Anka Zapart

A VYL classroom. Part 1: Our little pre-school kingdom

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This is my beloved classroom, mid-planning

I have decided to write this article inspired by my trainees on the IH VYL course and to collect, in one post, everything that I have learnt about a classroom that is appropriate for the lessons with the EFL preschoolers.

This post was meant as a short, one piece (emotionally-loaded, perhaps) description of a classroom. But then, as soon as I started writing, I realised that there is a lot more to say and that I myself have worked in so many different places that were made into VYL classrooms that, abracadabra, three posts came out of it. The other two can be found here: about the regular classroom that becomes a VYL classroom and about teaching in kindergartens

Well, enjoy! And if you have any other ideas to add, there is the comments box!

Case A: Our pre-school kingdom

This is a classroom in a language school that was set aside for the lessons with pre-schoolers. The furniture has been bought for the little people and there are no big tables or chairs. There are no other classes than those with pre-schoolers.

Advantages

  • The classroom is used only by the pre-primary students and teachers and all the furniture and the design can be adapted to the needs of the students.
  • The classroom is safe.
  • The room can be fully decorated in a child-friendly way, even if it is not all done at once, the elements can be added to it step by step.
  • There is plenty of room to display the kids’ work
  • It is easy to store resources and they are all at hand which gives the teacher a lot of flexibility while already in class.
  • The students feel comfortable in class and it is much easier to build up the routine.
  • With some investments, there is a lot of potential for some interesting solutions such as educational carpets (yes, in English!), lines painted on the floor that help to divide the classroom into sections (or just a hop-scotch grid that is always there, l saw it once in a classroom at IH Bucharest), wall hangings that now come with some of the coursebooks and can be left on the walls and so on.

Disadvantage

  • I cannot think of any, sorry)

Solutions

  • Have a look at the classroom before the lesson and figure out how you can make it fit your aims and ideas. Do not worry if at the start of the year you do not have a clear idea of what you want your classroom should be like. There is always room to experiement, to try new ideas and to improve the classroom, based your research, ideas or the group that you currently work with.
  • Make sure that the classroom is safe. Look out for the sockets, sharp edges, anything that is not stable or sticking out. There are easy ways of making the place child-proof ie moving out the furniture, swapping the classroom, getting the socket plugs etc.
  • The routine and the classroom go together and one can influence the other. They can also change through the year.
  • My dream classroom actually does exist and everything that I am going to include in this section of the post is based on a real experience.
  • My classroom is a rectangle and it has been divided into three sections: the carpeted area with a set of small chairs in a circle, a circle of small triangular tables arranged in a circle in the middle and another carpeted area by the window.
  • We start the lesson outside of the classroom. I am a huge fan of lining up. Kids walk in one by one, they put their books on the table, at their seats and then take a place on one of the chairs in the hello circle.
  • Afterwards, we move to the carpet by the window and this is where we study, we revise and play the flashcards games and this is also where we get up to do our movement games. We used to spend more time in the circle but then, last year, my students started to suggest, more and more frequently, to go to the carpet and that is exactly what we did. Now we spend there a lot more time. One of the reasons for that might be the fact that we got a big TV that hangs on the wall by the window. In order to make sure that we don’t sit too close to the screen, I put a piece of painter’s scotch onto the carpet and this is the line behind which we always have to sit while we are watching anything on the screen. Here we also do all of our movement games.
  • Afterwards we move to the tables in a circle and this is where we work with the book or the handouts. This is where we write and this is where we do craft.
  • The lesson finishes on the carpet that is also our storytelling corner. Sometimes our story is a video and in that case we sit in front of the TV. Sometimes it is a storybook with me sitting on a small chair and the kids sitting in a semi-circle on the carpet.
  • We finish the lesson on the carpet, too. We sing a song, talk about the homework and choose stickers.
  • In the corner of the classroom, there is a bookcase and on the shelves we keep the most immediate resources such as markers, scissors in a closed box on the top shelf, glue in another box, crayons, our notebooks and two big boxes with dice, blocks, plastic toys. I don’t have to share them with anyone else, these are just used by the little kids. Outside of the classroom we have to cupboards, too and a chest of drawers for flashcards and all the other things we might need.
  • My resources for the lesson, for my groups are kept in three different baskets. I keep there flashcards we are using currently as well as few other sets we revise as well as our favourite games, dice, etc. The children do not touch them, mostly because they are too big and we have learnt on developing the idea that this is Anka’s basket and we do not touch it. Keeping things in a basket also makes it very easy for us to be moving around from the circle to the carpet and to the table etc. In the past, we would move between two or three different classrooms in one lesson and the basket was superuseful then, too.
  • I have three little tricks, too. First of all, since our table is made of small triangular tables, I have some room in the centre and this is where I put a stool. This is where I leave all the materials for the focused task for the lesson. The small tables are also very easy to be moved apart which makes it possible for me to enter the centre and sit there, having all my kids around and all the resources at hand.
  • There is also a small cupboard under the table and I use it to keep a selection of storybooks, coursebooks and posters which I can use in class.
  • And since the same cupboard has a small section underneath, a section that I can close and that is why it is used to hide all the secrets and surprises
  • I display the kids’ work on two noticeboards in the classroom but also on the noticeboards in the hallway.
  • There are no toys in the classroom. We are lucky enough to have another small room where kids can play before or after the lesson and this where we keep all the toys.

