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.

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.

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

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?

Can We Afford it?

I'm just back from tesol-Spain in Bilbao with my head full of ideas.

One of the sessions I attended was Nick Robinson's Dogme presentation, where we got a succinct outline/brainstorm of how dogme teaching might work. Among the various terms mentioned, the one that most of us were a bit fuzzy about was affordances.

So with that in mind, here is my take on exploiting affordances from student-generated text, from a recent class of four pre-intermediate adults.

We started with an exercise called the Magnificent Seven, which I've blogged about elsewhere. The exercise finishes with pairs of students writing a mini-story from a list of words. Here are the two stories in their original form:

While I drove to the beach my car broken down its wheel. I stopped and saw a whale so I put on my jacket of wool and down to the sea for taking a photo. When I return at home I will hang it on my wall. I feel well when look to the picture.

While we went to see the whales, we had an accident, we crashed into a wall and the wheels were broken. Finally we got well and tomorrow we will go shopping and we will buy wool clothes for going to a birthday.

What affordances are there for scaffolding?

Well first off, the two pairs swopped stories and peer-corrected with a little help from me. That cleared up a lot of careless errors in tense and collocation.

It also affords an insight into learners' correction strategies. What kind of errors do they pick up on, and what kind are harder to catch? I think self-correnction is a vital skill, and one that learners can develop with experience and feedback. Do you make a habit of peer-reading and correcting in class? Does it work for your learners?

Then we had 20 minutes left: I focussed on what seem to me like two frequent structures:

Affordance I

We down to the sea.

...ignoring for the moment the final prepositional phrase 'to the beach.'

Verbs with adverbials  [VP went [AVP down]]  often express how (the verb)  + where (the adverbial).

My students had correctly put in the big idea first, down - the where, but forgotten that it's not itself a verb, so we needed to add one to express how the movement happened. Which one? Well, choose whichever is appropriate. How did you get down to the beach? Did you walk down, skip down, sprint down, drive down or what? We generated a few common versions.

For Romance L1 speakers, this structure is totally alien. In Spanish you might say:

bajamos corriendo [we descended running]

...where the verb says where and the -ing form says how. I took the chance to spell out explicitly how the words deliver the ideas, and we drilled and generated a few more.

Affordance II

we will buy wool clothes for going to a birthday.


or,  how we express the reason for doing something. In English we have three common alternatives:

I went to get batteries.
[VP went to get batteries]

I went for batteries.
[VP went [PP for batteries]]

I went because I needed batteries.
[CON because [S I needed batteries]]

I had noticed they had been a bit wooly about this. So again we discusses and generated.


In what way is this dogme? Is it not just grammar teaching? Is it not just the same as me bringing in the corresponding exercise from Murphy or Swan at the start of the lesson, and saying "Today we're going to look at two features of predicates"?

I think there's one vital difference - the stories are theirs. At least I hope it's a vital, rather than trivial experience. No individual teacher can hope to test this kind of thing objectively.

My Challenge to You

And once you've done that, show it to your students and get them to do the same.

I for got to say two important things - no reading, and no editing the video. Upload it warts and all!

  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #

In lessons, I find I'm referring more and more to Benny Lewis' blog Fluent in 3 Months. Not only does he offer a great set of specific techniques, but more importantly he gets to grips with THE problem of language learning - fear.

I've taken this challenge directly from his blog, more specifically here and here, although there are many others. It was a real challenge to me, since I've never really spoken Galician before. It's always been there, but Spanish has always been the easier option, and the conventional one, since locals automatically speak to guiris (foreigners) in Spanish.

But all the practice involved in making that short video really gave me a boost in confidence. I feel a bit like a Galician speaker now. Not a good speaker, true, but a speaker. i.e. not a learner.

I gave this task as homework to a group of approx B2 level adults last week. Although they all looked like rabbits caught in the headlights of an oncoming 18-wheeler, I am chuffed to report that every one of them had done it. And it was a comfort for all of us to see all the others grappling with the same problems. Searching for words,  fluffing a verb form, that I've-made-a-mistake-so-should-I-just-leave-it-be-or-correct-myself feeling. And so on.

I'm certainly going to give them video homework again, and I think the second time, we'll all approach it with more courage.

Have you made speak-to-the-camera videos with your students? Do let me know.

And I can't wait to hear your second languages!

Spring has Sprung!

We spent September in Scotland with our son Jamie and both sets of his grandparents. And about a month after coming back something incredible happened: Jamie started speaking. 




