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.

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.

The Magnificent Seven Ride Again

I've noticed that a post of mine, The Magnificent Seven has picked up quite a lot of views, since it was posted a couple of months back.

So, helped by my unperturbable students Lara and Fer, we've prepared a further magnificent septet for you and your class. Each of them has pronounced the same set for you. Click the link above for the in-class procedure.

 

Want to check? Fer has the solution:

And Lara has the instructions for your class:

another little plant grows

Courtesy of #eltpics and my student JoseMaria.

...and of course, David Warr.

The Magnificent Seven

Get hold of a pen and paper. When you play the video below, you'll hear seven words. Try to write them down with the sequence number. With students I usually repeat each one, but you're not getting it that easy, my EFL chum ;)

Compare your list with the one at the end of this post. How did you get on?

But with my class I do the following:

1. Ask them in pairs to compare.  Leave them to discuss it.

2. Draw the class back together. Elicit and produce the correct list on the board. Check meaning, usage, pronunciation, whatever.

3. Tell them they're going to produce a coherent story of a paragraph including all the seven words. They will have three minutes.

4. Put them in pairs, and remind them you want a single cooperative effort per pair, not individual efforts. And please write legibly!

(I usually say three minutes but end up being a bit flexible. But the idea of having to do something fast helps them to focus, I find.)

5. Bring everybody back together and ask each pair to pass their story to the pair on their left. This may be the hardest bit to organise ;) Ask them to read and discuss the story they now have. Whether or not you want to settle for one round of peer-reading or do another one will depend mainly on your class size. Meanwhile, circulate and help if needed.

6. After the reading, it's a good idea to take a some time to clear up questions or errors. How much time? You'll know better than me. It might also be appropriate to choose some stories for the students to read to each other. (It's not something we do much, is it? Getting students to read to each other?)

Dun dun-da-dun, dun da-da-da-dun...

Other minimal septets? See if you can find seven English words with this:

/p~t/  e.g. "pit, pet"

or with

/st~l/ e.g. "steel"

PS It's both gratifying and annoying when you find somebody else has come up with a similar idea to yours. Gratifying because it means you may be on the right track, and annoying because you thought nobody else has good ideas ;) Here you can see Johanna Stirling demonstrating a related exercise, among other things.

My septet from the video was beat, bit, bet, bat, boat, boot, bite. And do submit your story or other minimal septets. The best story wins a plateful of my mother-in-law's excellent barbecue ribs.

Always on my mind...

This mini-tutorial is in honour of the great visual thinkers on my PLN - Naomi Epstein, David Dodgson, Jason Renshaw, Jamie Keddie and of course David Warr . It's about making digital mind-maps using Freemind. Part One is about viewing maps, and part Two about creating and modifying them.

Viewing mind maps:

 Modifying and creating mind maps:

Freemind is available here.

A summary of basic commands in Freemind:

1. To move the map, drag the background, not the map itself.
2. To zoom in or out, Ctrl + mouse wheel.
3. Hover over an element to highlight it.
4. Hold Alt to freeze the highlighting so you can move the mouse elsewhere.
5. Highlight, then Insert to add a child node.
6. Highlight, then Enter to add a sibling node.
7. To move a branch, drag and drop to the tail of its new parent.

What you can do with them:

a) Having made a map in class on the board, make a digital version after.

b) With a little familiarity and a decent screen, you can make them live in class.

Having made a digital map you can:

c) Keep in your own archive for future classes.

d) Send to students for their records, or to modify themselves for homework.

By the way, if you want a copy of the Phrasal Verbs map, here's the link in Google Docs.

Edit: I don't think Blogger lets me post files so that viewers can download them directly from here. If somebody knows to the contrary, do let me know.

Veni , vidi, wordli

I get the photos, the students, write, paper, and Ask  but who the hell is David Green? Thanks to the other Dave for the idea.