Winter and Christmas(es)

Winter does not come alone. It carries a whole baggage of withdrawn dreams from the summertime and the blue skies and lolling seas. It is also laden with a lifetime’s dim memories of Christmases that have been and hurt us vaguely but intensely.

Here is a Greek poem of mine, a mere attempt to hint at the pain mixed with nostalgia and long-forgotten happiness.

Χριστούγεννα σαν φάντασμα

Τα Χριστούγεννα κάθε χρόνο

Μια ιδέα λειψά μας φτάνουν

Σαν μια τούφα χιόνι το δρόμο της να έχασε

Και η φωτιά  στις στάχτες

Τη θέση της να έχει δώσει

Η πάνινη κούκλα σε μια άδεια

 Ντουλάπα να μαραζώνει

Και η κουνιστή πολυθρόνα

Εκεί δίπλα να πηγαινόρχεται

Στη χαραμάδα μόνο του ανέμου

Και οι φωνές, οι φωνές σαν

Απόηχοι να μας φτάνουν

Δίχως ψυχή πού τραβάμε

Στου καινούριου χρόνου

Την πολλά και ψευδή

Υποσχόμενη χίμαιρα;

End of the year with a poem

And as the year is drawing to an end, we continue our soul-searching ...

ΥΠΝΩΣΗ

Κάποιες φορές

Όταν έχω τη σχόλη

Μες απ’ το παράθυρο

Τη θέα ν’ ατενίζω

Βλέπω μια πράσινη άπλα

Και στα όριά της άσχημα

Σπίτια με κάθε λογής

Τσίγκινα παραπήγματα

Και πέρα μακριά στον

Ορίζοντα μια σκληρή

Ολοκάθαρη γραμμή

Ακολουθεί του βουνού τις καμπύλες

Το γαλάζιο τ’ ουρανού

Δεν είναι πάντα το ίδιο

Μια λαμπρό μες το φως λουσμένο

 Άλλοτε θαμπό στις ομίχλες πνιγμένο

Όμως όπως και να ‘ναι

Τις αισθήσεις νεκρώνει

Και τη σκέψη υπνώνει

Και με μιας το χρόνο παγώνει

Να μπορούσα σ΄ αυτή

Την ύπνωση

Τις σβησμένες μορφές

Να διακρίνω … 

How to slow down reading and get the most out of it

Reading can serve many different purposes: spotting some information we are looking for, catching up on the latest news, pleasure, summarising a long text for someone, translating for someone and so on. I am a firm believer in reading extensively as it is the best way of reinforcing words and grammatical or syntactical patterns.

But where would we be if we didn’t focus from time to time? Our students need to be slowed down while reading and be challenged about how much they retain which they would be able to produce in the course of time.

There are, of course, various ways of slowing the students down, and here is one I would like to elaborate on this time.

I sometimes give my students extracts from fiction and if this means a few pages, it is not practically possible or even desirable to parse every single sentence in the extract. However, if or when this applies we could pick out some descriptive pieces and draw or find some images corresponding to them.

I am not artistic myself, which means I have to rely on what is available on the internet or toil on PowerPoint! But for the lucky ones who are gifted, this could be done on the board or on a flip chart as the reading takes place and would feel more authentic than providing a ready image on the computer screen.

 One could even begin to draw part of it and gradually add to it as the need arises, making the task even more demanding.

I suggest that the teacher assigns the reading of a couple of pages and asks the students at the end of their reading to underline the line(s) or phrase which is depicted in the image.

For the sake of illustration, I will provide some examples from sundry sources.

The first extract is from Wilkie Collins The Woman in White:

… two or three passengers who were late were clustering round the small opening through which the tickets were issued. …

The second extract is from Christopher Paolini’s The Eldest:

Inside the workshop was lit by a single candle which cast a trembling glow over the ring of faces that hovered about it in the surrounding darkness.

And the third one comes from Eduardo Mendoza’s An Englishman in Madrid:

… The signature was a florid scrawl …

How to build an active vocabulary 2 or the Layer Method

One of my teaching principles is incrementally bracing a word: I start with its foundation, which -- more or less -- corresponds to its literal meaning, and proceed step by step at different stages of learning – with the figurative meanings, which I introduce when the students’ mental maturity can handle them.

