Three and a half people.

This year has brought a change for me. I have taken over from my partner Sonia at her own English school in our small town, and left - with some regret, and not necessarily forever - Workshop in Santiago.

I'll miss the adult groups and the freedom to teach largely what, and how I like. On the other hand, I won't miss the commute and the longggggggg days away from Sonia and Jamie.

The main reason for this move may be visible in the Jan van Eyck photo below.

So I've got a bit less autonomy - I have to do a lot of recovering the local schools' curricula - and less chance to do dogme. Students mainly come so that they can get through exams. End of story.

I hope to do a bit of  brainwashing students into communicative learning in general, and specifically IPA, decent note-taking and function-fluency. I'm pretty sure none of them will have come into contact with any of these before.

However I intend to keep writing up post-plans and my usual assortment of worries, failures, triumphs and half-baked ideas.

And here, for the moment, is where I'd like your valuable opinion.

I made these cards to practice compound nouns with an upper-int group. I brought them into class and... er, nothing much happened. We made a few compounds up, but there was no dynamism, nor any inspiration on my part. What brilliant ideas have I missed? How can we turn these scraps of paper into a scintillating lexical activity?






Oh, to be filed under off-topic....

I've been test-driving Puppy Linux, yet another Linux variant, which is so small and light that you can carry it around on a pendrive. When you boot up with the pendrive in, it installs in the RAM of yer computer, not yer hard drive!!!  It gets touted as ideal for old computers, and since I run a rest home for tired and abandoned PCs, it was only a matter of time before I got round to trying it out.

And first impressions are that on my two senior citizens it runs like greased lightning. Rocket-powered greased lightning. On amphetamines.

 And also you can use your own operating system on somebody else's computer without leaving a trace after you've gone. How cool is that? I'm thinking it might be hell of a useful for people who have to do a lot of conferences using other people's gear.

Internet it found instantly - wired and wireless; multimedia and general stuff seems to work flawlessly. I haven't had the time (see first photo above) to try out printing and scanning yet, or how to install other software, but watch this space. Especially if you have a PC that predates the Iron Age.

What's Words Worth?

This August I was teaching mainly secondary school kids who had failed school English exams in June and had to retake them in September.

If you look at their coursebooks, they contain the usual mixture of lexis, grammar McNuggets, listening and so on. But if you listen to any of the kids, they express the syllabus entirely as grammar points: "El futuro, la pasiva, las tres condicionales,..."

So there I was, repasando la gramatica. Except that my kids couldn't get a grip on it.

[Possibly because state school teaching is devoid of meaning, engagement or even practice.]

But also more simply, the kids didn't have any vocabulary. How do you expect a callow youth of thirteen summers to "do" a second conditional if they don't have the vocabulary to even find the verb? Or even know what the sentence is about. How can they if they don't know words as common as "ill" or "busy" or "dangerous"?

But, we managed to make some headway by doing plenty of group-writing in class. The following is a typical procedure I used:

We had been looking at a reading exercise based on an article about a slimming drug [ludicrous as it sounds] and had tried to consolidate vocabulary with a mind-map about health and illness. To follow this up, I boarded the phrase "How I Got Hurt" and challenged them to make up a short story, adding one word at a time round the class. With only a little intervention/guidance from me, we managed to come up with this on the board:

The last day of my holidays, we decided to go to Amsterdam. We stopped in the airport for a souvenir but we couldn't buy one because I had lost my wallet. So I went to the police and asked them for a form. They had found a wallet but it wasn't mine. Then we took it and I ran away but fell down. Then a man looked at my wallet and said "This wallet's mine! Take that! This is mine! Give it to me!"

I woke up in hospital with my leg and three ribs broken.

We followed up with a progressive rub-out-and-read exercise, which you can see here:

And as we were doing that, I realised that this would be a perfect story to act out. Though we didn't have long, we had time to perform it twice, which was perfect, given that there were six of us, and the story has three speaking parts.

