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.

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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.

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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?

A Question of Etiquette.

Ken Wilson has written recently of his dismay at all his fellow German students slavishly following the oral grammar-practice task while he and his like-minded partner chatting around the same subject. Now clearly, the ball is in the teacher's court on this, but I sense that Ken is especially frustrated with his classmates having bought into the conspiracy of dullness.

In the unlikely event that you haven't been following Ken's diary of a Learner, you can do so here.

Now I'm certainly not going to comment on the thoughts and motivations of a bunch of people I've never met, but the feeling is familiar to me as a teacher, especially if my adult students are new to communicative lessons.

Why are they so passive? Don't they want to bring something to the lesson?

Now it could be dullness or passivity or loss of youth. But I feel that it's more a question of etiquette. They don't know what behaviour is acceptable and what isn't. The classroom is a foreign land for them.

And I know what I'd do if I found myself in Laos or Zanzibar tomorrow - I'd do what everybody else was doing, and submit to any authority figure there. Wouldn't you?


I think our passive adults have found themselves in a foreign country. How should they behave? The closest reference they may have is their own memories of  high-school. In high school, there are two ways to behave - either defer to authority or be a rebel without a cause. And now as adults, Dennis the Menace has dissolved, leaving only Walter the Softee. I think that's the default acceptable role for an adult student.

Walter and Dennis discuss TPR

If we expect our students to be cheerful and proactive, independent and experimental, I think we have to tell them. In other words, I think it's legitimate to establish classroom etiquette openly. But how to do it is another matter...





When giving instructions for a pair speaking activity, I make a point of including phrases like this:
"If you finish discussing all the points, keep going. Improvise a little. It's great practice."

We make no bones about establishing class etiquette with children and adolescents. But that's largely a question of "Don't do this, don't do that." Is it feasible to establish the etiquette of "Please do more of this and that."?

Do you teach adults unfamiliar to adult education? Do you explicitly set up classroom etiquette in some way? Do you find that your students are able to settle into a bigger role as time passes? Or is it an exercise in futility? I'd love to hear.

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!

Go to Sleep of a Prostitute Time

Recently in Jose Antonio Millán's great but sporadic blog El Candidato Melancólico, up came the curious subject of the children's book Go The Fuck To Sleep.

I found Millán's analysis a lovely introduction to that most bizarre of linguistic habits, taboo language. I've taken the liberty of translating an extract here. [Spanish speakers can read the original post here.]

Go The Fuck To Sleep is published in Spain as Duérmete Ya, ¡Joder! (Mondadori) although more literally it would be Duérmete de Una Puta Vez.

This kind of swearing shows two interesting features: Firstly these elements are superfluous, at least to the simple meaning of the sentences. (Of course, they add an expressive and pejorative charge). Secondly, they have lost their literal meaning: We can't say Go the Copulation to Sleep, or  Go to Sleep Of A Prostitute Time.

Millán also remarks how the Spanish translation for the Latin American market is Duermete, ¡Carajo! Is carajo less offensive in American Spanish than Iberian Spanish, he wonders. (Carajo is yet another name for the dangling trouser bishop.)

Millán goes on to list a few other translations of the title. Here I've translated his list literally back to English. See if you can identify the languages and reconstruct the original foreign-language titles. Full points wins a chicken curry at my house.

Do this prick of a sleep.


Bollocks, go to sleep.


Damn shit, sleep one.


Sleep and don't shit!


Go to sleep, fuck you.

Cheats will find the answers on Millán's original blog post - link above.


 *!&#*!&#*!& #*!&#*!&#*!&#*!&#*! &#*!&#*!&#*!& #*!&#*!&#*!& #*!&#*!&#* !&#*!&#*! &#*!&#*!&#

Dealing with taboo language in class has a multitude of pitfalls:-

Do we allow it in the first place? Is it an inevitable part of communication? Can we teach it? Should we? If so, how? Is it approachable through dogme? Does it depend on whether each individual teacher uses taboo language in their own speech, or is that imposing our own linguistic identity on others? Will we get into trouble from our DoS or parents? Is its use just too complex inguistically or socially? Etc, etc, etc.

What do you think?

I'm going to copulate off now and prepare some lessons.