Teaching is liberating if you keep an open mind and allow yourself some
space to pore over your approach, your students and the results of your choices
as we make hundreds of choices as we go along – from the books we will adopt to
whether a student needs some special treatment on a particular occasion.
Surprisingly, experience leads us to what appears to be very simple ideas but needed so much time to
crystallize as they have. A simple example is related to presenting and practising
new grammatical or lexical items.
It has taken me quite a long time to decide that there is a very basic
pattern in presenting and practising grammatical phenomena and/or lexical
items, and it is the following:
The point is that both the texts we select for presentation and the ones
for practice must be the right level for the students and, if possible,
correspond to their interests, which means that our exercises must be mostly
customised. Of course one can create ad hoc examples to suit one’s needs.
Let us assume that we want to present or more probably revise modal
verbs of deduction or possibility or ways of speculating in general. We can use
extracts from books which would fire our students’ imagination. I quote a short
extract from The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon and following that another extract
from The Stranger by Camilla
Lackberg:
But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a
garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone
all the way through the dog and into the ground because the fork had not fallen
over. I decide that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could
not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden
fork into a dog after it had died for some reason, like cancer for example, or
a road accident.
“It’s not so much what I see but what I smell.” Hanna took a couple of
deep sniffs. “She stinks of booze. She must have been dead drunk when she took off the
road.”
Of course this is only a sample of material that one can use and it is
meant for students who are revising rather than being introduced to those
functions for the first time. At this level, as the students are more mature,
they need to be coaxed into using the patterns by providing a meaningful
context.
So let us assume that we have provided enough examples both from sources
and of our own making, have clarified any unclear points and have answered the
students’ questions. It is now time to invite our students to produce relevant
structures again in a meaningful context. For the sake of convenience I will
consider a news item published on BBC. Here is the photo that accompanied the
news story and for those interested I provide the link further down.
We could show the photo to the students and ask questions that will
elicit the structures taught with a little bit of help or nudging from the
teacher. I am of the opinion that when teaching takes place in a controlled
environment, there is no harm in the teacher mediating to assist learning and
assimilation. The questions we could ask are:
Ø How was
the distress signal formed?
Ø Who could
have written it?
Ø How might
they have found themselves in the middle of the desert?
I got a few responses on showing the picture. The situation proved to be
intriguing enough to stimulate the students’ interest—not least because it was
so current.
