Saturday 27 May 2017

Using context to introduce and practise grammar


 Teaching is liberating if you keep an open mind and allow yourself some space to pore over your approach, your students and the results of your choices as we make hundreds of choices as we go along – from the books we will adopt to whether a student needs some special treatment on a particular occasion.

Surprisingly, experience leads us to what appears to be  very simple ideas but needed so much time to crystallize as they have. A simple example is related to presenting and practising new grammatical or lexical items.

It has taken me quite a long time to decide that there is a very basic pattern in presenting and practising grammatical phenomena and/or lexical items, and it is the following:



The point is that both the texts we select for presentation and the ones for practice must be the right level for the students and, if possible, correspond to their interests, which means that our exercises must be mostly customised. Of course one can create ad hoc examples to suit one’s needs.

Let us assume that we want to present or more probably revise modal verbs of deduction or possibility or ways of speculating in general. We can use extracts from books which would fire our students’ imagination. I quote a short extract from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon and following that another extract from The Stranger by Camilla Lackberg:

But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decide that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident.

“It’s not so much what I see but what I smell.” Hanna took a couple of deep sniffs. “She stinks of booze. She must have been dead drunk when she took off the road.”

Of course this is only a sample of material that one can use and it is meant for students who are revising rather than being introduced to those functions for the first time. At this level, as the students are more mature, they need to be coaxed into using the patterns by providing a meaningful context.

So let us assume that we have provided enough examples both from sources and of our own making, have clarified any unclear points and have answered the students’ questions. It is now time to invite our students to produce relevant structures again in a meaningful context. For the sake of convenience I will consider a news item published on BBC. Here is the photo that accompanied the news story and for those interested I provide the link further down.



We could show the photo to the students and ask questions that will elicit the structures taught with a little bit of help or nudging from the teacher. I am of the opinion that when teaching takes place in a controlled environment, there is no harm in the teacher mediating to assist learning and assimilation. The questions we could ask are:
Ø How was the distress signal formed?
Ø Who could have written it?
Ø How might they have found themselves in the middle of the desert?

I got a few responses on showing the picture. The situation proved to be intriguing enough to stimulate the students’ interest—not least because it was so current.



Friday 19 May 2017

The Unicorn in the Garden: as many ways as teachers

I find the way(s) a teacher’s personality shapes the learning process intriguing, to say the least. Our entire philosophy of life shows through our instruction not only through the preparation for our lessons but mainly through the snap decisions we take at each moment in class either to compensate for inequalities of any kind or to deal with challenges – educational or managerial.  This means that any material provided either in the form of a course book or lesson plan will eventually undergo as many adjustments as teachers using the material.

It would be interesting, therefore, for teachers who set out to adopt some common material to share their experiences of actually using it in class and accounting for the choices made.

I will provide an example of material that can be used in various ways depending on who you are and what the goals you have set are.

James Thurber’s stories constitute excellent resources for teaching English for various reasons. For one thing, many of his stories can be appreciated by both children and adults. Besides, you can find simple ones that an intermediate student can follow (The Moth and the Star, The Little Girl and the Wolf) as well as stories for more advanced students (The Night the bed Fell, What do you Mean it was Brillig?)




I will use The Unicorn in the Garden here. (Please find the story at the end of this post.)
A traditional approach would be to give the text to the students and allow the time to read it. One could ask content questions afterwards and perhaps invite students to interpret the story, to think of what it could possibly mean. Is it to be taken at face value or should one delve into it to find the underlying message?

One might decide to engage the students in the story more actively, in which case one could show an animated version of it on You Tube (link provided at the end) and then hand out the printed version of it.

One might, however, want the students to produce some language and make predictions about the content of the story, which could be achieved by showing the video without sound and inviting the students to make up the story as they go along.

Alternatively one might decide to provide some key words before asking the students to invent the story so that the resulting stories would approximate the original one.

Rather than having a general discussion, the teacher could guide it by writing down some cues on the board (realism, imagination, society, limits, normal, eccentric etc).

A written task could be assigned asking the students to  give a different end to the story. The woman was right after all (unicorns are mythical beasts!): why should one be penalised for being down to earth – though I don’t really think this is what she was punished for!

Others might grab the opportunity to teach some more sophisticated vocabulary such as “reversal of roles” or “turn the tables on someone”.

The possibilities are endless. So it is over to you now.






Friday 12 May 2017

A cloud chaser

Clouds hold a special fascination for me: their wanderings and changing shapes, their ponderance or lightness, their coloration. I follow their erratic course and keep marvelling at them. Here is another poem I wrote on the theme:

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



Saturday 6 May 2017

Miming and poems: This morning my dad shouted

Different poems lend themselves to different approaches. Depending on the students’ age and personality some approaches work better than others. However, anything that addresses  the students’ kinesthetic intelligence seems to have a special appeal even among adults.

The following poem is ideal for miming. It can be used both for checking understanding and producing language. This is why, rather than miming the whole poem myself, I prefer to assign each verse to a different group of students. This means that they will all look up words they don’t understand so that they can mime their verse and they will watch the other group carefully so that they will translate their miming into words. An amount of competition is to be expected but also plenty of fun and conviviality.

One might need a combination of drawing and miming. For instance, some of my students drew the tap and mimed turning it on.  It would be useful to bring in some realia so that they can be used for miming. A card could be stuck on the board to indicate the time of the incident: “This morning”.

The poem is simple enough and provides good practice for Past Simple. As a follow-up activity the students can be invited to give a brief account of similar home disasters. At this level they are not expected to come up with anything complicated but most are very keen to share “calamities” they suffered.

This morning my dad shouted

This morning my dad shouted.
This morning my dad swore.
There was water through the ceiling.
There was water on the floor.
There was water on the carpets.
There was water down the stairs.
The kitchen stools were floating
So were the dining chairs.

This morning I’ve been crying.
Dad made me so upset.
He shouted and he swore at me
Just ‘cause things got so wet.
I only turned the tap on
To get myself a drink.
The trouble is I didn’t see
The plug was in the sink.

By John Foster