How to introduce an element of surprise in your class

I often find texts in course books dull or lifeless. So I like to add a personal touch here and there. What follows is a text I wrote along with some follow-up activities to challenge bored students away from their gadgets.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-K
MXd0a2V0MW8xSWs/view?usp=sharing

Methodological questions include:

·       What level is the text aimed at?

The answer is roughly above level B2 and of course it depends on your students.

·       How do I present the text?

You could read it out or let your students read it to themselves.

Alternatively you could challenge the students by leaving some gaps to be filled with the right words. Those could be words which reveal the identity of the “I” (corridors, roof, façade, shutters, paint)

The question to be asked after the first read is who is “I”.

·       The students could be invited to think of a title.

A suggestion is: If a house could speak

·       The students could engage in creative writing. What would a …………………. say if it could speak?

It could be a mountain, a tree, a butterfly, a snake: the possibilities are endless.

A teacher's reverie

Greece south east

on a warm Sunday morning of November

and a feeling that time has frozen

There was a time when we learnt foreign languages without even having heard a native speaker. Of course learning was more difficult and relied on grammar and rules since exposure was extremely limited (some cassettes accompanying a course book).


 As in every situation, however, there was a silver lining: in my case English was a dreamland, the space where I could let my imagination run away with me, the space that I could populate with my fictional characters. In my early utterances of English there was a lot of mother tongue interference but also a lot of freedom of thought. 

Learning English meant distancing myself from a tedious reality, building bridges with the rest of the world, inhabiting a universe of fairytales where hopes for the future merged with ambitions of visiting the country where this marvellous language was spoken. 

The dream was fulfilled later on in life and took away all the magic but nothing can make  the memories of those times and the feeling of longing for places unknown waiting to be “discovered” fade away.

Today my learners are constantly exposed to English through music, films, sports commentaries. There is almost a surplus of exposure, which makes learning so much easier. So much less effort is needed to achieve fluency in a foreign language. Children have the opportunity to travel much more and they are possibly closer to considering themselves citizens of the world as the social media allow them to get into contact with people from far and wide. There are so many privileges that are taken for granted.

Theory and practice in language learning

As a student and, for many years throughout my career, as a teacher, I have conscientiously delved into the theory of practically anything related to the acquisition and teaching of English as a foreign language.

My theoretical grounding has stood me in good stead all those years though not without the support of solid hands-on experience. After all one has to make a start and therefore needs a framework within which to act. At least this was my default setting.

Theoretical books as well as methodological ones are fine as far as they go. There are different proponents of different theories about how learning a foreign language takes place and if you are a novice and haven’t got the foggiest idea where to start you have no other choice but to take one on trust, which is what we also do in real life.

I have moved on from grammar and translation through  audiolingual, communicative, functional methods to multiple intelligences to what is now my own re-adaptable approach, a crystallization of all the input fortified with my own discoveries and ideas of learning. Far from suggesting that I have learnt everything, I propose here that we learn as long as we teach if only because the means available are different and our experience is being enriched all the time even if adding up the minutiae and being led to generalizations is painfully slow. I like to think that teachers’ generalisations are fed back into new theories of how we learn as everything is in a fluid state of being defined and redefined.

In order to learn from your learners you have to hold your feelers out all the time. You have to observe how students approach and process new input, what mistakes they make, how much mother tongue interference accounts for their mistakes, how much their imagination and eagerness gets the better of accuracy, or, by the same token, to what extent their lack of motivation or lack of ability or dearth of pragmatic knowledge limits their efficiency in foreign language learning.

Watching learners, both young ones and adults, taking in and processing information is an absolutely amazing experience and can only be effective if the teacher is genuinely interested in their students as people as so much depends on that. Personally I am fortunate enough to teach people from a very young age and see them through to completing a full course up to levels B2, C1 and C2. This allows me some continuity both in terms of biological growth and mental development.

Personality and ability have an intriguing way of interacting when learning – not just a language, I suppose – since personality determines whether a learner will persevere or give up or whether the learner will turn an impediment  to good advantage by becoming more resourceful and more determined to overcome obstacles.

By way of illustration, I will provide an example of a young dyslexic learner in one of my classes. The child is eight years old and apparently aware of her difficulty in reading. A couple of weeks into her first year, she has already developed some strategies to get round the problem. She listens intently to me and the audio aids used in class without looking in the book so that she can learn the new lesson by heart. (I normally make a point of exposing learners to the sounds of new words first and then to their written form.) She whispers sentences while someone else is reading and when the class focuses on some written exercises and she gets stuck at a word that she can’t decipher, she will always ask me to tell her what the word is so that she can continue with the exercise. In other words, the child is making every effort to learn and she shows a will and inventiveness that one might be surprised to find in a child of her age, which is admirable. Class dynamics is also very important. In the case of the girl, what further motivates her is an underlying competition with a friend of hers.

All in all, every learner has a story to tell which perhaps is part of their life story.

Presenting a poem: Silverly

Presenting poems does not follow rules; on the contrary, I would say that it all depends on the poem of course, on your class and on your strengths or weaknesses as a teacher or as a person.

