Reaching out to students' minds

 

As life is drawing to an end, one grows desperate about all the facts one has missed and all the fields of research that one will leave unexplored. But one perforce also grows aware of how unequal one is to the task of reaching definitive answers to fundamental questions which have preoccupied one perhaps for as long as one’s lifetime.

If you search on the internet about how much we understand of the human brain, you will find all kinds of answers which actually fail to get to grips with the real point at issue.

As I have pointed out in an earlier post, my feeling is that we teachers are not invited or encouraged to feed our discoveries to the body of research being conducted into how learners approach learning a foreign language. If science is not empirical, it is nothing. No matter how scientists would interpret teachers’ observations, the fact remains that they should capitalise on those very observations.

I will cite a few examples of observations I have kept a record of and my interpretation of the mistakes. Note the mistakes were mostly made by dyslexic children and they involve a mix-up on several levels—phonological, morphological, semantic.

·       A student was asked to explain the meaning of “I miss you” and he came up with the equivalent of “I hate you” in his mother tongue (Greek).

My interpretation of his answer:

In Greek the word “miss” sounds like the verb μισώ (hate) if you take away the ending (-ω) for first person singular Present Tense. He kept the meaning of “you” which was familiar to him and that’s how he came up with this translation. This is an example of a mother-tongue-interfering mistake and an ingenious deployment of all means available to him.

·       Another dyslexic student was asked what “olives” means and he replied with the equivalent of “we all live” in Greek (όλοι ζούμε). Apparently he broke down the word to two constituent parts “all” and “live”. It is worth noting that in Greek you don’t normally use the pronoun (“we”) before the verb as the verb ending indicates the person and the number, and, needless to say, many students do not bother with the ending –s for the third person singular of Present Simple.

·       Dyslexic students literally hang on the teacher’s words so that they will make sense of what would be an impossible task on paper. This means that some misunderstandings depend on how they break down an utterance into distinct words. Here is an example to illustrate the point:

I asked a student “Is it raining?”, and his perceived hearing was “Is it training?” The sentence made no sense in the context but it never crossed the student’s mind that a neutral “it” could not possibly be training. This didn’t matter to the student as long as he could provide an answer to the question.

Learners, especially young children, have a way of making of words they hear what they will—or should I say, what sounds familiar from their exposure to the foreign language till the encounter with a new word. This time there were several junior students who contributed to the guessing game – with only one being dyslexic.   They had come across the word “imagine” before but none of them seemed to remember it. So the responses I got varied from “magic” to “emoji” and they were based on the hearing of the word. 

 

My conclusion

Although teachers in our majority do not credit dyslexic students with abstract thinking or organising the input of foreign language, we are wrong. They have an amazing ability to structure and restructure the input in order to decode the message, and they hardly ever give up trying till they (or the teacher) have the problem satisfactorily resolved.

Here is one more example of highly abstract thinking by another dyslexic student. He was having trouble understanding a sentence so I asked what “something” means. His answer was the Greek word for “often”. I racked my brains to see the relevance  and eventually all I could gather was that this time the student found some hidden semantic similarity between the two words (“often” and “something”). Let me put it this way absurd as it may sound: “something” is not “everything” while “often” is not “always”. On a high level of abstraction the words are comparable.

 

 

Creative activities out of nothing: Big Heart

 

Students, especially young ones, find it difficult to cope with writing tasks for some very significant reasons. For one, the topic is far too abstract for their age and interests; writing is not their forte in their first language; they can’t relate to the topic; there are no cues to follow. Concretising writing is an indispensable step not just in order to help students along with their writing but more importantly perhaps in order to motivate them.

It doesn’t always require too much preparation or effort on the part of the teacher to achieve the goal of stimulating students’ minds so they can compose a text that will answer the question and fulfil its communicative purpose.

Here is a task to try with your younger students:

Draw a big heart on the board and label it “big heart”. Following this, explain to the children in their mother tongue that they are to draw a heart in their notebooks and put five items in it; the items can be animate or inanimate. After they have done so, ask “why”. So now the children have to form clauses beginning with “because”.

Let us assume that someone has drawn  a silk shawl, a straw hat, a balloon, a dead leaf and their best friend.

Why a balloon?

because I can go places in it/because I can see the earth from high up

An extension of this would be to challenge the children to link as many items in the heart as possible in a story.  If we keep the items we chose above, their text could read:

My friend put on her beautiful silk shawl and I picked my wide-brim straw hat and got into a balloon which lifted into the blue sky and floated over the green and yellow fields. We started drifting down and just before we touched the earth softly a breath of air blew a dead leaf over our heads.

 

From Silence to Scream: The Sound Theme

 

Imagine life without a single sound – an empty soundscape – no biophony or anthropophony. Living in an age where many are trying hard to cope with noise pollution, perhaps it is difficult to picture this anechoic environment though we came very close to it during the pandemic lockdowns.

There is a wealth of information about sounds which might excite the imagination of the students. By way of introduction and in order to stimulate a discussion, I like to play the sound of the sea waves lapping gently against the shore; it is a soothing one with a universal appeal. And then one can perhaps share the video and ask how the image enhances the effect of the sound.