Happy teaching!

Happy Birthday, Funky Socks and Dragons!

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It is not the happiest time of the year or the happiest time of my life so I am not really going to celebrate. Apart from this one short post here.

The blog has been on for two years now.

It has been visited by almost 7000 people on 10 000 occasions. 188 posts have been written.

It has brought me a lot of joy and I would like to believe that it has helped a few teachers of English to feel a bit more comfortable, a bit more confident and a bit happier standing in front of a bunch of kids, from Monday to Friday.

For that reason I am going to continue writing.

Here are the links to the top 10 most popular posts over those two years

  1. a post on colourful semantics in EFL
  2. a post on Pasha, the invisible student
  3. a post on surviving your first ever lesson with VYL
  4. lots of ideas on using visuals in class, YL or not (2 parts)
  5. and some more ideas for the homework for pre-schoolers
  6. the many uses of wordwall games in class
  7. a post dedicated to a circle, my favourite shape ever and a cool craft idea
  8. ideas on how to start the school year with teens
  9. and a similar post but with the focus on primary
  10. and, one of my favourite ones ever, on how to survive when you suddenly land on Mars

And one of the least read one, with lots of great ideas on how you can allow yourself to be a lazy teacher. You can find it here.

Happy birthday, happy teaching!

Peace to the world. Please.

All you need is…a picture. Vol. 2

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This is still one of the top 5 among the most popular posts on this blog. But it was written about a year and a half ago. It looks like the high time for part 2. Here it is.

There is only one picture…

A to Z picture: teacher writes the alphabet on the board, students work in pairs or in teams, they talk about the picture by naming the word or words beginning with each letter of the alpahbet. Younger (or lower level) kids can use only single words, older students (or higher levels) can produce relevant sentences. Thank you, Polina Smirnova, for this activity.

Dice points: kids work in pairs. They describe the elements of the picture (ie one person, animal, element of their choice or assigned by their partner (Tell me about this…). They use the structures and vocabulary that they are familiar with, depending on the level. After each round, they roll the dice to find out how many points they get. They take a note of the points and add them up at the end of the game.

I spy with my little eye: teacher demonstrates the game by describing one of the elements of the picture ‘I spy with my little eye something big and red’. It works even with the youngest children as they are not even required to name the item in the picture, they only need to point at it. When the kids are ready, they take turns to describe something to the rest of the group or to their partner. The language can be made more complex by focusing on prepositions, adding more adjectives or details. It is a great speaking and listening activity.

Yes or No? Teacher makes sentences about the picture, children listen to check if these are correct. If they are, they confirm ‘Yes’ or ‘Yes, that’s true’. If they are not, they say ‘No’ or ‘No, it is not true’ and they correct the sentence. Afterwards, they can take turns and talk about the picture for the group or their team to listen. Again, this is one of the activities that I use with my pre-schoolers and it is lovely to see how they move on from one-word utterances (correcting only the key item) to full sentences. The complexity of these sentences or their number can be adjusted to the level and age of the students.

Travelling sentences: It is a version of the Yes or No activity. The teacher displays the picture for all the students to see and gives out small cards, one per student. Each student writes a true or false sentence about the picture, the teacher can support this with providing sentence starters. When the kids are ready, the sentences start travelling, with each student passing their sentence to the student on the left or on the right. They read the sentence on the card, say if it is true or false (and correct it) and the game goes on. This stage can be done in pairs or in groups of three.

