The little snake and the iris : a leap of faith

 

Life is full of surprises; impossible friendships are struck in the most unlikely places between the most – on the face of it -- incompatible parties. Adults, being more experienced and less credulous, would find it hard to see any affinity between a flower and a snake, but children -- inhabiting the land of make-believe – might be fascinated by such a rare friendship. 

Basically the story is meant to dispel myths about snakes and, hopefully, question people’s attitude towards them. I had children in mind when I wrote it since their perceptions about animals and people (!) are still in the making. The choice of flower is purposeful too. Iris is the Greek word for rainbow and also the name of the goddess of the rainbow.

 

The lesson could start by asking the students some questions that will prime their minds to receive the story. Such questions can be devised by observing life in its humblest forms. For instance, ask the children how a butterfly relates to the sea. If they don’t feel equal to the task, ask them to draw a butterfly flying over the sea. Perhaps not a common sight but a possible one, I can assure you!

Here is the story and a powerpoint slideshow to help present the story. Thereafter,  the sky is the limit.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y5GN55xMJwjGqZfh5EQcVF4g2_FiDEhP/view?usp=sharing

 

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QbsJ0DQmVLZcwRqNDPoDdNtjtT1sqP9VzN5OGtm8pL4/edit?usp=sharing

Improvising in the hard times of Covid-19

 

The pandemic has played havoc with our lives, personal and professional in many different ways. We are still in it so it is hard to make a final appraisal of the losses and the few gains (every cloud has a silver lining).

We, teachers, like our students, miss the physical contact and closeness sorely, and perhaps online teaching is taking its toll. Many of us found ourselves in the situation where we had to improvise a lot in order to keep up some semblance of normality, and I am no exception.

I have already digitised activities and games which were in paper form and have ransacked the internet for sources which will make my teaching more lively and stimulating, but I am not totally satisfied with the result. The reason is obvious: there is no substitute for real action in class especially when you teach juniors.

I came up with all sorts of ways that would add some physicality to our online classes, and regardless of whether they were still “fake” in a way, the children responded enthusiastically. So I invited the young pupils to hide in their room and ask the others to guess their whereabouts using (what else?) prepositions of place. I asked them to use cutlery (teaching basic vocabulary) to have a meal “together”. I joined them in miming action songs that I found online and so on and so forth.

And my efforts to whip up a bit more enthusiasm was crowned by a project that started tentatively but won the children over. I considered capitalising on some familiar vocabulary and at the same time introducing some more words which the children would find easy to mime after me. And since nature is what everyone missed most during the quarantines and lockdowns, nature it would be. 

I called my “sketch” The Elements and I had the children incarnate different elements by miming them after me. There is a very simple and memorable pattern to each line: I am (the element/noun) and I (the action/verb). The first time round it was the sun and the action was represented with movements of the hands in a radial pattern.

I am the sun and I shine.

Every time I introduced a new element, I got the children to repeat them all over --always using their bodies to mime. For words they didn’t know I accompanied each line with an image.

When our rehearsals were over, and taking advantage of the Christmas holiday, we all met up in the garden of my house--always at a safe distance from each other-- and I recorded them in the act so they would get a feeling of reward for all their efforts by watching themselves act out the sketch and have something to show for it.

Here it is:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZtKFTbNJ0LaR3JheQNfXfaUJpUmQOPTj/view?usp=sharing

Daydreaming and improvising or spinning stories

 

I like daydreaming and improvising. The latter is an acquired habit which formed after many years of planning. I dare say it is the inevitable concomitant of meticulous preparation for every single class – the privilege of taking students by surprise or challenging them to do what they don’t believe they can accomplish. And as children also daydream and improvise profusely, especially when they haven’t got a clue about the “right” answer, it is not hard to sweep them away with your enthusiasm. 

When students have to talk about a specific subject, they often lack the ability or the patience to structure their speech. As a teacher, I feel I have to show them that structuring their ideas and thoughts can take on many different forms, and all of them can be valid.

Stories, like questions on a passage, can be open-ended or we can reach the solution or a resolution following different routes.

By way of illustration, I have created a slide show, which starts with the image of an unfinished tale and the question why this story was cut short, left untold. The fourth slide puts an end to the story by implicitly attributing the sound on the door to a figment of the mother’s imagination.

But the story could take a twist and instead of stopping short it could continue in the realms of fantasy. 

The slide show could be presented without the narrative so as to get the students to supply their own ideas about why the story was interrupted and what happened afterwards. Besides, I have written out a two-tiered narrative for intermediate and more advanced learners – and thence the three slide shows. (videos)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ip_xkccszFfYoMxYybC9kBXJ8kMZQb6E/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wx33pNfmFcJv3BwOuWOA-dFlGaoah2RP/view?usp=sharing

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xRTIiqZRZNo-ZOsbX_C5ARv_VoUwnp1d/view?usp=sharing

 

 

 

 

The following is a Greek poem about the Future Tense and how it compares to the Past Tense!

