Monday, 16 July 2018
Monday, 9 July 2018
Mystery and teaching
 |
| Mystery and Melancholy Giorgio de Chirico |
Ideally, to stimulate and
hold the students’ interest you need a touch of suspense and a balanced mix of
science and art. It is not every day that I can strike gold in this endeavour,
but from time to time I come across some promising material such as a recent
item entitled How we Found Three
Poisonous Books in our Library on Conversation.
You could introduce your
topic by writing down
books poison colour
and then asking the
students to think of any possible ways to link the ideas. The speculation would
enhance the mystery around the forthcoming text.
To test some fine points
in syntax I turned some extracts from the text into a transformation exercise,
which the students had to do before they read the text. They then confirmed their
answers while they read the text.
I also gave them a
vocabulary exercise to do in order to practise the new words.
However, I often get this
niggling feeling that the students are not quite active in learning when they
simply perform tasks, but on the other hand I am aware of the fact that because
they are young they need some guidance in order to become independent learners.
To this end, I searched on
the internet for some related topics and came up with the following:
The mystery of Caravaggio's death solved at last –
painting killed him, The
Guardian
and
Oil paints that could kill: did Albrecht and Margret Durer
poison their customers with their paintings? Part I, By Dr. Elizabeth Garner and Joe Kiernan
Next, I devised some kind
of framework within which the students can prepare an oral presentation of each text and
assigned each to pairs of students. They had to meet up outside school and work
together on their presentation. I was pleasantly surprised by how well they
accomplished the task and how many questions arose out of doing this
independently.
I provide the copies of the
Student’s handouts here:
(Some Greek equivalents
are given by way of explanation for some lexical items. I am all for such shortcuts
when it comes to technical terms or words which it would take too long to
explain.)
Thursday, 28 June 2018
Lessons from nothing
Lessons from nothing
Texts, whether they are
articles or news stories or literary extracts, provide fair amounts of exposure
to the language, which is the most obvious way of learning. However, the
challenge for me is how to introduce a
text so I can stimulate the students’ interest as well as activate their mind.
I often rack my brains as
to how to present a new topic before I actually hand out the text. It turns out
that the best ideas come to me in the process of teaching as the students are
the ones who shape the lesson – with their unpredictable responses -- no matter
how well-prepared a teacher might be. I therefore call these “lessons from
nothing”.
For instance, recently I
had prepared a BBC article about the death of baobab trees for my B2 students. I
attempted to introduce the topic by asking my students to write down some words
they associate with “forest”. They seemed to be stuck (not least because the
school year was drawing to an end). So I supplied some words and asked them to
ask questions using them.
The words I gave them
were:
plant, acid rain, destruction, reforestation,
deforestation, human activity
It was a small
contribution for the questions I got back from the students:
·
To what
extent does acid rain affect trees?
·
In what
ways does human activity affect forests?
·
How can
we stop deforestation?
·
What is
the significance of reforestation?
·
Which is
the most effective method of reforestation?
The questions form the
basis of a writing topic on forests,
and the students could go on to write the answers to the questions if they
could do so off the top of their heads or alternatively they could search for
answers on the internet.
Another example of how a key word can trigger a variety of improvised activities follows.
This time it was a news
item I was introducing concerning an explosion in an apartment building in
Wuppertal, Germany, published in The Guardian.
I simply wrote down “explosion” on the board and invited the
students to share what the word brought to mind. Not surprisingly, they came up
with the very words that constitute the causes of an explosion:
earthquake, gas, bomb, volcano
I grabbed the opportunity
for some collocations:
A volcano erupts
Gas leaks
You plant a bomb
At that stage, it occurred to me
that it was high time we revised possibility
in the past. I wrote on the board:
may
might
could
and underneath a question:
What could have caused the explosion?
I then elicited sentences with
the other causes mentioned by the students.
·
Gas could
have leaked.
·
A bomb
might have been planted.
·
There may
have been an earthquake.
·
A volcano
might have erupted.
In conclusion, lessons
from nothing can be thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding for both students and
teachers.
The links for the two articles:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/24/dozens-injured-by-explosion-at-apartment-block-in-west-germany
Thursday, 21 June 2018
Summer is my source of inspiration. Here is a poem I wrote quite recently to celebrate summer.
SUMMERS
I hanker after
them in winter
But spring my
longing makes feebler
And when the
midday haze
My body in a
stupor lays
Subdued and
beaten hollow
The Sun my
king I follow
The glorious
day is gone
A blaze on the
horizon
A myriad stars
shoot the skies
Which skywards
draw my eyes
The silver
sliver slices through
Its
sovereignty to claim with a coup
Friday, 15 June 2018
The Proud Needle
Time leaves its indelible
mark on everyone and everything. We become attached to objects that helped
shape our life or sometimes even changed its course. These objects fall into
disuse as others take priority over them and are left somewhere, forgotten and
neglected—silent witnesses to past glories.
Here is a poem of mine,
which was meant to evoke the nostalgia of a past lost to us forever.
THE PROUD NEEDLE
It boasted once
A slender figure
It crafted quilts
And wondrous things
With time it tired
Of frantic hands
It curved and bent
And lost its lustre
A mighty sunny winter day
A casual throw of a hand
Consigned a best companion
To a lake's fathomless depths
Sunday, 10 June 2018
Images and Imagination: various forms of writing
It will have transpired by
now that I find images a great tool to stimulate learners’ imagination and
provide them with some concrete basis on which to build language.