Travelling questions: the teacher prepares a set of questions about a picture. These can be reused in many different lessons so it might be a good idea to laminate them. Students work in pairs or in groups of three. Each pair picks out one of the questions, they look at the picture, read out a question and answer it. The teacher monitors and when the time is up, the students exchange the questions by passing their question to the group on the left and they continue the game. The set of questions might include: Where are the people? What are they doing? What clothes are they wearing? How are they feeling? What’s the weather like? Can you see any animals? Do you like this picture? What’s your favourite thing about this picture? What’s your least favourite thing about this picture? Is there anything strange about this picture? If it happens, that the question is not relevant to a specific illustration, this particular question can be left out or the teacher can introduce a way for the students to get out of the situation, for example: ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t know. Maybe…’

Picture boardgame: It is a version of the Travelling Questions and it was created based on the same principle: there is a set of topics, themes and items that are involved in most of the illustrations that kids can talk about. The board, such as this one here (created with toolsforeducators.com) can be reused with pretty much any visual. The students play in pairs, move their checkers on the board and describe the picture according to the suggestions from the board.

Draw the picture: this is an activity that I used to use a lot with the first years of primary in order to practise reading and, obviously, with students who like drawing. We use a set of specifically prepared cards on worwall, like this one here. We get the pencils and the paper ready and I set the first card ready (‘We are in the park’). Afterwards, we read the cards, one by one, in any order (if something does not match, I skip the card to get back to it later), the students take turns to read the sentence and we all draw a picture according to these instructions. At the end, we compare our pictures and talk about some potential differences. It is a good activity to practise simple words, prepositions, colours and verbs.

Half the picture: Students work in pairs. Each pair receives only a half (or rather a part of the picture, depending on the particular photograph or illustration). First, they describe together what they can see and, as the second step, they try to guess and predict what can be seen in the part which they cannot see. Ideally, all the kids should be working with the same visual and then, in the feedback stage, the class share and compare their ideas before the teacher reveals the missing part of the picture. The materials can be easily created by cropping visuals but it is even easier with the electronic resources when a part of the photograph (or parts) can be easily covered and uncovered on the screen.

There are two pictures (or more)

Compare these two: students compare two pictures, they talk about the similarities and differences, very much like in the PET exam or like in the FCE exam, if there is a follow-up question, only without the time limits and without any B1 or B2+ language expectations as this activity can be done also with A2 or even A1 students.

Compare the two boardgame: there is a selection of pictures from the same topic ie school, sport, hobbies. They are numbered and displayed on the screen or on the page. Students play the boardgame and whenever it is their turn, they choose two of the pictures and compare them briefly. The pictures can be used many times in different combinations and students speak for about a minute.

Choose two to compare: students are given a set of picturse, for example 4. They are asked to choose any two to compare them and to explain why they have chosen these two pictures. The most interesting part of this activity is the follow up question which can be one or more of the following: Which one is your favourite? Which one is your least favourite? Which one is the happiest / saddest / funniest / most challenging / most unpleasant / strangest? Is there a picture that nobody has chosen to discuss? Why do you think you’ve never chosen this one?

Tell me about this picture: this game requires a set of pictures whose theme and level of complexity can be easily adjusted to the age and level of students. We normally use the wordwall which we play on the big screen. The kids play in teams and they take turns to open one of the boxes. They take a minute to talk about the picture they find there and they get the number of points for that. The teacher keeps track of that and announces the winner in the end. This game can be played with the lower level kids, like this one here, with pre-primary students on the topic of animals (here we play the group vs the teacher), with the level 1 primary school students on the topic of rooms, the level 5 primary school students on the topic of souvenirs (What is it? Who would like this present?) or even with B1 teenagers on the topic of travelling (What’s this place? What can be easy or difficult about travelling to this place?)

Two versions: this one is a bit more complex in terms of preparation as it involves some searching and researching. The idea behind this picture is to compare and contrast two interpretations of the same topic. Our photographs usually focus on the photographs and it would be the teacher’s job to find the other matching (or ‘matching’) item for example a painting, a sketch, a cartoon, a poster, an advertisement, a wordcloud and so on. The students discuss the visuals, compare them and choose the visual which they prefer and which better illustrates the idea.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #25 One sentence grammar practice (From the lazy teacher’s diary)

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Ingredients

  • A set of sentences with the key structure. In our case these were random (as in: not a part of a story or a discourse) sentences with let and make, in the present tense and in the past. I wrote them myself (ten of each), although any set of sentences included in typical gap fill activities that often feature in our coursebooks would do.
  • The sentences were typed up, printed and cut up into strips. In order to manage them better, I printed the make sentences on the white paper and the let sentences on the yellow paper.
  • Students work in pairs or groups of three. One of the students picks up a card, reads the sentence in silence and comes up with a short story to illustrate the sentence. The student should not really use the key verb and as few of the other words from the original sentence as possible.
  • The other student(s) listen and reproduce the orignal sentence.
  • The game continues. In our case, the students played in the teams of three first with the first set of the sentences and then with the other set.