Μου αρέσει ο μέλλοντας

Μου αρέσει ο μέλλοντας

Όλα αυτά που θα έρθουν

Να σβήσουν τις μουτζούρες

Του αόριστου με μια κίνηση

 

Μου αρέσει ο μέλλοντας

Είναι ο χρόνος που ηχεί

Τόσο ανέμελα

Με ελπίδες φρούδες ανάλαφρος

 

Μου αρέσει ο μέλλοντας

Και η τεράστια ελαφρότητά του

Πόσο άνετα κι αθόρυβα διαπερνά

Του νου τις σαθρές αντιστάσεις

The challenge of idioms

 

One of the many areas of difficulty for learners of English is the wealth of idioms they have to learn to use so they can speak natural English.

We, teachers, must find some creative ways of presenting and making idioms memorable, which is by no means an easy task.

Sometimes a situation arises which lends itself to focusing on an idiom if only because it is the only natural way of responding. However, this doesn’t happen so frequently in a school environment so we have to be resourceful and persistent.

I find that an image is perhaps the ideal way of imprinting it on students’ minds and a good deal of practice to anchor it.

I will illustrate with a couple of examples.

The first idiomatic phrase is to be on cloud nine. For this one I decided that prolonging the “mystery” would work well. So here is the PPT slide:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/18IL82cKTVlvNGzU-rUQJY7dW_vA0yAQA-4Mo1DBU6Xc/edit?usp=sharing

Following the slideshow, invite the students to imagine they are up there, on cloud nine and ask them to write something that led to such bliss.

She had been trying for years to have a baby and just a few minutes ago her doctor informed her that she is expecting.

 

The second phrase is to look daggers at someone. Again I made a slide and provided the following example hoping it would trigger some challenging responses:

My students looked daggers at me when I announced there would be a test every week for the whole academic year.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ReLZ38_oPGagHEmoHd0-Nr-7lG7KL7ghPvKbVJebgPk/edit?usp=sharing

Formal writing can be enjoyable

 

Teaching can be a romantic business in that you may always seek to clothe what would appear to be a cumbersome task in appealing terms. In this sense, I am an incorrigible romantic.

My focus is yet again writing for a language exam at an advanced level, particularly when the candidates are teenagers and still struggling with formal writing in their native language.

It is not very often that a teacher gets the opportunity to be playful about it but if you look out you might come across texts – newspaper articles, poems or even advertisements –which, if properly used, might provide excellent material for introducing or practising language or register useful in formal writing tasks.

The following was recently published in The Guardian.

  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oEfOAzprqaMgquQjbfkMMPU9nUT6DmLL/view?usp=sharing                 

It is a facetious exchange between someone versed in bird singing and an imaginary reader who responds to the information provided.

There is enormous potential in the text in various respects: witty repartee, colloquial language and a number of crucial issues to boot – music, birds, drugs, using animals in experiments, sounds during the coronavirus quarantine. So you could challenge your students by asking them to use different expressions from this dialogue to keep a conversation going.

(you don’t say, just think, really, I wonder if …, don’t say)

Now the question is how one could exploit the text in order to elicit more advanced writing. You could ask your students to write a serious article based on this dialogue, which will be published on a science website. This will involve leaving out all irrelevant details (summary skills), reordering the important facts in a way which the reader will find easy to follow (organisational skills)and employing different linguistic devices from those used in the original text.

It is exactly those differences in style that you need to focus on and either elicit them from the students or point them out to them so that they can use them in an appropriate way in their article.

I am supplying a sample here which I wrote for my students. I would make sure I won’t give away any of this before the students have tried their hand at the task. You will see some of the devices used highlighted.

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XC3d5IpvSHk8oNtpdqCSx1oWDIRFHLu5/view?usp=sharing

 

Conclusion: writing can be less of a bore for students if we, teachers, only tried harder.

Noun adjuncts in English and their rendition in Greek

It is amazing how long you may have been teaching and yet not fully identified the difficulties your students may come up against. There was a time when linguists invested far more time in comparing English to other languages and looking into systematic differences that inhibited understanding.

It is my feeling that there are quite a few aspects of the English language posing problems for speakers not just of one first language but of several which remain largely unexplored. At least I gather this much from discussions with other teachers, many of whom overlook these areas of difficulty in their teaching, and the same goes for the majority of course books whether they are meant for an international market or for speakers of a specific language.

 I will focus on one such aspect in this post without any pretensions to thoroughness; this would entail large-scale research with the participation of keen teachers and collection of corpora. However, I will attempt a certain methodology for this suggested research.

My topic is noun adjuncts, which means nouns qualifying nouns. Some simple examples would be:

orange juice, coffee pot, wine glass, health authorities, drug addiction, guard rail

 and many others. The above-mentioned examples are simple in the sense that there is only one noun qualifying another. However, there could be more:

landmark compensation case, snail shell spiral

or the attributive noun could be qualified by an adjective:

social media star, post-traumatic stress disorder

Being a native speaker of Greek, I will put forward my theory of rendition of phrases made up of two nouns to begin with. To my mind there are three different ways in which these phrases can be rendered in Greek:

·       second noun – first noun in genitive case (Most may in fact fall under this category.)

orange juice, wine glass

·       first noun translated as adjective – second as noun

health authorities, giant meteorite

·       second noun preposition (mostly “for”) second noun

drug addiction, air supremacy, kitchen towel, safety net