Day Two

Day Two of the online conference experience, and I have whiled away the evening flitting around the British Council Glasgow Online website, and collecting various interview nuggets which I plan to apply to my own classroom. Here they are:

Adrian Underhill’s “portable” mantra: “See what’s going on. Do something different. Learn from it.” An appealing idea, but Adrian himself was quick to point out its limitations. How do we see what is really going on in our own classroom?

Alan Maley’s ideas for teaching creative writing to learners of all levels. It’s a common assumption that creative writing should only be tackled with higher level learners, (it’s certainly one I’ve been guilty of making) so it was really nice to hear Alan’s suggestion for a simple metaphor poem which can be attempted with lower level learners. He suggests writing two columns of nouns. Learners then match the nouns from each column together to create metaphors and then write a line to explain each one, e.g.

Love is an egg,

Be careful you don’t drop it.

Freedom is a flute

I look forward to trying this out!

Finally, I really enjoyed hearing from Adam Simpson, blogathon winner. His tips about blogging have given me food for thought, as well as pointing me in the direction of his erudite (and very entertaining) blog:  http://www.yearinthelifeofanenglishteacher.com The blogathon sounds like fun - I'll be keeping a look out for a repeat event!

Glasgow Blogger

Well, I may be in dreich and rainy Shetland. I may not be rubbing shoulders with the great and good of the ELT world.  And I will not be going home with a collection of free Macmillan pens and OUP mouse mats.  But hey, I do have this lovely IATEFL badge with which to adorn my blog!  And, through the wonders of modern technology, I am able to tune into the conference from the comfort of my own kitchen table.  Therefore, I plan to drop in at least once a day this week, and record my own personal highlights. 

Today’s highlight was an interview with Nik Peachey. As I have recently (well, it’s never too late!) gotten into all things techie, I was interested in what Nik had to say about incorporating IT into language teaching. And it was no surprise to hear him say that we teachers should be incorporating (and being trained to incorporate it) it a heck of a lot more. 

Less than a year ago I would probably have turned up my nose at the thought of encouraging learners to use social network sites in the classroom.  I was (and still am) suspicious of Facebook and bemused by Twitter. I had just discovered Dogme (yes, late again!) and was keen to teach lessons that were truly “unplugged.”

However, like it or not, it looks like social networking is here to stay. It will never replace face to face communication in my classroom. But listening to Nik tonight I started to see the possibilities for creating exciting social networking lessons which empower learners and create a real life communicative need and a desire to collaborate with others. 

Having said all this, I realise how lucky my learners and I are to have internet access and a fast broadband connection, I also know that many teachers and classes around the world are not so fortunate.  While it is important to embrace all that technology offers us, we should also keep in touch with creative and learner centred ways of teaching English which do not rely on wealth and material resources.

Not So Lost in Translation

You can have an off -night with the course book and manage not to take it too personally.  It was a boring text anyway; you shrug to yourself, as you think ahead to the next lesson. However, a home made lesson which falls flat on its face brings with it a deeper sense of failure. There’s always an element of personal risk with such lessons, and I felt this strongly tonight as I hurried towards Adult Learning with the afore mentioned Faster than Witches and a folder of poems I didn’t understand in Polish, Slovenian, Spanish and Hungarian.

The lesson was not tightly planned. However, as the class filed into the room I had the strong sense that if I mentioned my plans for the evening ahead (poetry writing and translating) the whole group would run away screaming.  I told them the thought I’d just had, and explained that we would take this lesson bit by bit. So we started off discussing train journeys we’d been on, and what we remembered seeing from the window.  I then asked them to tell me what sound a train makes, and we began to choo-choo in chorus, which paved the way for the initial reading of From a Railway Carriage. This poem’s rhythm evokes a train perfectly, and the class were quick to see this.

The learners were each given a couple of lines from the poem, and they repeated these lines quietly to themselves a few times, marking the word stress and checking pronunciation with me. Then we recited the poem around the class and the rhythm and stress were, on the whole, really accurate.

Later on in the lesson I distributed the foreign language poems, hoping that there wasn’t anything too dodgy in amongst my selection. The learners took a few minutes to read the poems and I asked for their response. A few of them found a poem they really liked, while others went on line to print out a favourite. One learner chose a poem from her school days; another chose a song lyric.   I asked the learners to find out what they could about the poet in question and his/her circumstances at the time of writing. A lot of this research was conducted in L1, and the learners reported back in English. Then began the task of translation. The first stage is simply to translate the general meaning. Next week will see the translations taking on a more poetic form.