Why we like it

  • Very little preparation.
  • It can be also SS-generated, if one more stage is introduced (every student writes three sentences with ‘make’ and three senteces with ‘let’), afterwards these sentences are dealt among the teams /pairs.
  • It is easy to adapt. It can involve one, two or a selection of the target langauge structures.
  • It is an opportunity to extend the grammar practice and to make it more productive.
  • The students have a chance to practise grammar as well as develop their listening skills and their speaking skills.
  • The kids produce mini-stories which can include both narrative and dialogue. Their main aim is to convey the idea of the grammar structure to make it possible for their peers to reproduce.
  • The mini-stories help to create the context for the grammar and can make it more meaningful and memorable.
  • It is an activity that gives the teacher lots of freedom, it can be stopped at any given point, after a certain number of rounds or minutes.
  • Apart from the target langauge, the students get some practise in key word transformation and paraphrasing, without any specific exam focus.
  • I used it with my B1 teens but I am considering how it can be adapted to the needs of my primary A2 kids, too.

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #24: The sheep! A game

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Instead of an introduction

I have a small problem: my brain does not like dealing with written instructions and, really, any instructions whatsoever. I cannot make myself. What that means for my life is that I use devices instead of reading the manuals, I prefer to watch cooking videos rather than reading any recipes (and, indeed, no matter how exciting the food, if the instructions for cooking are longer than four or five lines, I immediately lose interest). In my teaching life, that means never reading any teachers’ books (if I can help it and most of the time I can). If I find an activity that I like, in a resource pack, for example, and I cannot figure out how to use it only from the game itself, well, I just never use it at all.

Or I make up my own rules. That’s exactly what happened with this game.

It actually makes me giggle. I have had this game for about three years (a lovely present from Chee-Way) and it was only this week that I noticed the name of the game. Apparently, it is called Snap. Oh, well.

This morning I was finally inspired enough to google how to play it and I found it easily enough, only to find out that I had never played it the right way. Oh, well.

Actually, I had some suspicious that what we were playing was inspired by another game, that I once heard about but when I bothered to find out, it turned out this morning that I couldn’t have been more wrong. Oh, well.

The Sheep Game (as we know it)

  • There are 12 different emotions / feelings / adjectives in the set. We started to play with those that the kids knew already and, then, we kept adding one or two with every next game. At this point, they know all of the adjectives and we play with the whole set.
  • There are 4 cards of each adjective but in any real game, we use only two of each. One is displayed on the floor in the middle of the circle. The other one we deal among the teams. Usually each team ends up with four cards.
  • The students keep their cards secret from the other teams.
  • We sit in a circle, students ask the questions to the team sitting on their left or on their right but the questions are always travelling in one direction.
  • The main question is ‘Are you happy / sad / angry?’
  • If the team have this one particular card, they have to answer ‘Yes, I am’ or ‘Yes, we are’ and give away the card.
  • If the team don’t have this particular card, they have to say ‘No, I am not’ or ‘No, we are not’ and then it is their turn to ask the team on their left / right.
  • The game can be played for a certain number of rounds or until one of the teams loses all their cards. Then the winner is announced and that is the team has the biggest number of the initial set left.
  • It is a great game to practise the key vocabulary, in a sentence and although the students play in teams, they can win the game only when they pay attention throughout the entire game, listening to all the teams and keeping track of all the cards (or words) that were mentioned and lost, too.