I was a bit shocked to read this post by Mike Harrison just the other day, where he seemed to be arguing against personalisation. Then I actually read the thing, rather than just scanning it, and I realised we're on the same side. [Phew. Read the thing properly, Tait!] His exercises have an individual, rather than collaborative bias, but both let the mind do what it does best, which is to make connections.

Anyway, if you haven't tried collective writing before, do give it a go. You'll find that it's fairly easy to get the level of teacher guidance right, and apart from that, there's really nothing you need, except for a title. I have to say that the kids did seem to be turning up with a bit of enthusiasm rather than the usual academic trudge.

Have fun!

Picsaw

I'm just going to surface from my summer hibernation to share a curiosity with you.

If you have access to Ubuntu - or any other Linux box - you might want to cast a teacherly eye over Picsaw. It's a lovely simple little app that cuts up an image into a jigsaw. Very clean and of course, free. Available from your usual software channels.

Now I'm thinking that if the image contained text, you could make a nice little language exercise. Maybe something like this:

So there you go. Do let me know if you try it out.

PS - It doesn't seem to work on pdf's, at least on my rig, so if you've got a text document, a screenshot is the simplest way to go.

Beat the Teacher

or Finding Affordances, volume III.

I wanted to share a post-lesson plan with yous while it was fresh in my mind. This was with five ~B2 level adults.

We started off with a board game called Beat the Teacher: Teacher challenges the whole group to make a correct and coherent sentence by calling out words one by one round the class. The words go up in the order they are called out - no inserting or editing - and they can't suggest ideas to each other. It might go like this:

Abigail:         We
Brian:            went
Charlotte:       to
David:           the
Elisa:             my
Frank:           house
Gillian:          STOP

(Frank isn't allowed to call out a word and say STOP - it has to be the next person.)

In this case, it's a point for teacher, because in English you can't say "the my house".

I use this exercise a lot as a tail-ender, but today I wanted to use it at the start to see if we could generate any affordances. Regular readers of this blog will notice that affordances is the current bee in my bonnet.

(Hope you like my bonnet - Sandy Milliner made it for me ;)



Affordance One

They came up with up to lunchtime which not everybody was familiar with. I used the other board to brainstorm different uses of up. Up is a preposition of a thousand faces (OK, four or five...) so we just looked at the following -

a) the ordinary UP for higher/more: - get up, speak up

b) UP for approaching: - This guy comes up to me, a car pulls up

c) UP for totally: - clean up your room, wrap up warm



Affordance Two

We stumbled upon broken-hearted, so we took a look at this family of compound adjectives -

blue-eyed, left-footed, dark-skinned and so on.

Affordance Three

Somebody suggested since, and we clarified that it's actually two separate words:

a preposition/conjunction of time: - Since the war, Since my baby left me

and a conjunction of consequence: - Since you don't know I'll tell you.



And just to wrap up, we listened to Elvis singing Heartbreak Hotel on YouTube with lyrics, which contain the latter two affordances.

How do you go about generating affordances? Can you share any tips with us?

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Beat the Teacher

a) Yes, I know - there are several games out there with the same name.

b) It's well worth tuning this game to the level of your students, since otherwise they simply stay in their comfort zone. You can push them by adding the rule that you the teacher will give them the first word. This allows you to start them off easily with pronouns or nouns, or give them something much more challenging. Try starting off intermediate students with a gerund, or a past participle, or a conjunction and see if they can cope.

Dice dice baby.

Have you ever played Russian Roulette? Slept rough in Paris? Worked as a spy?*

Sadly, questions like this rarely appear in oral exams, but the structure abounds. And it's frequent enough as a conversation starter in real life. (You remember real life... those disorientating moments when you're neither teaching nor sleeping...? No? Well never mind. It abounds in oral exams.)

If you have a dice and a cup, you might want to try this game out.

Write or project up the following expressions:

1. No, I haven't had the chance.
2. I'd be a bit scared, actually.
3. Oh, yes, lots of times.
4. I couldn't afford it.
5. Once or twice.
6. I'm not really into that kind of thing.