I am not the world’s most extroverted person, but when it comes to reading stories and poems to children I have had so much practice with my own children that I am a natural! I will change voices, I will exaggerate movements, I will bring the poem alive, I will do all I can to draw the students into it.

One of my favourites is a short poem called Silverly:

Silverly

             Silverly,                                Dozily,

         Silverly,                                Dozily,

         Over the                       Deep in her

         Trees                                           Bed

The moon drifts,                   A little girl

         By on a                Dreams with the            Runaway         Moon in her

         Breeze.                                     Head

                                                                                            

There is a mesmerizing quality about it not just in the images it evokes but also in its enunciation. So here is how I go about it:

I ask my pupils, young ones normally, to rest their heads on the desk and close their eyes. I switch off the light, I put on my soft mellow voice and read dragging the words out and maintaining a tempo throughout the reading.

Then I ask the pupils to draw an image of what they make of the poem. It is not essential that they know all the words so they can do so. They will want to hear it again so that they can draw the picture, which reinforces listening skills.

I get some original pictures in response to the poem – often of a disproportionately large moon hovering in the sky with a little girl lying in bed far below and her long orange hair loose all over the bed.

I then show them a powerpoint slideshow, which you can see below and I focus on “drift”. As my pupils are quite young, I only elicit the literal use of the word by drawing

·       some food cooking, the smell of which drifts down the stairs

·       a boat drifting in the sea

·       a woman whose perfume drifts all over the room

and asking them to write a sentence for each picture using the word “drift”.

Methodological choices must be made all the time and they all depend on what one’s aims are. Mine was to provide a Friday evening break from the routine while exposing my pupils to spoken language and exciting their imagination as well as presenting the lexical item “drift” through the motion of the slideshow.

Back to clouds

Back to clouds then. Clouds like tornadoes get their fair amount

of adulation and an obscure --to me-- horde of loyal watchers.

This poem of mine is dedicated to a cloud chaser. 

A cloud chaser

His eyes pinned

On the celestial sphere

Pursuing ever elusive

Fugitives

Be it lucid or be it leaden

They never tire

They stow away

Behind peaks

They leap onto

The glistening lakes

A hostage to their erratic ways

In bondage to a trivial pursuit

His days aimlessly flutter by

His path fusing with their flight

Resistance

Winter has just set in for all of us in the northern hemisphere. I feel the chill in my bones and the dark spreads relentlessly leaving little space for dream-mongering. Body and soul put up token resistance against the rule of nature, but I soon let go, fortifying myself with fabrications of the summer gone and the light that will be again.

Here is a fabrication of mine:

A summer night’s vision

The drifting moon

Was gazing down

A seamless blue

The sleepless sea

A swelling lull

The slightest signs

Of life subdued

In its arms

An eerie stillness

The cosmos ruled

A trail of dreams

Wrestling free

Like sailing boats

Under a breath of wind

Their skyward course

Across the nightly cloth

With eagerness pursued

The restless vision

A flight of fancy

Unchecked

In its inception

A  ruthless rift

Insidiously wrought

In the nocturnal harmony

There is one supertool in teaching:flexibility

This time I would like to share some thoughts which might sound self-evident but might not be so for many of us.

In my experience, those of us who teach have somehow associated certain methods with specific functions or parts of the teaching process. Perhaps exams, which are always standardised, have contributed to this attitude.

What I posit here is that different teaching aids or tools and different methods should be used to introduce, explain or test the understanding of each text. The teacher sets their goals in using a text and decides on ways to get their students to reach those targets.

By nature I am a maximalist, but I have learned how to lower my sights and get the most out of what I decide to be my priority in using a text. There are no hard and fast rules as to how we can make sure that our students comprehend what they read. Importantly we might want to limit ourselves to checking only gist. Personally I doubt the validity of the multiple-choice exercise though I admit I have created many all those years as part of my job involves preparing students for exams.

I will provide an example of the point I am making. I found a short news story on BBC (see links at the end of this post) which I chose to use with a group of students at level B1. I knew that my students had enough words to understand the story. At the same time I needed to test gist first before moving on to the gapped-text exercise. Therefore, I asked them to read the story and make a sketch of it in their notebooks. I wanted to elicit the father’s leap with his children in his arms and the way the children miraculously escaped almost certain death. To facilitate the process I asked my students to think of the natural features in their picture (wooded land) and include them in their picture.

My point is that we normally associate pictures with illustrating vocabulary items or as stimuli for conversation, but they may be used for anything depending on the circumstances. In this case the picture was designed to test gist.  

As for the words in the gaps, I normally choose them on the basis of what I have covered in this particular class or what has been taught recently that needs reinforcement or even what is a problem area and needs checking again and again.

I normally make a point of creating a vocabulary exercise so that my students see the words I want to focus on in different context.

You can see the student’s sheet and the teacher’s version here:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KUnhEQnRsR2hhT2c/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KZFhpMVN6b2VDUU0/view?usp=sharing