Brainstorming is great as far as it goes. However, I do feel there
is a need for flipping it from time to time.
If by brainstorming we
mean a quick succession of student responses on a certain topic, I will keep
the tempo and the group participation in what I call flipped brainstorming though my goals
will vary each time, and this will become clear further down, when I attempt to
demonstrate my proposition.
How and why?
The answer to “how” is not
so simple. Suffice to say, the students will extract the ideas from a given
text.
As for “why,” briefly, there
is a lot to be gained and no waste of time.
1. The students are sometimes hard put to reel off the
ideas and dress them in words to boot.
2. There is plenty of opportunity to tease the students’
brains by firing questions at them.
3. The teacher can test the students’ assimilation of
already taught vocabulary and/or activate the students’ minds by inviting them
to extrapolate meaning from context.
However,
to be able to totally engage the students in the process, the teacher must use
the right content – it is a prerequisite.
Therefore,
I will now illustrate, reinforcing the points I made above.
Level:
advanced
I used it
with my post-FCE students on the road to Proficiency.
Content
Many of
us, yielding to the pressure of imminent exams, compromise on enjoyment. We
often find ourselves selecting material which will serve a dual purpose: teach
new language and familiarise our students with issues and questions which are
beyond their age and scope of interests but crop up in language qualification
exams.
My
instinct is to resist exam requirements though, to be honest, I usually
engineer some kind of middle-of-the-road attitude to save the day.
Literature
and poetry are great resources for killing two birds with one stone, and James
Thurber is a writer whose works constitute ideal material for introducing
serious issues in an amusing and challenging way.
I chose
his story The Night the Bed Fell to illustrate my “flipped
brainstorming”.
I divided
the story in three parts for manageability and a touch of suspense.
I am well
aware of my students’ knowledge and ability, so my use of this text and choice
of activities suits my situation, but one could easily adapt them to their own
reality – whether that is upgrading or downgrading the difficulty or the focus
on the new vocabulary. I provide images when this will save me valuable time
and will be a more appropriate way of explaining the meaning of lexical items.
First, I
gave my students a copy of the first part of the story and asked them to read
it. I deliberately kept the text free of activities so that they would
concentrate on content.
Here is a
copy of the first part of the story (arbitrarily divided) with the vocabulary
exercise and the explanatory footnotes.
When they
were ready, (I could already detect some faint smiles) I started asking
questions which were meant to elicit all the detail I wanted and place emphasis
on guessing meaning wherever possible.
Here is a
copy of the questions:
My first question was a way of making my
students guess the word “verisimilitude,”
which they did as the context allowed them to do so.
Question 6 was meant to check whether they remembered the word “wobbly”, which I had recently revised
and reinforced. I was pleased when I got the answer by one of them. Question 9 was designed to remind them
of the meaning of “interval” as
“break” and introduce its meaning in the phrase “at intervals”. And so on and so forth.
I am
simply trying to explain how different teachers can take advantage of a
resource depending on their aims and their students’ knowledge and needs.
Of
course, I almost never forgo the opportunity to boost the students’ learning of
vocabulary with a vocabulary exercise!
Parts 2
and 3 are structured in the same way. The story went down really well, and my
reward was to see some students hardly able to contain themselves!
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