Variations

  • Blue, please – one of the first games that I normally play with my primary students, in the first weeks of the course, as soon as we feel comfortable with the basic colours or numbers, we play with flashcards that we usually hide inside of the book, to make sure that the cards remain a secret. As soon as the kids progress, we replace the simple ‘please’ with a full question ‘Can I have blue, please?‘ and we play it this way with any set of vocabulary
  • Do you like… – another variation of the game that we play with the beginner primary students, we normally switch into that version when we start the topic of food and drink. If the students / teams have this particular flashcard in their set, they have to answer ‘Yes, I do‘ and they have to give the card away. If not, they answer ‘No, I don’t‘ and they continue playing.
  • What’s the matter with your…– a version that we played with my teens while working on the health / medical vocabulary which turned this game into a mini dialogue with different yes and no answers (yes = I need to have it / them checked, no = nothing I am fine) or Excuse me, where is the check-in gate? while we were working on the travelling / airport vocabulary (yes = it is next to…, no = sorry, I don’t know).
  • Any other set: the vocabulary set + the structure that would be used with this set
  • Whole class vs groups of three? With the younger kids we normally play whole class, in small pairs because it helps them learn the rules of the game much faster and because the game is easy to set up and you need no other materials apart from the set of flashcards normally used in class. With the older students, I use words on small cards and we normally play it with the whole class only in the beginning, later on they play in groups of three.
  • And the winner is… Well, there are at least two options here. For a very long time we played it in such a way that the winner was the team who had the biggest number of cards left at the end. Until my kids suggested that perhaps the winner should be the team who managed to get rid of their cards first and we played it this way, too. On the one hand, it makes the game less competitive and it is not a real shame to be ‘losing’ a card but we have had a situation when a team avoided asking the right question not to help their opponents win…I suppose the game can be played as normal and it can be decided only in the end who the winner is (all the cards lost vs all the cards saved) but we haven’t really tried it in the classroom. Not yet anyway.
  • Leftovers. We normally deal out all the cards available but keeping a few cards away and keeping them secret adds up to the challenge. These leftovers are going to be automatically the incorrect questions and the players will have to figure out first which ones these are and secondly, which ones not to ask anymore.

Happy teaching!

For the love of…the adjective

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Our basic set of adjectives

Once upon a time…

This is how I daydream it: my primary kids go on to take their Starters (this is an old daydream, this year they will be taking Flyers), they are describing the pictures or telling the story. The examiner asks ‘How is this boy?’ and my kids answer ‘He is confused.’ and the examiner cannot believe her/his ears but she/he is, actually, impressed.

‘Confused’ is one of the many adjectives that my primary kids have learnt thanks to the sheep game that we’ve been playing for a few years now. We started with the normal adjectives, happy, sad, angry, sleepy but the kids noticed that I’ve been hiding some cards and they got curious. And because they were curious, they started to ask questions. Since the cards were wonderfully happy and funny, and since, together with some clarification from me, they did illustrated the concept very well (after all, they were created for children), we started using the ‘confused’ card (and with them ‘chatty’, ‘in love’, ‘crazy’).

That, in hindsight, was an excellent idea because this turned out to be a very useful words because I happen to be confused and my kids happen to be confused, too. Not to mention all the characters from all the stories. ‘Confused’ might be from the B1/B2 shelf, but, we found it very very useful, at the age of seven, in something that was the pre-A1 level.

‘OK’, ‘ill’, ‘in love’, ‘creative’

The coursebook and the curriculum

A disclaimer first: my comments in this section are based only on a very un-thorough looking through the coursebooks for pre-schoolers, only a quick glance at the contents page and the units. I acknowledge that fact that I might have missed something and that a proper research might be necessary and, for that reason, I will refrain from quoting any titles here. However, having flipped through five recently published coursebooks for pre-primary learners, I did not find much as regards adjectives, apart from colours (all), some of the weather words (depending on the title) and some random happy, sad and hungry (also depending on the title). With one honourable exception that introduces quite a few emotions as well as some other opposites, either through stories or through CLIL projects. Overall, however – not good at all.

I also had a look at the primary books and here the situation is admittedly better because all of the modern publications tend to align their content with the YLE Cambridge wordlist and that, in turn, means about 50 adjectives on the pre-A1 level, including colours and possessive adjectives.

As it happens, my school is now getting ready for the YLE mock exams and I am putting together a set of materials for our teachers and kids and that made me look at the said wordlist with a great more deal of scrutiny. Starters kids (pre-A1) are supposed to know about 50 adjectives, Movers kids (A1) – additional 50 adjectives and Flyers kids (A2) – 70 more adjectives on top of that. I am aware of the fact that these lists were not created on a whim, quite the contrary – they are a result of a large-scale research and the effort of a huge team of people. But there are all these questions there, too. Why do the pre-A1 kids need to know the adjectives such as ‘double’ or ‘correct’ and ‘right’ (as correct) and ‘its’ (also an adjective) and some other ones, although not adjectives (‘coconut’, ‘pineapple’, ‘flat’ and ‘apartment’ or ‘lime’)? Why would these be more important, useful and appropriate for primary school children than ‘hot’, ‘cold’, ‘easy’, ‘difficult’ or ‘loud’ and ‘quiet’, which are only introduced at the A1 level?

I do not have the answers but I have been introducing them (or some of them) much earlier than that. And effectively so. If you are interested why and how, please continue reading.

‘crazy’

Emotions and feelings

‘Sasha, how do feel today?‘ is one of the questions that we ask in every lesson. Why? Well, I guess, first and foremost it is for socialising. This is the question that we ask when we meet someone, just to make a conversation, at least with adults.

Since our students are children, however, there is a lot more to that. Children are growing, developing their social skills and learning about a variety of emotions available and, even more importantly, learning how to deal with these emotions and learning how to recognise these emotions in others. That is why giving them tools to do that, in their L1 and, naturally, in their L2, is absolutely crucial.

Ideally, all the Sashas in the world would walk into the classroom being happy, totally over the moon, brimming with joy and ready to conquer the world with us in the next 45 minutes. But it is not possible for every Sasha to be happy every day and, as a teacher, I want to know how they really are and during the hello circle I am, literally, all ears because if Sasha is sad or sleepy or hungry, or, sometimes, angry, I would like to know that. Not only to show empathy but also to look at the lesson and what I have prepared for today from the group’s and the individuals’ point of view. Maybe a bunch of sleepy children will not be able to deal very well with the story? Maybe it will be necessary to keep an eye on Sasha and accept that today she might not be able to focus as well as usually because she is feeling a bit under the weather. Maybe it is a good idea to start with this silly game of ours (although I did promise myself to ‘never ever’) because it might distract and cheer up this little human who walks in and announces ‘I am very, very, very angry.’

Having this range of emotions vocabulary is also very handy when it comes to behaviour management, even if in the simplest of terms.

Situation type #1: an unpleasant situation: someone draws on someone else’s paper, someone takes someone else’s toy /book / marker without asking, someone jumps the queue, no casualties, only a lot of unhappiness in the room and one person is on the verge of tears. ‘Look. Sasha is very sad now‘. Naturally, it might not be the case of ‘one size only’, one solution for all occasions but it is a good start.

Situation type #2: a 5 y.o. confrontation: both parties did have a disagreement, both parties are not very happy and, definitely, way too upset to just get over it and get involved in the lesson activities. ‘Sasha, are you angry?’ ‘Yes!’ ‘It’s ok.’ Again, some cases are more complex than that, but in many situations the very fact of calling the spade a spade and showing that it is natural to feel angry (and, by default, giving the human some time out to accept and recover) is the best solution. It applies also to all the negative emtions, as long as no comes to any harm.

To be perfectly honest, sometimes (only sometimes!) it feels like this brief and contained reaction, limited by the fact that extreme language grading is necessary, is the best solution. Anything to avoid a long lecture from the adult on ‘The negative impact and the long-term consequences of….’ that children sometimes receive from their teachers, baby-sitters, nannies, parents, grandparents…

‘ill’

Riddles

This is, by far, one of our favourite games: making riddles. The game is introduced in its simplest from, with a set of flashcards and with the students guessing the secret word which the teacher or one of the children keep close to their chest. That’s just the beginning, however, once the kids are comfortable and familiar with the format, a set of simple adjectives are added, first the colours (based on the visuals in the flashcards) and big / small. Then, depending on the topic, we introduce and play with the relevant adjectives, for example fast / slow / big / small / loud / quiet while talking about transport, big / small / friendly / dangerous while talking about animals, hot and cold while talking about food and big / small / soft / hard / light / heavy while talking about the everyday objects and so on.

The kids can either use the adjectives of their choice and affirmative sentences (It’s big, it is yellow) or they can react to teacher’s or kids’ questions (Is it big or small?).

A variation of this activity is also I spy with my little eye adopted (and limited) to the set of vocabulary that the students are familiar with, played with a set of flashcards or a poster.

Expressing opinion…

…or, rather, justifying your opinion, something that can become a part of pretty much every unit and every set of words. Not only does it create an opportunity to personalise the vocabulary by dividing it into the things we like and the things we don’t like but also to give more detail and to build a small discourse (I like it. It is beautiful) or even first complex sentences (I like it because it is beautiful).