As the town hall clock struck eight, I had to repeat my request for the learners to finish off, so absorbed were they in their work. One learner said to me on leaving: You were right, not to tell us what we’d be doing at the beginning of the lesson. We would have run out screaming.” A back handed compliment, perhaps, but a compliment? I hope so…

Unexpected

In community education you have to be prepared to expect the unexpected.  A family of three new learners arrived in the class and I didn’t want frighten them off with political manifesto writing. So we played it safe with a book lesson and we’ll build up from there.  The family brought their four year old son who amused himself and the class by quietly drawing dinosaurs on the spare white board.

Last week’s lesson on local politics had had an effect on at least one of the learners, who is now looking into standing for election as a local councillor in May, and has asked me to help him with his application. I hope he sees his plan through: candidates tend to be much of a muchness in Shetland and it would be great to have someone a little different.

I’m currently sourcing poetry for tomorrow night’s poetry translation lesson. I want to have a few poems from each country, in case the learners are unable to think of a poem which they would like to translate into English. While it makes more sense to work on poems which have not already been translated, I have to be careful that I don’t present them with anything dodgy!  (My knowledge of Polish is sketchy and my Slovenian is non existent…)

Tonight we’ll set the poetry ball rolling with a study of rhythm and Robert Louis Stevenson’s fantastic poem about a train ride: “Faster than fairies, faster than witches…”

Carne Mechada

I have returned home from work even hungrier than usual after working on the first night of the International Recipe Book project.  For two hours I have helped learners transcribe recipes for Hungarian poppy seed cake and Spanish carne mechada with salsa and patatas bravas. I’m now wondering if it is possible to transform half a stale loaf, two lemons and a sad packet of wilted parsley into an appetising dish. A talking point for next week, maybe?

Hopefully the project numbers will bulk up over the coming weeks. Tonight’s group was small (ahem, three…) but as the learners’ English was at elementary level they benefited from a lot of individual attention.  As ever, unshakeable confidence in Google Translate helped to obfuscate meaning: I was intrigued by the laurel which kept appearing in recipes and it took a bit of miming and board illustrations to work out that a simple bay leaf was what was needed.

I tried to encourage the learners to use recipes they knew by heart and which had some significance to them, realising that those with little English may have been tempted to simply print a recipe off the internet. I tried to show the group that they could work with what they knew and introduced them to the structure, layout and style of recipe writing through a group exercise in which we co –wrote the recipe for the perfect cup of tea. It was amazing how opinions differed on this!

The plan is to collect as many recipes as possible from as many countries as possible, before helping the group to decide on format, layout and illustrations. One thing’s for sure though – I think a tasting event is going to be essential!

Authentic Indirectness

I've spent the past couple of nights working on indirect questions with my intermediate learners. The class claimed that this was a totally new area for them: however with a little prompting they admitted to occasionally beginning queries with an introductory “Could you tell me” or “Would you mind telling me…?” What’s trickier is mastering the form: the fact that does and do disappear, word order changes and if and whether are required for yes/no questions…

Anyway, I breezed into class tonight convinced that I had a splendid lesson on indirect questions tucked up my sleeve. I had a great starting point in Elefthourio Ernst’s wonderful Fairy Tale Bad Guys: http://www.onestopenglish.com/community/lesson-share/pdf-content/fairytale-bad-guys-lesson-plan/550939.article, and thought that I could easily adapt it to fit my purpose. 

My idea was to use the interview role play as an opportunity for learners to ask indirect questions where they might normally use direct questions. Not every question needed to be indirect: I asked for a 50:50 ratio.

The learners enjoyed the comedy of the role plays, and seemed to get to grips with the form of the new question type fairly painlessly. But listening to them, I started to ask myself:  how do native speakers of English use this question form?  In an interview situation, what percentage of questions might be indirect? I plan to find some authentic examples for next week to listen to and analyse with the class. 

On a jolly holiday note, plans for our school trip to Unst are underway! I’ve booked the Gardiesfauld hostel for the 21^st of April. Now we just need to fill it to its capacity and arrange a fun filled cultural itinerary!

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.