Not just ready-made chunks, not just repeating, not just chanting and singing fragments. Real speech appropriate to its context:


Are you going to work, Pappy?
Don't want to sleep.
No me pones la chaqueta, mami.
Where the big football?
Pappy, have you got shoes?
Want to go to Santiago with you.
Blas me tiró en el charco. (Blas is a dog.)


...and my favourite -


Give me the... (pause) ... I don't know the name.


...........................................................


Two things stand out:


He's started asking us questions - that's completely new.


He now seems to be able to distinguish reality from imagination. He'll tell you something that sounds false, I'll say "Really?", and he'll smile and go "Nooo!"


I wonder which neurons have learned to talk to each other in his little head. Wouldn't it be amazing to spend ten minutes in his head?

I can't help using David Warr's great metaphor for language: Little bits of undifferentiated tissue have suddenly turned into stems and roots and leaves and flowers. He has flourished. 


Steven Pinker dedicates The Language Instinct to his parents, who "gave me life and language." What a gift - free to give and priceless to receive.


He still pees his pants occasionally though ;) Words come before wee, I guess.

How Many Words?

I think this may be the simplest grammar/listening/visualising exercise in the world...

Having discussed or studied a topic/situation, just tell your students the following:

You're going to say some phrases - they have to count the number of words you say.

Demonstrate: 

"I've lost the car keys."

I - ve - lost - the - car - keys = six.

(Contractions like "I've" count as two.)

And all you need to do is make up a few phrases or sentences from the lesson, or related to it. Try to pronounce them as realisically as you can - really join up the words. Then ask everybody in class to say how many words were in the phrase.

"How many words? Six, Belen? Six, Alvaro? Marcos, five?

Yes, six. Well done. Do you remember them?..."


I find that just with a minute or so most lessons, learners are able to tune in a little faster. And of course you don't need any prep :)


                                  *    *    *    *    *

Naomi Epstein at Visualizing Ideas recently got me thinking on the subject of hearing: She mentioned here a persistent grammar problem for Hebrew speakers, in which she used the phrases "learners with perfect hearing" It took me a moment to remember that she teaches hearing-impaired learners, but the phrase was suggestive: As a serial language learner (4 attempts - 2 wins, 1 draw, 1 defeat), I've noticed that my own hearing takes a while to tune in to the rhythms of a new language.

And not only new languages. Over the last year or so, I've had the car radio on the classical station quite often. It's my first ever time at voluntarily listening to classical music. And I feel like a Martian living on Earth. Pretty disorientated at the beginning - there's this big nonsensical mass of music, and there are too many instruments, and just when you're getting the hang of a bit, it all stops and a totally different bit starts. And it goes on a bit, too.

But it's starting to make sense now: I feel more comfortable listening to classical music. I can listen to more pieces all the way through without getting lost. And I can listen to the classical station for longer.

I've noticed a couple of features of the "grammar" of classical music:

i) Instead of choruses, they sometimes have a little phrase coming back later in the piece, maybe played the same, maybe played a bit differently. But not much in the way of verse/chorus structures.

ii) The rhythm is often very understated or totally implied: I don't like losing the rhythm of a piece, and it happens a lot in classical music.

iii) You can expect much more drastic changes in tempo or sound or key than you would in any rock or pop or folk piece. I've learned not to be disorientated; things often return to more familiar territory a little later.

You can probably tell I've been reading in some depth on classical musicology ;)

But seriously, I get the feeling that, with some exposure to the new music of English, learners may pick up little details, consciously or otherwise. Does anybody else think so?

What sort of things might constitute the music of English?

If I may speculate wildly:

Maybe the way we really pronounce I'm and want to and because and plenty more;

Maybethewaywejus kinastringitaltogether;

Maybe the way the new information seems to come later in the sentence; (get that bit first and go back for the grammar if you need to).

Maybe the way we repeat y'know or ahmean or isslike, and learners can learn to mentally skip them, because they don't mean much.

Or whatever it may be. I don't have any intentions of bothering my students with a self-analysis, so I will instead invite you to check out Benny Lewis' blog Fluent in 3 Months for great insights, motivation and strategies for language learners. If you don't know him, his mission is to learn a new language fluently pretty much every three months. As I say, his is a great dynamic blog: part learner's diary, part tutorial, part reflection, always upbeat.

And of course, thanks to Naomi.


PS It's nice to be back!

another little plant grows

Courtesy of #eltpics and my student JoseMaria.