I call it the layer method because this is what really happens: the learner adds one or more layers of meaning to the existing one(s) thus enriching and broadening their scope.  The method may not apply to all words as some are quite straightforward, and those are usually the words that refer to tangible objects, but it does apply to the majority of words that an adult speaker will need. However, an adult speaker, in my experience, is rather reluctant to draw or mime words, which a child will be only too eager to do. Therefore, when I teach children, I make a point of imprinting the foundation meaning of the word on their minds by encouraging them to use their bodies or produce sounds or mime and, wherever this facilitates learning, to draw. It is a long-term strategy for building up vocabulary, which pays dividends.

I will illustrate with one of my favourite poems for teaching: Raymond Wilson’s The Grateful Dragon.

When I present a poem to my students, I vary the way depending on the poem and the level of my students. This poem was presented to a level B1 class with particularly sharp children who adore stories and storytelling. So I teased their brains a little by asking why a dragon should be grateful. The responses were varied from “There are no dragons really” to “They are grateful to be alive at all”.

Then I recited the poem adding as much drama to my voice as possible and let it sink in.  HERE IS THE POEM https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Y577dKksD84sKae7CkyS8jxbjBUhrku5/view?usp=sharing Next I asked the children to tell me the story in a few words and continued with some comprehension questions, which were also meant to elicit their understanding of vocabulary:

·       How did the dragon get to the castle door?

·       How big was it?

·       How weak was the dragon? (They didn’t know the word “eyelid” so I just mimed not being able to move more than one eyelid.)

·       What did the princess do when the enemy appeared before the castle? (I had to mime “wept”, which was easy.)

Most of the times, when I use a poem or literary extract, I focus on some, not all, unknown words --   though not randomly. The main criterion often is the frequency of the word though this may not always apply. Sometimes I choose words which the students can draw or illustrate, but I don’t normally provide the first language equivalent; instead I refer them to their (paper) dictionaries and ask them to look up the word(s) and make a drawing. Their minds are more actively engaged, and images do reinforce the memorisation of words.

 In this case I divided the students into pairs and asked different pairs to illustrate different phrases from the poem, which I chose for them.

The first one was from the second stanza: “… to lash its tail”. “Lash” is a flexible word that can be used in many different contexts both literally and figuratively.

The “skinny harvest mouse” in the third stanza was too attractive a choice to ignore! I instructed my students to illustrate  how “harvest” and “skinny mouse” related to each other.

The next one was from the third stanza: “a blade of grass”. They knew “blade” but not in this sense. I hardly ever miss the chance to point out a countable vs uncountable noun.

The next one was “bundles of hay” in the sixth stanza, which was quite straightforward in terms of drawing.

The last item, however, was a metaphor and more of a challenge: “a whirlwind of thunder and fury” in the penultimate stanza. They actually did quite well with this one as the drawing included angry faces swirling and thunder.

By selecting in particular “lash” and “bundle”, I was aiming at establishing – at this stage of learning -- a basis for building up the figurative uses of the words later on. A mental image can help understand and appreciate the figurative uses of a word more easily and directly, effectively saving the teacher and the learner a lot of time while the word is assimilated or “anchored” in the student’s mind.

Thus, from a “bundle of sticks” we can then move to “Her friends managed to get her out of the pub and bundled her home” or to  “The company offered customers a single computer solution, bundling together hardware and software.”

Or from “He lashed the horses to go faster” to “Democrats lashed Republican plans, calling them extreme.” and even further to “In his speech, he lashed out at his enemies.”

Ways to teach writing through poems and … Five ways to kill a man

Poems, being much shorter and more easily manageable than fiction, enable us to demonstrate some basic principles of writing to our students, and by writing I certainly do not mean literary writing but any kind of creative writing.

I mostly teach children and teenagers so I make a point of presenting my writing principles in an easily digestible form.

By no means do I claim originality in illustrating some principles of writing, but definitely the approach I suggest is of my own thinking and is made to suit the presentation of Edwin Brock’s poem Five Ways to Kill a Man.

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

To do this properly you require a crowd of people a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

Principle 1

A piece of writing is made of a raw material like any finished product: words. Words, even when seen individually -- and not in relation to other words, are vehicles of meaning though the range and the depth will vary from individual to individual depending on their experience, exposure to texts, mentality, temperament, occupation and perhaps on many other factors which it would be pointless to go into here.

