Reaching out to students' minds

 

As life is drawing to an end, one grows desperate about all the facts one has missed and all the fields of research that one will leave unexplored. But one perforce also grows aware of how unequal one is to the task of reaching definitive answers to fundamental questions which have preoccupied one perhaps for as long as one’s lifetime.

If you search on the internet about how much we understand of the human brain, you will find all kinds of answers which actually fail to get to grips with the real point at issue.

As I have pointed out in an earlier post, my feeling is that we teachers are not invited or encouraged to feed our discoveries to the body of research being conducted into how learners approach learning a foreign language. If science is not empirical, it is nothing. No matter how scientists would interpret teachers’ observations, the fact remains that they should capitalise on those very observations.

I will cite a few examples of observations I have kept a record of and my interpretation of the mistakes. Note the mistakes were mostly made by dyslexic children and they involve a mix-up on several levels—phonological, morphological, semantic.

·       A student was asked to explain the meaning of “I miss you” and he came up with the equivalent of “I hate you” in his mother tongue (Greek).

My interpretation of his answer:

In Greek the word “miss” sounds like the verb μισώ (hate) if you take away the ending (-ω) for first person singular Present Tense. He kept the meaning of “you” which was familiar to him and that’s how he came up with this translation. This is an example of a mother-tongue-interfering mistake and an ingenious deployment of all means available to him.

·       Another dyslexic student was asked what “olives” means and he replied with the equivalent of “we all live” in Greek (όλοι ζούμε). Apparently he broke down the word to two constituent parts “all” and “live”. It is worth noting that in Greek you don’t normally use the pronoun (“we”) before the verb as the verb ending indicates the person and the number, and, needless to say, many students do not bother with the ending –s for the third person singular of Present Simple.

·       Dyslexic students literally hang on the teacher’s words so that they will make sense of what would be an impossible task on paper. This means that some misunderstandings depend on how they break down an utterance into distinct words. Here is an example to illustrate the point:

I asked a student “Is it raining?”, and his perceived hearing was “Is it training?” The sentence made no sense in the context but it never crossed the student’s mind that a neutral “it” could not possibly be training. This didn’t matter to the student as long as he could provide an answer to the question.

Learners, especially young children, have a way of making of words they hear what they will—or should I say, what sounds familiar from their exposure to the foreign language till the encounter with a new word. This time there were several junior students who contributed to the guessing game – with only one being dyslexic.   They had come across the word “imagine” before but none of them seemed to remember it. So the responses I got varied from “magic” to “emoji” and they were based on the hearing of the word. 

 

My conclusion

Although teachers in our majority do not credit dyslexic students with abstract thinking or organising the input of foreign language, we are wrong. They have an amazing ability to structure and restructure the input in order to decode the message, and they hardly ever give up trying till they (or the teacher) have the problem satisfactorily resolved.

Here is one more example of highly abstract thinking by another dyslexic student. He was having trouble understanding a sentence so I asked what “something” means. His answer was the Greek word for “often”. I racked my brains to see the relevance  and eventually all I could gather was that this time the student found some hidden semantic similarity between the two words (“often” and “something”). Let me put it this way absurd as it may sound: “something” is not “everything” while “often” is not “always”. On a high level of abstraction the words are comparable.

 

 

Creative activities out of nothing: Big Heart

 

Students, especially young ones, find it difficult to cope with writing tasks for some very significant reasons. For one, the topic is far too abstract for their age and interests; writing is not their forte in their first language; they can’t relate to the topic; there are no cues to follow. Concretising writing is an indispensable step not just in order to help students along with their writing but more importantly perhaps in order to motivate them.

It doesn’t always require too much preparation or effort on the part of the teacher to achieve the goal of stimulating students’ minds so they can compose a text that will answer the question and fulfil its communicative purpose.

Here is a task to try with your younger students:

Draw a big heart on the board and label it “big heart”. Following this, explain to the children in their mother tongue that they are to draw a heart in their notebooks and put five items in it; the items can be animate or inanimate. After they have done so, ask “why”. So now the children have to form clauses beginning with “because”.

Let us assume that someone has drawn  a silk shawl, a straw hat, a balloon, a dead leaf and their best friend.

Why a balloon?

because I can go places in it/because I can see the earth from high up

An extension of this would be to challenge the children to link as many items in the heart as possible in a story.  If we keep the items we chose above, their text could read:

My friend put on her beautiful silk shawl and I picked my wide-brim straw hat and got into a balloon which lifted into the blue sky and floated over the green and yellow fields. We started drifting down and just before we touched the earth softly a breath of air blew a dead leaf over our heads.

 

From Silence to Scream: The Sound Theme

 

Imagine life without a single sound – an empty soundscape – no biophony or anthropophony. Living in an age where many are trying hard to cope with noise pollution, perhaps it is difficult to picture this anechoic environment though we came very close to it during the pandemic lockdowns.

