Activating the mind is an
issue that constantly preoccupies me as a teacher in general and, evidently, as
a language teacher.
It is understood that we
can’t make a brainteaser out of everything we intend to teach to our students,
but we can definitely capitalise on anything that helps us get the students to
think, compare, contrast and tease out meaning rather than spoon-feeding them
incessantly.
I find it hard to keep
replenishing the stock of activities borrowed or of my own invention which will
stimulate and compel the students to engage in any given task.
As I have often claimed
before, poetry and literature -- in the
right balance and carefully chosen for the right level of students -- possess
this power to get them to puzzle out meaning from context and spend this extra
time over lexis that we would rather they saved in their memory.
While trying to think of a
way of presenting a poem called Sunflakes to my students, I coined a
term for the task which I devised for it to refer to the thinking process involved:
context-shifting. It might work for
a limited number of texts, but with a modicum of resourcefulness and
imagination one could find other texts – literary or not -- in which to use a
similar technique.
Before I suggest my way of
presenting the poem, let me just point out that it would work fine with intermediate-level
groups –both children and adult.
Here is the
task and the poem in PDF form:
Read the following poem and try to find the missing
item in the compound nouns in the poem. Some, but not all, of the blank spaces
are to be filled with the same item.
I have highlighted in red the items to be left blank for the students to supply the answers:
A further suggestion is
that depending on the students’ mastery of relevant vocabulary, one could
create fewer or more gaps to be filled. For instance, I knew my students were
not acquainted with compound words such as “snowdrifts” or “snowbanks” so I
just left them intact. They would make the task to gather the missing word too
difficult when it was already quite a bit of a challenge.
I hope you have fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment