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.

Mi no save mekim ol poster*

I thought I would share with you an attempt at a poster project. Whoop of triumph, cry for help or death rattle? You be the judge.


I have a class of four 10 year-old boys. Although the boys are no trouble whatsoever, I always feel at a loss trying to find appropriate content or materials for them - I have absolutely no formal training for YL. Or put another way, we all enjoy ourselves in class, but I have the sneaking sensation that they're not learning any English :)

Recently I thought we would try to make a poster in class. It would be about a single country, since we've done a few online quizzes in class and they generally like geography. We had a few goes at an online geography quiz as a warm-up. I specified that it couldn't be a European or Spanish-speaking country. The most geographically-curious student, A, plumped for Papua New Guinea, and the others were fine with that.

Now this was a bit of luck, because my old friend Tiziana had spent a few weeks there some years back. Did the lads fancy composing an email to her asking for her impressions and maybe a couple of her photos? Fine. So we team-wrote the email and I sent it.


Come lesson 2, Tizi hadn't let me down. So we looked at her text and photos, doing a little language work on them and composed a short reply, with thanks and a couple more questions.

What to do now in the rest of the lesson? Clever Alan hadn't given the slightest thought to this bit. In the end, we stumbled rather untidily to the end of the lesson, looking and reading snippets from YouTube and Wikipedia. Wish I had put more thought into this. (Surely the third conditional is the saddest tense...)

For the next lesson, I had found a couple of short relevant You Tube videos, although in the end they didn't make much impact on the lads. What actually crystallised them more was the results from Google Images. PNG is visually arresting, with spectacular flora and fauna,and dazzling cultural artefacts like carved masks and face-paint. It's also one of the least Westernized countries in the world, in whose highlands many people live largely stone-age lives, complete with terrifying inter-tribal violence, and the occasional practice of head-hunting and ritual cannibalism. Things which ten-year old boys love.

So by the end of lesson four, we had the poster wrapped up, complete with a few printed photos, their own hand-drawn illustrations and a couple of short texts.

Lessons learnt? Well, it was useful to find out the effectiveness of Google Images. And secondly, posters are fairly easy to do in class, logistics-wise - just some rudimentary art supplies. Thirdly. the reality of writing to a real person did make a difference, even at this young age. Fourthly, they seemed to enjoy making their own drawings more than I expected - I thought they'd opt for the slicker printout rather than the hand-drawn stuff.

And maybe most encouraging of all, the kids responded well to WEIRD STUFF.  The little glimpse into a faraway place. I'm not especially anti-coursebook, but I would like to see more weird stuff in books. Stuff that extends people's mental horizons more, rather than opting for the lowest common denominator.

But, I'm not all that happy about the amount of English used and produced. Essentially we spent four hours to produce a few short snippets and two emails. (And the emails were the result of a lucky coincidence.)

And I have no idea how to go about scaffolding or recycling the language generated.

And the poster itself can't be taken home to show to parents, either :(

Would I have been better preparing texts for them beforehand? I would love to find a more learner-driven way of doing research during class time, but with four young students, I just couldn't think of a way to do it. Any ideas?

*" I don't know how to make posters." in Tok Pisin.

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:

Letters of Note

Dear Reader,

This post is dedicated to you especially if, like me, you are still at work. While the rest of the world is making sandcastles, you and I are looking for a board pen that doesn't leak, or ferrying two hundred sweaty and libidinous teens around London.

I thought I'd share with you one of my absolute favourite blogs. And it's neither an EFL site nor a techy one. It's plainly and simply a collections of letters,  Letters of Note. It's a tribute to curator Shaun Usher's perseverance and dedication that he has collected such a fine corpus. I salute you, Shaun.



But it's also a testament to the power of that odd combination of ink, paper and distance as a channel, seedbed and butterfly net for human emotion. You'll find here outrage, ambition, sympathy, paranoia, sorrow, encouragement, humour, complaint, madness and pretty much every other feeling there is:



A pant-wettingly hilarious memo on bad language in 1890s baseball. John Hinkley's eerily tender stalking letter to Jodie Foster, written hours before he shot Ronald Reagan. Queen Victoria's elegant and moving letter of condolance to Abraham Lincoln's widow. Oil magnate Tiger Mike's terrifyingly vitriolic business memos.
 
(Use the search engine embedded in the website. Or better still, browse.)



But here is possibly my favourite - how a 6-year-old got his dream job. This also includes a video interview, by the way, but for my money the letter is the star of the show.




Must write off now. Got to go scuba-diving do some photocopying.

Wish you were here (instead of me).

Ever yours,

Alan xxx

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.

Before Your Very Eyes...

Here is a wee tiny update to my previous post, From Thin Air. I had the same students  yesterday and we came up with this after an hour's work: -

Stephen Jackson's Heart

He woke up; while he was making breakfast he lit his first cigarette. He fried three eggs and 200g of bacon in butter, and ate it with lots of fried bread. While enjoying his second cigarette, he made a pot of strong coffee, and drank three cups with another cigarette. He thought “If that Dr. Green could see me now, he’d have a heart attack.”

He had always enjoyed smoking. The taste in his mouth, the cheerful glow of the paper, the lovely blue spiral of smoke. Of course the doctor had told him to cut down, and his ex-wife used to complain. He had been referred to a cardiologist called Green a few years ago after his first heart scare. Naturally Green had repeated the usual platitudes: No smoking or alcohol before breakfast, no deep-fried cheese, no more than three packets a day of Mariner’s Filterless Black and so on. But he felt fine. He could still get up the stairs at home, although he had to stop a for couple of minutes to cough and gasp in the middle.

He went out of his house and found a lot of snow and ice in the street. He needed to get to the hospital by 10 o’clock, but there weren’t any taxis to be seen in the city. He decided to go there by his brand-new red scooter. It was extremely cold and he'd lost his gloves - he couldn’t feel his fingers. He was wearing his helmet but the visor was broken and the snow kept covering up his glasses. In the Gran Via a cat suddenly crossed, and he ran over it. He lost control of the scooter and slipped on the ice. He tipped over and one of his mirrors smashed.

He carried on through the snow without mirrors.

(The authors will remain anonymous until I've asked their permission) 
I'm extremely pleased with how it turned out, and again it was a lot of fun. If you'd like to try it, here's the procedure:

1. Recap the original long sentence (see link above)

2. Identify details in it that might be interesting to expand on. One detail for each student ideally.

3. Fill in a couple of key details - in this case, just the character's name, approximate age and that he lives alone. Other details will arise later.

4. Ask each student to sit on their own and try to write a paragraph or so.

5. As each of them finish, read their piece with them. Feel free to ask them to expand a little more on nice details, add a little dialogue, fill out a description as well as correct the English.

6. Draw it all together - either post the papers on the wall, pass them round or ask the authors to read out loud.


Let me know how it goes.