Naturally, that will require a different set of adjectives but beautiful, ugly, easy difficult, interesting and boring to be the concepts that preschool children understand, even though the flashards and visuals will be based on some symbols.

Storytelling

Our storytelling has reached some new amazing levels since we started working extensively on adjectives, both with primary and pre-primary students. You can read more about in an earlier post on the Storytelling Campaign here and here.

‘confused’

In my classroom

In this academic year, I am working with three pre-school groups, level 1, level 2 and level 3 and I am happy to say that even my youngest level 1 students are familiar with the set of 12 different adjectives that you can see in the first photograph plus a few more that we have learnt through songs. Level 2 group have got the basic set, quantifiers ‘very’ and ‘a little’ and a few more adjectives lined up. Level 3 group have got a nice set to describe food, transport and animals (including ‘scary‘) and they have already started working on extanding that range.

The photographs that were chosen to illustrate this post all come from the set that I have created for my pre-school group.

I have decided to use paper plates because they are durable, easy to stock and they have a shape of a circle aka they are a face. In the classroom, we put them in neat rows on the carpet, in the middle of the circle, to support production. My younger students like to pick up those that are relevant and hide behind them, showing how they really feel. This makes this part of the lesson a bit more kinesthetic.

I have drawn all of them myself but before making the decision on how to represent each adjective, I like to look at different emoticons to get inspired and to find something that meets two criteria a) I can draw it and b) my students will be able to associate it with a specific concept.

In some cases, the symbol was pretty easy for students to decode (for example: an owl = clever), in some others, I had to follow up with a brief clarification (for example: lightbulbs = ideas = creative). After the first lesson, I decided to upgrade the ill flashcard by adding a real tissue for the poor sneezing person.

There is another thing that I am considering at the moment. With my preschool students we start with the adjectives that help us describe how we feel and it must have been out of sheer linguistic greed that I decided to add those adjectives that describe personal characteristics rather than emotions such as ‘strong’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘clever’. Although, to be honest, we adults know very well that there are days when we feel particularly beautiful or not and the kids responded well to it. At the moment, I am considering different ways of organising all the adjectives that we already know and building up on that, in each category.

Basically, the best is yet to come.

Where to find the adjectives?

Happy teaching!

Crumbs #23 OR 5 ways of using video in class

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These are not all the activities that you can do with a video, these might not be the best activities for your groups. These are just some approaches that we like. Maybe you will find them useful.

Prediction

Procedure: The teacher introduces the topic of the video and gives the students a set of key words that appear in the video. The students discuss why these words might appear in the video and why they might be important. After a whole class feedback, the class watch the video to check whether they predictions were correct. As a follow-up, the students discuss the most (or the least) surprising / unusual / weird facts they have found out about.

Example: We used this video to accompany a reading on extreme adventures and survival in which making a snow cave helped the people survive. We watched a real tutorial on making a snow cave and the key words we started with were: a candle, the letter T, the stick, a saw, the flat ceiling.

Back to the board

Procedure: The teacher divides the group into pairs, one student in each pair sits facing the TV, the other one sits with their back to the screen. the teacher plays the video, students work in pairs and they retell each other what is happening on the screen. Depending on the video, the students can watch the video with the sound on or with the sound muted. After a while, the students change seats and continue watching. Finally, they talk together and answer some questions related to the video. Usually it is a mix of questions, some of which check comprehension and some which help the students see the big picture or express opinion.

Example: We did this kind of an activity while discussing sports and unusual sports. The students watched the muted video on extreme extreme ironing, in two halves, about 60 seconds each and afterwards answered the following questions: What do you think is the name of this sport? How do you think Phil Shaw came up with the idea? What can be easy and difficult about this sport? Would you like to try? Which was the strangest place in which this sport was done? In the end, we watched it together, with the sound on and we compared ideas.

Pause and talk

Procedure: This is a great activity for the videos that consist of short blocks or include a set of examples of a certain item. The teacher writes the key question on the board, usually only one, and plays the video. The students watch a short clip. The teacher pauses the video and students discuss what they have just seen by answering the question. The biggest advantage of this approach is that the teacher is in charge as regards the duration, the activity can be stopped after only three items or the video can be played until the very end. As a follow-up, the students choose their favourite / their least favourite item and justify their choices. As in all of the other activities, there is also an option of the students changing partners and sharing their ideas with someone else in the group.