Here is a video I have made myself:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PWAcrT4jIs9Fl5ushZHsFulP0ssM1pdv/view?usp=sharing

One can look at sounds and silence in many different ways using a different approach depending on the level of the students. At a basic level, I start with a well-known poem by Roger McGough: The Sound Collector.

A stranger called this morning
Dressed all in black and grey
Put every sound into a bag
And carried them away

The whistling of the kettle
The turning of the lock
The purring of the kitten
The ticking of the clock

The popping of the toaster
The crunching of the flakes
When you spread the marmalade
The scraping noise it makes

The hissing of the frying pan
The ticking of the grill
The bubbling of the bathtub
As it starts to fill

The drumming of the raindrops
On the windowpane
When you do the washing-up
The gurgle of the drain

The crying of the baby
The squeaking of the chair
The swishing of the curtain
The creaking of the stair

A stranger called this morning
He didn't leave his name
Left us only silence
Life will never be the same

 

A challenging way of introducing the poem is to play all the familiar sounds that the collector removes from the house one by one and ask the students to name each sound or, failing that, to describe the action taking place that creates this particular sound. There is an excellent powerpoint slideshow at the following site that will help.

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/sound-collector-roger-mcgough-interactive-poem-6325258

The students take up the challenge of hearing and guessing, which means there is a good deal of language production before the poem is presented. They quite enjoy having their guesses confirmed or even proved wrong. The same method can be used later to check that they have memorised the words for the sounds. I find this a very practical and interesting way of teaching this kind of language, which is hard to teach to advanced students simply because they are too old to join in the fun. Following that, the students can discuss their feelings about a house bare of sounds or they could write a few sentences about how to bring back the sounds. Any original ideas are welcome!

Moving up levels, we can upgrade the content. Sounds that can be pleasant in normal circumstances can become a threat to our sanity. According to Barney Thompson (The Tines 23 October 2009) a song like I love you by Barney the Dinosaur could drive people to confess anything if played loudly and often enough. Advanced students could be given the article, which focuses on sound as a means of torture for home reading.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Kc5Vct-fHXAmF6irwKHN1zLUByja-o2/view?usp=sharing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK3C9IytrLI

The students could be assigned a variety of tasks including collecting sounds from nature or from their environment or they could be asked to create a scale of a specific sound from the most pleasurable to the most annoying – for example their pet cat’s  purrs all the way down to snarls. For the artistically minded, a challenging task would be to consider situations that could have triggered the famous Scream (Edvard Munch)

The Scream by Edvard Munch

More motivated students could embark on collecting information about the very first sounds of music or the first musical instruments. To motivate them, show them this image of the oldest musical instrument in the world (60,000 years).

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3agcq7fSGC8

They can watch the video to discover its history.

Hope it works for your classes.

We must talk about children

 

While we are still wavering amidst a pandemic that broke out a couple of years ago, I hear no-one asking the right questions. So I might as well do it myself.

Do we intend to continue pretending that distance learning is equivalent to face to face learning or will it ultimately dawn on us that education is all about interaction and physical presence?

Are we going to turn children into miserable obese creatures sitting in front of a screen and counting down to the very last minute of their Maths session?

Are we to isolate and confine them to their –not always so comfortable -- homes and teach them social skills from a distance? And where will play and fun go? What use will their communication skills be in their electronic cages?

Are we putting across contradictory messages about caring for the environment and protecting the beauties of nature when we are actually reducing their lives to a metaworld of everything?

Are children and teenagers going to be intimidated and emotionally blackmailed into shouldering the deaths of their grandparents and perhaps parents when it is the failures of adults and the so-called experts who should be held accountable?

Will we go on plaguing them with “facts” which have kept changing at a pace that even Russian roulette would envy? How much longer will we sit back and hear “experts” banging on about the dramatic increase in mental illnesses in the near future among children as well as adults for that matter?

Most important of all, how much longer will we force children and teenagers bursting with energy to wear masks made out of all kinds of materials under the delusion – or maybe with malicious intent – that we are doing anything else but asphyxiating them, smothering their voices and criminally suppressing their freedom of speech? I won’t even go into seeing their smiles light up their eyes again and the flame of life return to their expressionless faces?

We are all teachers. Shall we bend over our young pupils and heal their wounds gently reintroducing them to the life we left behind? Shall we regain control of our lives?

 

 

Problem areas for English language learners: infinitive tenses

 

A teacher has got strengths and weaknesses depending on their ability and natural inclinations. For example I am rather lousy at drawing --though I do try hard-- but I can make the most of every opportunity a text affords me to clarify, illustrate and further practise language issues.

I feel that some problematic areas for learners of English are not given proper attention by course or grammar book writers. If you look at a typical course of English, you will not fail to notice an excessive emphasis on tenses in the indicative mood so much so that one gets practice for the Present and Past tenses right into Proficiency level. To my mind, this is superfluous given that a B2 level student should be able to use those quite efficiently. On the other hand, there are other grammar points introduced well into a typical course that require further development and consolidation if only because they are too sophisticated to be assimilated by younger or lower-level learners.

