Not quite Dogme

I am now a published ELT author and fairly flush with success. See: (www.onestopenglish.com/community/lesson-share/lesson-share-archive/esol/lesson-share-complaining-with-confidence/551924.article).  It’s satisfying to think that a few time zones away my lesson plan may this very minute be bringing a relieved smile to the face of a harassed teacher wondering what the heck she is going to do with the class of ten learners who have already started to file into her classroom.

Tonight’s lesson brought home again the old dogme adage that sometimes what motivates and interests learners may be so much closer to home than what lies awaiting them in their course books. My pre intermediate class arrived in class clutching their student books as if they were comforters. We proceeded to plough our way through a handsomely illustrated text about LA teenagers. At break time I asked them if they fancied breaking away from the book for the next half. Five heads nodded tentatively.

We spent the next half of the lesson discussing the issues that Shetland faces today. The learners were extremely vocal on diverse areas from wind energy through to school closures to corruption. At the end of the lesson they had to write their own political manifesto for Shetland in preparation for next lesson’s mock election. They all expressed an interest in using a future lesson to read up on candidates for the forthcoming local elections in May, so they can make well informed choices when the time comes…

My learners have paid for their Headway course books and seem to appreciate having them. It’s easy to see why: they are attractive and glossy and provide learners with a useful record of what has been learned. When learners only have one English lesson a week, it is easy to stick with the course book to create a sense of progress. However, tonight’s lesson has encouraged me to try to work in a few more “book free” sessions.

A Wonderful Evening

The International Night at the library was fantastic!

Thai dancing, French accordion music, an Irish song, poems in Hungarian, Frisian, Gaelic and Polish were just some of the highlights of a night which fairly buzzed with cultural diversity. After the performances and some refreshments (Orkney and Shetland beer and Shetland fudge) we cleared the chairs to one side and danced The Gay Gordons, the Hungarian czardas and a Greek circle dance…All that dancing was thirsty work, so a  large group of us repaired to Da Lounge bar to carry on the night’s festive cheer into the wee small hours.  We should do this more often…

You can view photos of this event at: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.296371997097027.70064.106114926122736&type=3

Portrait of a Class

Tonight saw the conclusion of a two week long project : biography writing. Sounds like a simple enough idea, but the past few classes have seen the learners completely absorbed in their work: true ESOL gold - I recommend it!

It's simple to organise - the learners start out by writing a simple timeline of their lives, including the events they feel have most significance to the people they are today.   They then swap this with their partner and interview each other, getting plenty of descriptive detail about each event. Finally they write up their partner's biography choosing an appropriate title.

I'm lucky enough to have access to computers, and so my learners were able to type their biographies and include digital photographs of their interviewee. It was easy to highlight grammatical and lexical inaccuracies on the computer for learners to revisit and revise. I will photocopy a class set of each biography so they all have a little keepsake of their classmates (obviously this would not be a hugely motivating factor in a class where relations were less jolly!) and will also display the finished products on the wall for all to see.

Tomorrow night sees our International Night at the library.  Many learners are coming with national songs and dances. My colleague, Kate, and I are performing a slightly adapted version of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone"  We have just finished rehearsing and I am consoling myself with the old theatrical maxim that a terrible dress rehearsal means it will be alright on the night!

Martian Postcards

Tonight local poet and reader in residence Jen Hadfield visited my intermediate class. We looked at riddle like poems, such as A Martian Sends a Postcard Home by Craig Raine.

It was fascinating to watch the reactions of the learners in reading these poems and grapple with vocabulary several notches above what they would come across in their course book. It was also refreshing to watch them work with someone whose personality is so different from my own: a person less afraid of silences than I am.  At times, Jen would ask a question, and, just as I was beginning to find the wait excruciating a learner would pipe up with a considered response.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to ask the learners to work on their own riddle poems: this can wait till next week! And I am still keen to run a poetry translation workshop. As they say: watch this space…

Langosh

Today saw another one of my forays into investigative journalism/trying to make some cash in the two hours when my youngest is at nursery.

I had decided to interview the Hungarian proprietors of the newly opened langos takeaway  with the hope of generating a little publicity for their business. I was all prepared with Dictaphone on the table in between myself and my interviewee, Robert. Sadly, however, the door of the shop opened and a very noisy langos customer talked loudly in Hungarian for the duration of the interview.

When I got home Robert's softly spoken musings were drowned out by the sound of frying langos, the rattling of plates and the bellowing of the langos customer.  Ah, well.

In tonight's lesson we looked at the difference between will and going to . Despite having taught an assessed lesson on this very subject on my DELTA course a mere year ago, I feel I have failed to crack this very subtle difference in the minds of my learners.  Especially when the class consists of two Thai learners (the Thai language has no equivalent to the way English expresses the future) and two Polish learners (who have a future auxiliary verb, but struggle to distinguish between will and going to.)  The course book only muddy matters further by providing decontextualised snippets of dialogue. I will have to mull this over before next week...

In the meantime...preparations are underway for International Night at the library on Friday, and we are gearing up for our poetry translation workshop, led by Jen Hadfield, tomorrow. It's set to be a fun week...