There is a wealth of information about sounds which might excite the imagination of the students. By way of introduction and in order to stimulate a discussion, I like to play the sound of the sea waves lapping gently against the shore; it is a soothing one with a universal appeal. And then one can perhaps share the video and ask how the image enhances the effect of the sound.

Here is a video I have made myself:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PWAcrT4jIs9Fl5ushZHsFulP0ssM1pdv/view?usp=sharing

One can look at sounds and silence in many different ways using a different approach depending on the level of the students. At a basic level, I start with a well-known poem by Roger McGough: The Sound Collector.

A stranger called this morning
Dressed all in black and grey
Put every sound into a bag
And carried them away

The whistling of the kettle
The turning of the lock
The purring of the kitten
The ticking of the clock

The popping of the toaster
The crunching of the flakes
When you spread the marmalade
The scraping noise it makes

The hissing of the frying pan
The ticking of the grill
The bubbling of the bathtub
As it starts to fill

The drumming of the raindrops
On the windowpane
When you do the washing-up
The gurgle of the drain

The crying of the baby
The squeaking of the chair
The swishing of the curtain
The creaking of the stair

A stranger called this morning
He didn't leave his name
Left us only silence
Life will never be the same

 

A challenging way of introducing the poem is to play all the familiar sounds that the collector removes from the house one by one and ask the students to name each sound or, failing that, to describe the action taking place that creates this particular sound. There is an excellent powerpoint slideshow at the following site that will help.

https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource/sound-collector-roger-mcgough-interactive-poem-6325258

The students take up the challenge of hearing and guessing, which means there is a good deal of language production before the poem is presented. They quite enjoy having their guesses confirmed or even proved wrong. The same method can be used later to check that they have memorised the words for the sounds. I find this a very practical and interesting way of teaching this kind of language, which is hard to teach to advanced students simply because they are too old to join in the fun. Following that, the students can discuss their feelings about a house bare of sounds or they could write a few sentences about how to bring back the sounds. Any original ideas are welcome!

Moving up levels, we can upgrade the content. Sounds that can be pleasant in normal circumstances can become a threat to our sanity. According to Barney Thompson (The Tines 23 October 2009) a song like I love you by Barney the Dinosaur could drive people to confess anything if played loudly and often enough. Advanced students could be given the article, which focuses on sound as a means of torture for home reading.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Kc5Vct-fHXAmF6irwKHN1zLUByja-o2/view?usp=sharing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LK3C9IytrLI

The students could be assigned a variety of tasks including collecting sounds from nature or from their environment or they could be asked to create a scale of a specific sound from the most pleasurable to the most annoying – for example their pet cat’s  purrs all the way down to snarls. For the artistically minded, a challenging task would be to consider situations that could have triggered the famous Scream (Edvard Munch)

The Scream by Edvard Munch

More motivated students could embark on collecting information about the very first sounds of music or the first musical instruments. To motivate them, show them this image of the oldest musical instrument in the world (60,000 years).

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3agcq7fSGC8

They can watch the video to discover its history.

Hope it works for your classes.

We must talk about children

 

While we are still wavering amidst a pandemic that broke out a couple of years ago, I hear no-one asking the right questions. So I might as well do it myself.

Do we intend to continue pretending that distance learning is equivalent to face to face learning or will it ultimately dawn on us that education is all about interaction and physical presence?

Are we going to turn children into miserable obese creatures sitting in front of a screen and counting down to the very last minute of their Maths session?

Are we to isolate and confine them to their –not always so comfortable -- homes and teach them social skills from a distance? And where will play and fun go? What use will their communication skills be in their electronic cages?

Are we putting across contradictory messages about caring for the environment and protecting the beauties of nature when we are actually reducing their lives to a metaworld of everything?

Are children and teenagers going to be intimidated and emotionally blackmailed into shouldering the deaths of their grandparents and perhaps parents when it is the failures of adults and the so-called experts who should be held accountable?

Will we go on plaguing them with “facts” which have kept changing at a pace that even Russian roulette would envy? How much longer will we sit back and hear “experts” banging on about the dramatic increase in mental illnesses in the near future among children as well as adults for that matter?

Most important of all, how much longer will we force children and teenagers bursting with energy to wear masks made out of all kinds of materials under the delusion – or maybe with malicious intent – that we are doing anything else but asphyxiating them, smothering their voices and criminally suppressing their freedom of speech? I won’t even go into seeing their smiles light up their eyes again and the flame of life return to their expressionless faces?

We are all teachers. Shall we bend over our young pupils and heal their wounds gently reintroducing them to the life we left behind? Shall we regain control of our lives?