I have always been
fascinated by the “magic” of science and I never miss an opportunity to apply
it to materials I create for my classes.
This time it is a very
basic interview, which I have called An Interview Like No Other, and
which may be reproduced in a myriad ways as the student’s fancy takes them.
(and believe me it takes them all over the place!)
The idea is that the
students are called upon to work out a puzzle: who is the interviewee. By the
by you can teach the difference between interviewer and interviewee and mention
other similarly formed pairs (trainer/trainee, employer/employee and so on.
Back to the interview:
the interviewee is a cloud and I have based the answers on popular science to
the extent I could. The children loved the mental stimulation, but to my
surprise not everybody could come up with the right answer, which pleased me …
enormously!
What was, however, the
greatest pleasure of all was some of the interviews A2 Level students wrote
using the mould of my interview, which goes to show that children have not lost
their ability to spin stories and to exploit creatively whatever is given to
them.
You can use the
interview at any level and simply recalibrate the language or your demands in
terms of language, which evidently should be consistent with the level of
English your students have.
Here is my interview:
Where do you live?
In space
Who are your parents?
Water and Air
What do you look like?
I come in all kinds of shapes
What do you do?
I float
What is your hobby?
Hanging over mountains
What is your enemy?
Weight
What happens when you put on too much weight?
I fall
And what follows is one
of the most resourceful interviews by an eleven-year-old child (level A2):
Who are your parents?
Water, rocks and ice
What do you look like?
I am red and white
Have you got any special
features?
Yes, my sky and the sun
become blue in the sunset
Have you got any life on
you?
No, but there are some
rovers on me
Have you got any
neighbours?
Yes, my two moons, Phobos and Deimos
And another one by a
student of the same age and level:
Where do you live?
In a school bag
What do you look like?
Square and usually
colourful
What do you have inside?
Sheets of paper
What colour have your
sheets of paper got?
Sometimes colourful and
other times black and white