...and of course, David Warr.

What People Eat ...and what it's wrapped in.

I wanted to reply with a screen-capture to Sandy Millin's most recent post on her wonderful Almost Infinite EFL Ideas blog. This was in turn related to this slide show from Time.

In class with my individual adult student Jose we began simply looking slowly through the images. He instantly noticed one thing that I hadn't - the different amounts of packaging in the photos - compare the British family's food with the Bhutanese spread, for example, where there's virtually no 'future rubbish' in sight. So we re-opened a mind map that we had built up on previous occasions, and added a section on packaging, as you can see above.

Jose is one of those students who had  never seen mind maps before but took to them with a vengeance. Previously he had really taken the ball and run with it with an earlier version of this food map: He downloaded it from my Google Docs, found out mountains of vocabulary and re-uploaded his new version in time for the next class. As I blogged previously, I like to make mind maps in class, either digital or hand-made, but the curious thing is that you get all sorts of reactions to them, from familiarity to amazement to consternation to road-to-Damascus conversions.

And today, happily, lots of engagement.

Thank You

Thank you David Warr for giving us a great original idea for scaffolding language...

[PS I've just realised that Ana at the lovely imadeitso is doing a thank-you week. Coincidence...?]

Want A Fight?

This speaking lesson concentrates purely on arguing and debating. The material looks like this:

The original document is this pdf. [edit - this link is faulty - will sort it out ASAP. You get the general idea from the screenshot opposite :) ] Of course you may prefer to modify  them or write your own statements. Remember to express them as a single opinion which is very clearly on one side of the debate.

Cut up the document into separate cards.

This is what I say to the students:

You're going to practise disagreeing, debating and arguing. Let's get into pairs.


In a moment I'm going to give you a slip of paper with an opinion written in it. But first - did you or your partner get up earlier this morning? [Pause to find out] Okay, earlier riser is going to agree with the opinion on the paper, and late riser is going to disagree. You can't switch sides and you can't agree with each other! [Check they understand this part.]


Here is your opinion card. Five minutes to debate. You're not allowed to ask me for help - we'll do that after." 

And hand out the cards randomly one to each pair.

And then I simply monitor (which I prefer to do as unobtrusively as possible) and take notes for subsequent feedback and scaffolding.

We usually have time and energy to repeat the whole thing 2 - 4 times in a class.


details:

I try to encourage an atmosphere of fun and games, rather than serious debate. I like to think of it as a kind of verbal table-tennis.

Also, I try to space the pairs as far apart as possible.

The feedback/scaffolding/consolidation work will depend on what the students say, of course, but often I find they are short of rhetorical devices like:

          challenging:

You can't be serious!    No way!    Come on!


          interrupting and resisting interruption:


Wait a minute...    Hang on a second...    Let me finish...

I've used this lesson many times, and repeatedly with the same classes, and the cards are always on hand in my classroom just in case. However, it was brought to mind again by Martin Sketchley's very informative video'd lesson here, and especially his reference in his post-lesson comments to 'devil's advocate' arguing.

STOP PRESS Having just read Sandy Millin's reflections on observe-hypothesise-experiment, an alternative model to PPP, I think lessons like this have a relevance.

Hearing Voices

Myself and Osama bin Laden were the only people in the universe not at Brighton, and now that he's gone, it's just me left. So I have been doing my best to follow the conference as it echoes around the blogosphere. Just last night I read Scott Thornbury's technosceptical post and its many comments and reblogs. I too feel ambivalent about technology, but have never been quite how to put my feelings into words. But I do feel glad for my modest old laptop and internet connection. Let me offer my defence of that aspect of technology at least.

I've been in this shabby business long enough to remember when the cassette recorder was the only multimedium available, and pretty much all you could play was the cassette that came with the book. (For those of you who do not know what a cassette recorder is, here  is an excellent introduction.)

All that ffwing and rewing. All that tape hiss. All that lugging the frigging stuff around on buses and tube trains. The constant risk of your tape-player turning into a plate of moaning brown spaghetti. So why did I bother?

Because it was another voice. Even a crap one. Another dimension - especially when I was doing one-to-one classes. And I think the content and quality of that third voice have improved in the days of the multi-worldwide-inter-online-blogo-tubo-sphere-net.

And does the third voice get in the way of dogme? See what you think. I've found the following kind of strategy often works - inviting the third voice to join in near the end of a conversation class.

If we've been talking about food or cooking, we might take a look at Videojug. (See the end of this blog for details about each of the sources.)