Having said this, however,
I must make it clear that I don’t normally ask for a description of a picture
as this is far too vague and leaves the students at sea as to which aspect of
the image to focus on.
An image may simply serve
as a source of inspiration for creative writing without further prompting on
the part of the teacher. In fact, I often find that the more uncomplicated the
image, the broader the scope for letting your imagination run away with you.
Depending on your
students’ level and ability, you can move from the basics to more sophisticated
questions and make tasks gradually more challenging.
Here is an image which is
highly suggestive and lends itself to all kinds of activities. If nothing else,
it puts the learners into a trance, numbing all kinds of inhibitions that they might
harbour towards writing!
I prefer to prompt my students by providing some basic
clues and brainstorm for words or phrases which can be used to answer these
basic questions.
Here is the framework for building a text, whatever form
of writing the student or the teacher might choose.
WHERE scene, children
WHEN time of day, time of
year
WHO
WHAT action(s)
HOW (MOVE)
If you find that the learners are not prepared to do
their bit of research in order to find some appropriate words and phrases to
use, you may wish to do what every self-respecting teacher does(!): supply a
list and demand the students to use them all while answering the questions.
An indicative list follows:
pier
half way along
on the edge
on an autumn afternoon
11 or 12-year-old children
cast a fishing rod
peer at the sea
sound the depth of the sea
bend over
squat
kneel
calm sea
ripples
You may want to ask your
students, after they have answered the questions, to flesh out their notes into
a story entitled, for instance, A summer day in the life of three childhood
friends.
On the other hand, if you
are in the mood to teach describing simple processes, you could do so by asking
your students to explain step by step how one can fish.
Here is a very schematic
plan, which you might want to expand into full-length text.
Get a fishing rod
Get a bait
Hook the bait on
Cast the fishing rod
Dangle the rod over the water
Sit and wait till the fish bites
Hook the fish
Lift the rod
Pull the fish out
You could ask your students to link the ideas by using
some linking words or phrases or you could even proceed to ask them to orally
describe a very simple process to one another without completing it and get
them to name the process or continue one another’s processes.
Example:
Take a small cup.
Fill it with bottled water.
Put a small pot on a cooker ring.
Turn on the cooker.
Pour the water into the pot.
Open the sugar bowl.
Scoop a spoonful of sugar.
……………..
For those who have not guessed yet, the answer is :
making Greek coffee!
Friday, 25 May 2018
Digressions
A common problem that
teachers have to deal with in our days is the ever-diminishing attention span
of young learners due to their addiction to the social media. That means that a
session of study consists of a number of digressions from the main activity,
which is studying.
Occasionally, I create
activities which imitate this interrupted session of studying. They do not
require a long attention span on the part of the learners and can be broken
down to smaller units which gradually unfold as questions arising out of a
larger framework – digressions. The questions are meant to challenge the
learners’ notion of comprehension and get them to think about content, focusing
on a deeper understanding of the input rather than a cursory read-through with
the aim of answering some multiple-choice questions.
Here is an illustration of
digressions.
I picked a BBC video
called Can Magnets Improve your Brain
and started showing it to a group of advanced students. As one can see, the
video is subtitled and very easy to follow.
When the phrase Crafting cognition appeared on the
screen, I stopped the video and asked the students to give me a definition of craft, which they did quite adequately
and then I provided a dictionary definition of the word.
craft=exercise skill in making (an object), typically
by hand
The next question was “How
can one craft cognition”, which did not receive much feedback but posed a
question, which primed the students’
mind for what would follow.
The next question was what
steroids are. The students had an inkling of anabolic steroids and explained
how they are used, or rather abused, by athletes. At this point, I mentioned
that there are natural and artificial steroids and gave them a short definition
I found online.
Cortisol is one
important adrenal cortex steroid hormone, and it regulates
carbohydrate metabolism and has an anti-inflammatory effect on the body. Aldosterone is another steroid hormone that comes
from the adrenal cortex. It helps maintain blood pressure and regulate the salt
and water balance in your body.
The anabolic
steroids abused by athletes are synthetic versions of testosterone, a male
hormone. Both men and women naturally produce testosterone. But like all
hormones -- which regulate the body's most basic functions -- throwing one's
testosterone out of balance can have wide-ranging consequences.
As the main idea of the
video is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, the next question to ask was what a
magnetic field is. My students were old enough to have come across the idea in
their science class, but a clear definition escaped them. So here is a short
definition and a link I asked them to have a look at:
A magnetic
field is a picture that we use as a tool to describe how the magnetic force is
distributed in the space around and within something magnetic.
Motor skills came up next, which was
answered in a very basic way:
Typically, they are categorized into
two groups: gross motor skills and fine motor skills. Gross motor skills are involved
in movement and coordination of the arms, legs,
and other large body
parts and movements. They involve actions such as running, crawling and swimming.
Finally, I asked my
students what an ethics committee is and why it is involved in scientific research,
which they had no clue about. So I teased out the answer by asking what happens
when for example scientists try to find a new cure for cancer (animals made
sick and given the new drug, patients volunteering to try the new medicine). I did
not fail to also give them a short definition.
An ethics committee is a body
responsible for ensuring that medical experimentation and human research are
carried out in an ethical manner in accordance with national and international
law.
At the end of the class,
the students were given a handout with all the relevant information and links,
which they might or might not have a closer look at. The point is that they
were made to see how much pith lies in a short video and how much interest it
can generate.
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