules: I refer to the generalisations (rules) learners will make, which will allow them to understand input and produce comprehensible output.

 Grammar is all about meaning. Take word order for example:  in English, if we know who does what the verb denotes, it is because the subject precedes the verb. By contrast in Greek we would know from the ending which denotes case but not necessarily from the word order.

All learners make inferences about how language works whether they can verbalise them or not. Their inferences are tested and confirmed or contradicted. In the latter case they have to make new inferences till they get it right. Grammar preempts those inferences. There is nothing wrong with taking this shortcut if it suits the learner’s mode of thinking and learning.