Summer magic

We are well into summer now and the haze of the heat has engulfed us all. We seek a breath of coolness in the nearest sea by day while by night everything turns magical under the moonlit sky. If you let go and sink into the summer nightscape, you will drift into your dreamland. For each one of us it is different but dreamland it is.

I have tried to capture a little of this magic into the following poem:

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

Ella Mcstumping: capitalising on different intelligences

It is summertime, and the mind races. The heat can push people to do incredible things that they would have summarily dismissed in the sobriety of cooler weather. Or at least this is how it feels in this part of the world at the moment.

So I will focus on a children’s poem this time, which is about attempting the impossible repeatedly only to come down to earth with a bump in the long run.

The poem is called Ella McStumping and comes from the book People Poems (Jill Bennett and Nick Sharratt). It is suitable for all children as long as they have attained the required level of English.

Ella is an incorrigible leaper. She is a dreamer at heart and wants to reach for the sky. She only gives up jumping when she nearly falls to her death.

What I did with the poem, which is essentially narrative, is that I cranked up the mystery in it by removing words at the end of several lines and then asked my students to fill the gaps by relying on rhyme for clues. This way they had to read the poem aloud several times so as to guess the words that rhyme. (musical intelligence)

You can also use visual stimuli to help them fill the gaps though in my experience this was not really necessary and it could detract from the suspense and the guessing fun.

When the students have successfully completed the task, you could ask them to mime the actions without looking in the text. (kinesthetic intelligence)

I discovered that they enjoyed telling the story by heart, too.  (linguistic intelligence)

Here is the poem as a gapped exercise:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KeE92MWZiMHE3ZU0/view?usp=sharing

And here with the answers highlighted:

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

Writing revisited: a painstaking but highly rewarding process

As I have pointed out in a previous post on the same topic, writing need not be such a bore for either young or adult learners. This can be done by ridding the process of the stultifying conformity to rules imposed by examination standards and liberating the learners’ imagination from the strict adherence to guidelines.

Gradually the learners develop their own style and sense of balance. Like much else in real life, writing is the result of ability and practice but also the product of will and self-discipline.

Therefore, when the learners have reached an advanced level, at which point the ideas must be organised in a coherent whole, the teacher has a dual role: to correct and, if necessary, reorganise the learners’ writing and to provide examples of the thinking process. This is what course books do in their writing sections, but I find these models – most of the times – far too idealised an answer to the question.

Writing help should not come in the form of ready-made answers; instead a diagram or a set of notes that illustrate the way the students could approach the topic would be more effective and lead to learner autonomy. And I say “could” because there is no single way of doing so. It is thus evident that a teacher could and should step in, taking into consideration the individual student’s development of the topic so that the comments will be relevant and may lead to self-correction.

Of course, I do realise that this means a lot of work on the part of the teacher and disputes the usefulness or the relevance of automatic correction systems very much in fashion recently.

What follows is an example of the methods developed above. It was written to help some of my students preparing for exams and was designed to demonstrate how to approach the topic in a logical sequence and also to point out how linking devices are not added on at the end of the thinking process but arise as an integral part of it.

The topic was taken from Cambridge English Advanced 1 and it is quoted here:

Your class has listened to a radio discussion on how more young people can be encouraged to sudy science. You have made the notes below:

Ways of encouraging young people to study science:

·        advertising

·        school programmes

·        government grants

Some opinions expressed in the discussion:

“You never see positive images of young scientists on TV, just pop stars or actors.”

“Science lessons should be more practical and fun.”

“If young people see science as a career, they’ll want to study it.”

Write an essay discussing two of the points in your notes. You should explain which way would be more effective in encouraging young people to study science, providing reasons to support your opinion.

You may, if you wish, make use of the opinions expressed in the discussion, but you should use your own words as far as possible.

I modified the topic requirements for my students slightly, asking them to include all points raised and ignore the question about which one would be the most effective.

I now provide the notes I made to help the students improve their writing after I had read their answers to the question. For the sake of convenience, I have highlighted the linking devices as they come up in the development of the topic.

INTRODUCTION

Science may well be the backbone of progress but seems to be the prerogative of a few.

MAIN BODY

How to motivate young people to study science

First and foremost

Stimulate interest            

How?

·     methods of presenting facts in class

·     relating science to real world

(colours of sunset)

·     discovering for themselves

experiments (creativity is developed)

This is not sufficient

Have to outbalance influence of glamorised professions on TV (acting, singing, sport)

How?

By showing the exciting aspect of being a scientist

(Theory of Everything film)

Last but not least

Government should actively encourage young people to opt for science

How?

by providing grants for those willing to do so

CONCLUSION

Enabling children to see the magic of science while being at an impressionable age can spark a genuine interest in science.

Writing in English: a point of view

Writing on the whole is a thorny issue -- even more so in a foreign language. Writing is closely linked to your knowledge of the world directly through your experience or as a result of your exposure to books, films or any kind of creative work that develops your imagination or cultivates your mind.

I often wonder about the usefulness of writing models and/or writing plans in most course books. Writing is a process of thinking, creating, organising ideas or events in a meaningful coherent way, which is unique for anyone who tries their hand at it. If a teacher is to help their students through this laborious task, it must be done by following each student’s line of thought, trying to guess or verify with the student the intention behind the wording and proceeding to correct, rephrase or reorganise.

Quite often there is a dearth of ideas on the topic, in which case writing should be preceded by a text – article, poem, literary extract – which will stimulate interest and will serve as a springboard for students to provide their own response to the input.

