Lessons from nothing
Texts, whether they are
articles or news stories or literary extracts, provide fair amounts of exposure
to the language, which is the most obvious way of learning. However, the
challenge for me is how to introduce a
text so I can stimulate the students’ interest as well as activate their mind.
I often rack my brains as
to how to present a new topic before I actually hand out the text. It turns out
that the best ideas come to me in the process of teaching as the students are
the ones who shape the lesson – with their unpredictable responses -- no matter
how well-prepared a teacher might be. I therefore call these “lessons from
nothing”.
For instance, recently I
had prepared a BBC article about the death of baobab trees for my B2 students. I
attempted to introduce the topic by asking my students to write down some words
they associate with “forest”. They seemed to be stuck (not least because the
school year was drawing to an end). So I supplied some words and asked them to
ask questions using them.
The words I gave them
were:
plant, acid rain, destruction, reforestation,
deforestation, human activity
It was a small
contribution for the questions I got back from the students:
·
To what
extent does acid rain affect trees?
·
In what
ways does human activity affect forests?
·
How can
we stop deforestation?
·
What is
the significance of reforestation?
·
Which is
the most effective method of reforestation?
The questions form the
basis of a writing topic on forests,
and the students could go on to write the answers to the questions if they
could do so off the top of their heads or alternatively they could search for
answers on the internet.
Another example of how a key word can trigger a variety of improvised activities follows.
This time it was a news
item I was introducing concerning an explosion in an apartment building in
Wuppertal, Germany, published in The Guardian.
I simply wrote down “explosion” on the board and invited the
students to share what the word brought to mind. Not surprisingly, they came up
with the very words that constitute the causes of an explosion:
earthquake, gas, bomb, volcano
I grabbed the opportunity
for some collocations:
A volcano erupts
Gas leaks
You plant a bomb
At that stage, it occurred to me
that it was high time we revised possibility
in the past. I wrote on the board:
may
might
could
and underneath a question:
What could have caused the explosion?
I then elicited sentences with
the other causes mentioned by the students.
·
Gas could
have leaked.
·
A bomb
might have been planted.
·
There may
have been an earthquake.
·
A volcano
might have erupted.
In conclusion, lessons
from nothing can be thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding for both students and
teachers.
The links for the two articles:
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