In order to demonstrate the weightiness of each and every word in this particular poem, I searched for images which would illustrate them in a more concrete and memorable manner, and divided the images on five slides of a slideshow presentation – as many as the stanzas in the poem.

The words that appear at the bottom of each slide are meant to be hidden from view when inviting the students to label the images in each slide. In fact, most students are puzzled by the apparent lack of connection between the images, but they are quite happy to play along, which brings me to my second principle:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zHOL1dvlNsSNPEWssxYXwffbq1hDLD_EE_SXkar269Q/edit?usp=sharing

Principle 2

An element of suspense is essential in writing. By that I don’t mean that mystery is key to good writing; what I am saying is that building up a larger picture, which will only be visible by the end of your writing is a sign of craftsmanship. Parts of a whole can be organised by the same guiding principle. Accordingly, when the students reach the end of each stanza they should have established the method of killing and the person or people killed.  And of course, by the end of the poem they should be able to discern the poet’s message about the disastrous effects of hatred and intolerance on the human race.

Principle 3

I like to challenge my students or others might call it engaging the reader. The poet is at it all the time: on a micro level by not always supplying the obvious word for his meaning but by taking a fresh look at the object and redefining it in his own terms:

length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way

the metal cage

round hats made of steel

It was easy for my students, who had first labelled the images on the slideshow, to connect the descriptions of the objects with the words and appreciate the literary device.

On a macro level, the students were asked to put together – bit by bit – the objects and construct the whole scene: Jesus’s crucifixion in the first stanza, medieval wars in the second, First World War in the third, Second World War in the fourth, and a final more abstract scene and also more open to interpretation, which might well be another writing principle:

Principle 4: allow the reader space and free scope

When the students had read the poem and constructed and established the various killings throughout history, I asked them to think of the style of writing as a whole and tell me whether it strongly reminded them of another register that they had  come across, pointing out the following ways of expression

To do this properly you require a crowd of people

But for this you need white horses

But then you need

All you then
require is an ocean

and the lists of objects in the first four stanzas. One of the students responded by replying that the poem did at times sound like a recipe in the sense that once you used the ingredients and followed the instructions, you got your “killing”.

It had sounded very much like this when I first read it,  but I was in two minds about eliciting this response from my students. However, I was prepared in case someone did think along the same lines and I handed out the following text encouraging all the students to have a look and possibly hear the undertones.

To make the flatbreads, tip the flour into a large bowl with 1 tsp salt and the cumin seeds. Make a well in the centre and pour in the oil and 150ml warm water. Mix together well. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead for a few mins until smooth. Leave to rest in a lightly floured bowl for 15 mins. Meanwhile, mix together the yogurt and dill. Season and set aside.

That could be the next principle in writing.

Principle 5: be adventurous and daring when you create a text; some readers, but perhaps the ones you care most for, might make the connection.

A final note in this analysis is the irony or sarcasm underlying the poem. Many experts have discussed these issues with regard to the poem, and I would have very little to add to this literature. Nevertheless, I do feel tempted to add

Principle 6:  do use –sparingly-- the element of surprise by juxtaposing apparently dissimilar concepts (several factories, a psychopath) and/or under/overstatement (All you then require is an ocean to separate you) in order to create humour.

How to build an active vocabulary: Part 1

What I often mull over is how to invent new ways of practising vocabulary and motivating students to go beyond the basics, which is a challenge for teachers themselves.

Understanding and explaining new words is fine, but safely storing words in the long-term memory or coming up with the right word in the right context is a different kettle of fish.

Personally, I am constantly reviewing my methods of anchoring words and eliciting them from my students and therefore eternally struggling to devise more effective activities in order to achieve my goal.

In the present and the next few posts, I will provide a hodgepodge of ideas about how to render words more memorable and in effect build an active vocabulary.

The guiding principle is flipping the multiple-choice questions typically used in EFL exams and consequently in most course books across the spectrum.

By way of illustration, I will quote a paragraph from Eduardo Mendoza’s novel An Englishman in Madrid:

Still stunned, and with an anguished look on his face not dissimilar to that of the Christ that gave the church its name, Anthony Whitelands stumbled out into the street, pushing his way through the endless flow of the faithful. Beyond the entrance to the church the snow was coming down hard, and he was soon lost in a whirling mass of heavy snowflakes so thick and white they seemed to leave the rest of the world in impenetrable darkness. This phenomenon seemed to him to reflect his state of mind, now the scene of a desperate battle. No sooner did he decide to surrender his will to Paquita’s disconcerting entreaty than part of him rebelled against such cruel imposition. There was no doubt that the daring if tacit way she had offered herself to him aroused his desire, but he thought it might be too high a price to pay. Did he have to give up on worldwide recognition just when it was within his grasp? And she had not even offered him an explanation, simply appealing to his weakness for her. It was outrageous!