(Here, maybe drill for pronunciation)

This is how it works:

Student A takes the dice and shakes it in the cup. She slams it down and looks at the number, keeping it secret. Her objective is to ask the student on her left a have-you-ever question, and elicit answer 4 from student B. He has to answer, choosing the phrase on the board which is closest to his own truth.


So if I throw a 2, and I know you're not very physical/sporty I might ask you:

Have you ever tried boxing?

or

Have you ever been go-karting?

...and I hope you'll answer "I'd be a bit scared, actually."

And it's simply a question of going round the group and awarding points.

The nice thing about this is that it offers an insight into your students likes, interests and experiences. You may be able to use these affordances in future lessons.

******************************************************************

This game can also be used with the structure "Would you like to...?" or "Do you ever...?", which also feature frequently in oral exams.

* PS: I have done ONE of these three.

New Register Time

If you are a teacher or academic manager, you probably spend a fair bit of your time handling registers, or lesson records, group sheets, work-done records or whatever you call them.

And in springtime, a young man's fancy turns to administration. My point is, I intend to redo our old school registers soon. And my question for yous, my PLNers, is how.

What kind of document will be clear, save time, act as a lesson diary, help me to keep track of what we've done and what we'd like to do, and so on?

A separate one for register and work-done? That's how I've done it so far, but I'm open to persuasion.

I would like not to have to rely on any other documents. And I would like it to be plain A4 monochrome and easily stickable into plastic document pockets.

Brilliant ideas will be shamelessly pilfered.

So go do 
that voodoo
that you do
so well....

Subverting Myself

made / away from home / by jaguar

became / apprenticed / to the planet Venus

settled / an upholsterer /

attempted / his living / to live in the jungle

was / two crossings of the Atlantic / to a pirate

managed / with his mother / by a shark

ran / a mink farm / with a pistol

talked / bitten on the arm /

was / a dispute / to Buenos Aires

moved / ardently /

made / suicide / playing baccarat

Ages ago I had suggested this article to Sandy Millin for her Almost Infinite Ideas blog.  The article was an obituary of an adventurer called John Fairfax. I then made a fairly conventional reading lesson which kicked off with the matching exercise you see above. As you might imagine, students had to guess the true facts from the fragments.

Having tried the lesson out twice with groups and finding it lacking a bit in affective engagement, I stumbled on a much more enjoyable and production-orientated way of using it. Instead of matching what they thought might be the true sentences, I just asked students to come up with their favourite combination instead- just one per student:

David moved with his mother to the planet Venus.
Ana attempted suicide playing baccarat.
Carlos was bitten on the arm by a pirate.

... and so on.

"We're more popular than John Fairfax."

Then I arranged the seats with one out front facing the rest - no desks.

In turn, each person had to go front-centre and call a press conference to answer questions about their "adventure" (from which they had just returned.)

The others were all journalists and had to ask the adventurer questions, forcing her/him to flesh out the story.



"Roberto Garcia from the Financial Times - Did you have technological support?"

"Ana Campos from Hello Magazine - Where did you get the shark from?"

 and so on.

This kind of whole-class activity can be daunting for some, so I decided to be the first adventurer myself, and I took five minutes or so of questions on how I made two crossings of the Atlantic by jaguar.

[It's actually pretty easy - you just harness them to your boat like huskies to a sled, load up with tins of Baked Beans, get the whip cracking and before you know it you're in Cape Cod. A five-year-old could do it.]

If I recall, we spent most of our allotted 60 minutes on this daft game, and didn't get round to reading the article at all. In the end, I gave the students the title of the article and gave them optional homework to google it and read it.

Were there affordances?

Yup, loads: Question structures, past tenses, expressions like "How many/much/far/long", the difference between a jaguar and a Jaguar, and so on.

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The idea of a press conference came from the improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway, which has been posted extensively on YouTube. Their game is somewhat different, but also has tremendous potential.

David Warr thinks I spend my entire life watching repeats of Whose Line. I wouldn't go as far as that, but I know I'm not the only teacher who thinks that improv games have their place in the EFL classroom. 

Have you ever used improv in the class? Have you ever subverted your own material? Or just stumbled accidentally on a new way of doing things?