In my experience of teaching mainly Greek people, one of those areas in English grammar which merit special attention and should be dealt with in more detail is the infinitive tenses and their inextricable link with modal verbs. My point is that the tense for most modal verbs provides no clue as to the time the verb phrase refers to and it is the tense of the infinitive that is the time marker. (Could for ability is a time marker but not for possibility whereas may or might are no time markers and one needs to denote the time by choosing the appropriate infinitive tense.)

However, in Greek and other languages, I imagine, it is not the infinitive but the subjunctive tenses which denote time.  As a result, it is quite difficult for Greek learners to comprehend the infinitive tense use or grasp the idea that the infinitive has tenses but does not agree with the subject in person. This leads to mistakes of this kind:

He should has tried more.

The above sentence shows that there is some understanding of infinitive tenses but not sufficient understanding of the infinitive as a non-conjugated form. The mistake is the result of mental translation in the mother tongue, which equates infinitive to subjunctive. (Greek is a morphologically rich language with person differences marked by different endings.)

In order that my students get enough practice of problem grammar areas, I take advantage of original texts which provide ample examples of a particular structure either underlining the examples of this particular structure or creating an exercise.

What follows is an instance of what I have tried to illustrate so far. In addition to infinitive tenses, the text lent itself to some practice of noun adjuncts (I have already discussed this in a previous post of mine in detail providing a methodology of making sense of noun adjuncts by Greek learners.)

The first exercise is meant to be completed before reading the news story and check in the process of reading it while the second evidently is to be done while reading the text.

 

Police step up search for missing hospital worker Petra Srncova

            The Guardian 11 December 2021

Put the words in the right order to reconstruct the noun phrases. Translate the phrases in your first language.

a.      hospital, missing, children’s, worker, a

b.     nurse, senior, a, assistant

c.      her, address, home

d.     a, conference, press

e.      home, her, country

f.       our, service, national, health

Read the news story carefully and put the verbs in brackets in the correct infinitive form:

A missing children’s hospital worker is believed to …….......................... (disappear) on her way home from work, police said on Saturday, as Labour MP Harriet Harman launched an appeal for information on her constituent^[1].

Petra Srncova, 32, a senior nurse assistant at Evelina London children’s hospital in Westminster, was reported missing on 3 December by a concerned colleague, and officers are intensifying their efforts to try to ………………………….(find) her.

Srncova is believed to ……………………………(leave) the hospital at 19.45pm on 28 November. She is thought to ……………………………. (wear) a green coat and ………………………………..(carry) a red backpack at the time, the Metropolitan police said.

It is believed that Srncova withdrew money from a cashpoint, before boarding a bus towards Elephant and Castle. She is then thought to ……………………………………(change) to a bus travelling southbound towards her home address in Camberwell, where she was last sighted at 20.22pm.

A man has been arrested in connection with her disappearance and remains in custody, the Met added.

“Petra is missing, and we want people to help the police find her,” Harman said at a press conference she held on Saturday afternoon in her constituency^[2] of Camberwell.

She added: “She’s been missing for quite a few days now, she’s only 32, she’s from the Czech Republic, her parents of course are desperately worried about her, and I feel we’ve all got a particular responsibility to ……………………..(ttry)and ………………………(find) her because she was away from her home country, away from her family, here working for our national health service.”

A Met spokesperson said police have approached her family in the Czech Republic and “they have not heard from her”.

They added:“Officers are growing increasingly concerned for Petra’s welfare and are asking anyone who has seen her, or has information as to^[3] her whereabouts, to ……………………………(make) contact immediately.”

Det Supt Clair Kelland, from the Central South Command Unit which covers the area that Petra lives in, said: “We continue to …………...... (grow) increasingly worried about Petra and we are doing everything we can to try to find her.

“Her disappearance is out of character and, of course, her loved ones are extremely concerned and want to know where she is.

“Please think about if you’ve seen her, or maybe come into contact with her. If you have any information whatsoever, please get in touch and help us with our inquiries.”

The Evelina hospital said on Twitter: “We are extremely concerned about our valued colleague Petra who is missing. We want to encourage anyone who may ……………………….(have) any information that could ………………………(help) to find her to contact the police.”

 

---

[1] ψηφοφόρος

[2] εκλογική περιφέρεια.

[3] about

The Future

 The times are a-changin and we are changing with them. Here is a recent creation right out of gloomland:

Το μέλλον

Έρχεται πολλή παγωνιά

Θα σιωπούμε αενάως

Η φωνή μας άφωνη

Θα μετεωρίζεται πριν απ’ το λόγο

 

Άνθρωποι σκιές

Θα πλανώνται στους δρόμους

Τα παιδιά ασπρομάλλικα

Θα ματώνουν τη σιγή με κραυγές

 

Θα κλαίμε χωρίς δάκρυα

Θα θρηνούμε χωρίς λόγια

Στον αδιάφορο ουρανό

Ένας παγερός ήλιος θα βασιλεύει

Using models creatively: An Interview

 

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