I have picked the nouns which I intend to explore with my students, (highlighted in the extract) and those are:

·       flow

·       darkness

·       battle

Here are the sets of collocating adjectives or participles used as adjectives:

·       steady, continuous, constant, smooth

·       thick, total, partial, gathering

·       difficult, losing, legal, constant

The students are given the groups of adjectives and asked to find the nouns in the text which can collocate with all the items of each group. They could then be asked to make their own examples using the different adjectives with the same noun.

The lights suddenly went off leaving us in total darkness.

The gathering darkness began to envelop the forest making it eerie and frightening.

I find this approach much easier and more meaningful for my students. Rather than having to explain the context for each of the four different items of the multiple-choice question, you focus on one and explore the denotative and connotative potential of each noun by looking at the collocating adjectives.

Context shifting and Sunflakes!

Activating the mind is an issue that constantly preoccupies me as a teacher in general and, evidently, as a language teacher.

It is understood that we can’t make a brainteaser out of everything we intend to teach to our students, but we can definitely capitalise on anything that helps us get the students to think, compare, contrast and tease out meaning rather than spoon-feeding them incessantly.

I find it hard to keep replenishing the stock of activities borrowed or of my own invention which will stimulate and compel the students to engage in any given task.

As I have often claimed before, poetry and literature   -- in the right balance and carefully chosen for the right level of students -- possess this power to get them to puzzle out meaning from context and spend this extra time over lexis that we would rather they saved in their memory.

While trying to think of a way of presenting a poem called Sunflakes to my students, I coined a term for the task which I devised for it to refer to the thinking process involved: context-shifting. It might work for a limited number of texts, but with a modicum of resourcefulness and imagination one could find other texts – literary or not -- in which to use a similar technique.

Before I suggest my way of presenting the poem, let me just point out that it would work fine with intermediate-level groups –both children and adult.

Here is the task and the poem in PDF form:

Read the following poem and try to find the missing item in the compound nouns in the poem. Some, but not all, of the blank spaces are to be filled with the same item.  

I have highlighted in red the items to be left blank for the students to supply the answers:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KM0U5UUVDSkluV1U/view?usp=sharing

A further suggestion is that depending on the students’ mastery of relevant vocabulary, one could create fewer or more gaps to be filled. For instance, I knew my students were not acquainted with compound words such as “snowdrifts” or “snowbanks” so I just left them intact. They would make the task to gather the missing word too difficult when it was already quite a bit of a challenge.    

I hope you have fun!

Arts and science in teaching language or The Story of Grass

One of the challenges in teaching, at least as far as I am concerned, is the difficulty in conveying my enthusiasm, as an adult with more experience of the world, for ideas which are perhaps not within my students’ grasp. But then again, as with everything in this world, that’s what is worth fighting for: whatever eludes us.

My attitude could be described as having my feet on the ground while my head is in the clouds! Most of my students are children and teenagers who are obviously learning general English in order to use it later in life as the situation may arise: graduate studies in English, job requirement, travel, moving abroad.

I therefore feel that there should be a strong practical core to the course which prepares students for everyday encounters in English as well as understanding a range of texts from different disciplines while at the same time they get a taste of literature and poetry. The latter will allow them to develop their imagination and creativity – essential tools in learning anything really.

As I have pointed out in a previous post, I quite like working on themes whenever this is possible. So, this time it was the theme of “lowly” grass. It all started with the Great Dust Storm (Woodie Guthrie) which led to a discussion of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the erosion of the soil in many states across America.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUXGBLTUD8w

I then thought that I needed some scientific back-up for what was introduced as a creative activity which would elicit descriptive language by asking the students to explain what is happening in the muted video of the song frame by frame.  