If we've been talking about just about anything from science or social science, we make a bee-line to TED.

If crime is the subject, we might try The Real Hustle on YouTube. The Real Hustle is also great for social interaction with strangers (shops, hotels, passers-by and so on).

I think there's a huge difference in emphasis between starting a class off with a video sequence (teacher-led) and allowing a third voice to chip in at the end of a student-generated conversation. Dogme? Dogmaybe.

And I notice one curious thing time after time: If the conversation has arisen from the people in the room, students tend to be able to understand the video sequence much better than if it had been brought in by me. As listeners, they seem to punch above their weight.

If you've never done this before, I would spend a little free time skimming through a few videos from each site. But in class I don't hesitate to say "Well since we're talking about what you ate on holiday in Vietnam, do you want to take a quick look at a website which has lots of recipes? Maybe we can find something Vietnamese?"

And if nothing useful turns up, so be it. We do something else with the existing voices.

So definitely a freshly-made dish, but garnished with a little multimedia. Bo proveite!

Appendix - The Sources


The Real Hustle is a TV programme which has been posted extensively on YouTube. It is a hidden-camera programme where a trio of performers demonstrate con-tricks and scams on the unsuspecting public. The English is hard - lots of untidy colloquial speech - but I usually ask my students to try to follow the dynamics, rather than the speech.


TED is a very well-known conference on various key issues featuring many leading experts. All the talks are posted on TED.com and many now feature multilingual subtitles.


Videojug features short video tutorials on how to cook, keep fit, do DIY and many other subjects. Anybody can upload to the site, but the best quality clips are those made by the Videojug people themselves. A godsend for foodies. Try this one.

I can explain everything...

David Deubelbeiss at EFL Classroom 2.0  posted this morning about photographs - "the fundamental intermediary for context in language teaching" as he writes. While I found myself agreeing totally, I also realised that my main use of photos is entirely different, and the photos I tend to use are also different. Which is one of the joys of a humanistic job, don't you think? No wrong solutions, and lots of right ones.

My own photo library - built slowly from magazine cutouts - has a selection of the lexical sets David mentions and includes in his post. However the ones I come back to again and again are all very similar: all cryptic or incomplete, and almost all captured rather than posed. Here are a couple of my favourites. (I also take the time to cut them out and mount them on decent card to protect them, by the way.)

NB These were cut from magazines, so are not in the public domain. I'll let you know if the Copyright Gestapo kick my door down in the middle of the night.

Here's one activity you can use with teens upwards and lower-int upwards.

I Can Explain Everything

1. Choose one cryptic or strange photo for each student. Don't give them out yet!

2. Ask the students to sit as far apart as your classroom will allow - this is an individual exercise, so give them space to think.

3. Explain that they will each get a photo and a blank sheet of paper. They will have to look at the photo and write a few sentences explaining or interpreting the picture at the top of the paper. Make it very clear you want an explanation, not a description. Ask them to write legibly.

4. Give out the photos and leave them to think and write in peace - usually 2-4 minutes is enough, but play it by ear. Be on hand if they call you, and monitor unobtrusively near the end of the time limit. (I usually do the same as them, BTW.)

5. Ask them to draw a line under their paragraph. Tell them that they are going to get a new photo and paper, which will already have an explanation. They will have to look at the new photo, read the existing interpretation, and write an alternative one, which must be totally different.

6. Ask them to pass the photo and paper to the student on their left, then look, read and write.

7. Repeat this until each photo has been round the class once. You will have several different interpretations of the same photo written on the same sheet.

8. Pin up each photo on the wall, with its paper, allowing students to mill and read. They can each vote for their favourite interpretation - but of course, can't vote for their own.

9. Round up vocabulary.


This lesson has the great boon that it allows your students to appear smart and imaginative to each other, which is vital with adolescents. I haven't tried it with younger learners - as always I'd love your feedback.

PS In a lovely moment of synchronicity, I found this glorious collection online.

Initial impressions

Just this morning Kalinago (whose session I had the pleasure of catching at TESOL Spain last weekend) blogged here and earlier here about dealing with errors and emergent language. How can we catch it before it flies away into oblivion?

The blogs and comments reminded me of this simple technique - initial writing.

You simply turn this...

into this:

The text in this case was my recasting of a student's tale, but it can come from anywhere. I often use initial-notation as a kind of shorthand to capture my own monologues as I speak to the class - without ever writing the full version.