However, mostly the writing topics in course books are so narrow in scope that many a resourceful and imaginative product slips through this strictly delimited net. It seems to me that this adherence to highly formalised and standardised writing topics is meant to prepare students for a formal exam which will come much later and which is equally restrictive for candidates’ creativity and power of imagination. Indeed, sometimes it may even not have been thought out by the creators or examiners themselves.

By way of illustration, let us look at a topic for the essay task in the Cambridge First of Schools published by Cambridge University. In fact it is a test that has been sat. Here it is:

In your English class you have been talking about free time. Now your English teacher has asked you to write an essay for homework.

Write your essay using all the notes and giving reasons for your point of view:

Having a chat with friends in your free time can be as important as studying. Do you agree?

Notes

Write about:

1.    learning to get on with people

2.    wasting valuable time

3.    ……………………………………….. (your own idea)

I am citing here a question my students had about this topic: if they are supposed to chat with friends in their free time, how can it be a waste of time? I find this a very sensible question to ask, and it came from children of 13 and 14 years old.

But quite apart from that, I have an objection of essence concerning the compulsory writing task in First for Schools. Why provide some points for inclusion rather than allow the candidate to write the answer from scratch? The two ideas which must be included are often representative of two opposing views on the subject. However, many candidates would much prefer to give a one-sided answer -- for or against -- supporting their views with sound arguments. This actually sounds much more reasonable and feasible considering the word limit that applies (150-190 words), which hardly permits a rounded development of both points of view.

One may wonder why this attitude persists in a world where imagination and individuality appear to be sought-after and rewarded. I can only think of establishing some criteria for the examiners to assess and grade the composition. But then again shouldn’t examiners be knowledgeable and experienced enough to judge a piece of writing on its own merit? Personally, I have on occasion been stumped by how some learners can transcend teachers’ or any adult’s imagination in the freshness of approach to various topics when given space and freedom.

On the whole I find that by setting limitations to the development of a subject, we deprive young people of the opportunity to reveal their way of thinking and mindset, which may happen to differ from adults’ but which are,  nonetheless, complete and systematic and should be judged in their own right.

By way of conclusion I will provide some examples of topics which could lead to some excellent responses from young students and not only. These examples are not suggestions for writing topics in exams but could be used and recycled during a five- or six-year course. The list is random and by no means complete. Each teacher can draw up their own list on the basis of their students’ background, experience and preferences.

·       The sea

·       The wind

·       Mountains

·       Our neighbours

·       A day in the life of

·       The toys have come alive

·       I don’t have many friends but …

·       Are we free?

All in all, the sky is the limit.

Word Anchoring

My philosophy of learning and by extension of teaching can be condensed in two words: word anchoring. This can involve different approaches depending on what you need to anchor, and the process is lengthy though not necessarily tedious—on the contrary it could be stimulating and inspiring.

Most of the time we try to teach words by simply providing a mother tongue equivalent and/or paraphrasing the word in English and illustrating meanings with examples. However, when this is feasible, we should be fortifying understanding by creating meaningful context in which the students should place the words taught. I regularly create gap-filling exercises for practising vocabulary which was presented in context before. It is at this stage that most questions regarding the use of the words arise, and it is the answers to those questions that solidify learning.

An alternative way of making words memorable is by looking into their origin. This sometimes leads to fascinating discoveries not only for the student but even for the teacher as we all learn so much by teaching.

Another powerful method of anchoring words is by rendering them multifaceted. The science behind a concept, a poem or literary extract focusing on this particular concept can result in a network of related words/concepts which allow for more profound and lasting connections to be created.

And, of course, images can speak volumes sometimes and further enhance our perception of words.

The diamond project

To illustrate what I have said, I will use a lesson I built around a recent news story about a diamond which will soon be sold at auction and might fetch as much as 350,000 pounds for its owner. The level of English for this project was B2 or, if this doesn’t mean anything, the students have been studying English for about 6 years.

Origin of word

The main word is “diamond”. It comes from the Greek word αδάμας, which is made up of α (can’t) and δαμάζω (tame). 

Facts

I asked my students to prepare a short presentation about what diamonds are, which led to discussing carbon allotropes, properties of diamonds and covalent bonds between its atoms which makes its melting and boiling point so high. We also explained that there are no electrons in diamond, which means it does not conduct electricity.

This may sound rather ambitious and too hard to follow but the point is my students in this particular group are in High School and could easily understand the terms because they were familiar with them in their first language and, I must say, keen on science, which made things much more fun.

History

Next I wanted to introduce some technical details about how diamond used to be cut in the past and how it is cut now as prior knowledge of this would facilitate their understanding of the news story and would require less mediation on my part when they were exposed to it.  So the terms dull and brilliant came up and weight maintenance at the cost of brilliance in the past in contrast with weight loss as the price for brilliance in the present.

Images

To illustrate mount and mounted as opposed to loose diamonds as well as  cushion-mounted I provided some images. I did the same to explain car boot sale as the idea is foreign to my students.

shallow and deep cut

cushion-mounted diamond

loose diamond

Post-reading competition

After having read the story and getting everything clarified, the students were divided into groups and wrote some questions for the other group to test their memory of detail. While they were at it, they were not allowed to look in the text. This gave rise to quite a bit of animation while at the same time it served as the perfect motive to concentrate for the sake of winning.

Here is the link for the news story:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KcFg5ZzFFenVBM0U/view?usp=sharing