This particular group of students are well on their way to the Cambridge Proficiency exam so I picked out a gapped text in the Cambridge Advanced English test book (volume 1) published by Cambridge University Press. The text is entitled The Story of Grass and it is a review of Graham Harvey’s The Forgiveness of Nature: The Story of Grass by John Carey. The students get a rough idea about the importance of grass and its gradual but irreversible destruction by intensive farming and the use of chemical fertilisers to maintain yields in cereal monocultures. At the same time, they improve their understanding of coherence and cohesion, which constitute  a big stumbling block as their understanding of these issues in their mother tongue is poor.

For those interested, the gapped text can be found here:

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

But where would grass be without Emily Dickinson’s exaltation of it in her poem The Grass Has so Little to Do. After my students had been filled in on the science of grass and its benefits for the environment, they were entitled to some fun. Therefore, I gave them the poem with a glossary in the form of example sentences and asked them to answer some questions I prepared. This was set as homework so that the students could have more time to brood over the poem. The questions ensure a more accurate understanding than a cursory reading and sensitise the students to the figurative use of language. Here is the poem and the questions:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KOXMycXNFV3NHR0U/view?usp=sharing

Finally, I encouraged my students to listen to the poem being recited online. I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were several readings of the poem. Here is a link directing to one of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLAq8rO0kIQ

I do hope I have made the case for arts and science working together in perfect harmony to hone linguistic ability.

How to sharpen up observation and use of detail in writing

Difficulties in using detail

One of the challenges in teaching a foreign language is how to motivate and guide the students especially at a higher level in using descriptive/narrative detail.

Details are not add-ons; they are rather the manifestation of an inquisitive mind and a watchful eye. In other words, asking one to flesh out one’s ideas with all the relevant details presupposes that one is already being encouraged at school by science and first language teachers to use one’s senses in order to allow all kinds of information to reach one’s mind through the sensory organs.

How Can one define detail?

An equally important consideration is how we define detail: certainly, it is not adjectives preceding or following nouns or adverbs before adjectives or adverbials. It is so much more than that and certainly closely bound up with coordination or subordination and sentence complexity.

However, to the extent that a language teacher can interfere, there are ways of sensitising students to the significance of zooming in on detail.

Examples of how to engage students’ attention in detail

I make a point of first exposing students to a basic (devoid of detail) short extract and subsequently overlaying the extract with all the details in place. It is a passive way of indicating the huge difference detail can make to our writing, but a necessary step before engaging students in more demanding tasks where they have to “fill in” the details.

Let me cite a couple of examples though they are by no means exhaustive or thorough since detail is difficult to disentangle from the structure of the text. They will only poorly serve the purpose.

Ø Here is an extract from Graham Swift’s novel Last Orders with its detail missing:

The road went on, [                                                            ], like [                                                                                            ], the one sure thing in the world.

This is the extract in full detail:

The road went on,[black and curving and cat’s-eyed,] like [the one sure thing in the wet and the dark and the spray,] the one sure thing in the world.

Ø And another from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire:

Snow was falling [                       ] upon the castle and its grounds now. The [                                    ]Beauxbatons carriage looked like a [                                        ] pumpkin next to the [                                ] house that was Hagrid’s cabin, while the Durmstrang ship’s portholes were glazed with ice, [                                                         ].

Snow was falling [thickly] upon the castle and its grounds now. The [pale blue] Beauxbatons carriage looked like a [large, chilly, frosted] pumpkin next to the [iced gingerbread] house that was Hagrid’s cabin, while the Durmstrang ship’s portholes were glazed with ice, [the rigging white with frost].

I will now cite an extract in which it is impossible to tease out the details. It is also a good example of how the specifics can displace the whole since it is the parts that figure prominent and capture the reader’s imagination. The last sentence of the paragraph best illustrates this precedence of the part(s) over the whole.  

Ø The extract is from Christopher Paolini’s The Eldest:

(p.232)

As Eragon listened, his gaze wandered and alighted upon a small girl prowling behind the queen. When he looked again, he saw that her shaggy hair was not silver, like many of the elves, but bleached white with age, and that her face was creased and lined, like a dry withered apple. She was no elf, nor dwarf, nor – Eragon felt – even human. She smiled at him, and he glimpsed rows of sharp teeth.

A more active engagement

After showing the detail missing in the first version, students could be asked to “reverse” one aspect of the description: for example, they could focus on the face but instead of old and creased, it should be firm and fresh like a rose in bud or whatever they think appropriate for a young face.

Something to look forward to

In a future post, I will suggest further ways of enhancing  students’ power of observation to notice subtle detail and try their hand at achieving a similar result.