Example: While discussing food, we watched the video about school lunches around the world, we watched it bit by bit (after each item) and the students had to answer the following question ‘Would you like to try it? Why?’. Actually, this particular lesson included the video because we followed up with a video on American kids trying Russian food and we paused right after the food was introduced and we try to predict if the kids are going to like it or not.

Read my lips

Procedure: It is used with the video with a very clear narrative that can be interpreted without the audio version as the students watch it muted. The teacher can start with the title of the film and ask the students to predict what they think it is about. Afterwards, the students watch the film and try to figure out what is happening, who the characters are, how they are feeling. The teacher can ask them to take notes while they are watching. Afterwards, students compare their notes in pairs or in groups of three. The teacher can also ask them about the main events or to try to connect the clip to the title of the film. Afterwards, the students watch the video again and as a group discuss their guesses. The teacher clarifies the main points, without going into too many details. The final activity is predicting what happens next.

Example: One of my top ten for this kind of an approach is a video like this excerpt from Big Fish, or actually a set of clips from the same film, for example this one here or this one here. In this one case, we did not really talk about the title of the film. After watching the film, the students were discussing what they saw but I also asked them to think about the following questions: Who was the big man? Why did he look scruffy? Why did the boy throw a stone at him? Why did the boy reach out a hand and closed the eyes? Why did they shake hands in the end?

After we finished watching and discussing, we also looked at the quote from the clip ‘You are a big man. You should be in a big city.’ and we talked about what it might mean and whether it is true.

Categorise

Procedure: The students are given a list of all the items that are shown in the video ie some extreme sports, some unusual holiday destinations, exotic animals etc. The students watch the video and they take notes about all the items, ie putting (+) and (-) next to those that they like or grading them from 1 – 5, depending on how interesting they are. After watching the video, they make their own list, organising all the items from the most to the least interesting one or dividing them into categories (like – don’t like, useful – not useful, interesting – boring) and so on. They work in pairs or small teams and compare and explain their decisions.

Example: This video was used in a lesson on technology as it presents the list of 10 Coolest Gadges. Some of the gadgets in the video have unusual names so we started with looking at these, trying to figure out what these might be. We actually divided the video into two and we discussed the first five gadgets and then, after the second half, the other five and then all ten, to round up. The students were choosing the most interesting gadgets that they might want to buy and those that they would not really even consider. In the end, we choose the most and the least popular gadget as a group.

None of the videos I use as examples were graded or created with the EFL /ESL learners so they can be considered authentic materials. I found all of them on youtube while looking for videos that would match the topic we were working on. I did not introduce any vocabulary, focusing rather on listening (or watching) for gist and general understanding, rather than on any specific details. Unless, of course, the students had any questions.

If you want to find out more about using authentic materials, have a look at some of the many resources online such as these post here: how to choose and adapt them, here from the Britsh Council, and here.

I have also found out a few posts on using video in class. If you are interested, you can find them here and here and this one here, although it has a wider scope and does not really focus on videos in the EFL/ESL classroom.

Happy teaching!

EFL metaphors #2: Teachers about their first lessons with VYL

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1970 Brazil

This is definitely not the first post here on working with pre-schoolers and certainly not the first one written for the preschool teachers. If you are interested, you can find all of them here, and if you are looking for something written specifically for the novice preschool teachers, you can start reading about behaviour management, singing in the classroom, rewards charts, homework for pre-schoolers and lesson planning.

There is also this one here, The first VYL lesson survival kit, which for a very long time already has been one of the most popular and most frequently accessed pieces I have committed and published on this blog. A coincidence? I don’t think so.

I would like to think that the world is changing for the better and that the novice VYL teachers around the world are getting the help and support they need, either from their managers, from the methodology and resource books, or from the fellow teachers on the social media and blogs. But, even if they do, entering the room with a bunch of little children, whom you don’t know (yet), who do not speak English (yet) and who may not have any idea as regards why we have gathered here (yet!!!), well, this is not you typical ‘dream come true‘. And yes, with time, as you get more experience, you learn better how to prepare, what to expect and how to be, but there is no doubt that starting the course with all the other age groups is easier. No doubt whatsoever.

It is no coincidence, either, that my MA dissertation at the University of Leicester was devoted to teacher education for the first-year pre-primary teachers of English and that I decided to give it the following title ‘Left to their own devices?‘…

The time will come when I finally publish the results of my research in a real article (keep your fingers crossed!). Today, in the series of the EFL Metaphors, I would like to share a tiny little bit of it.

1931, Argentina

It started with…

Well, it started with an article which I talked about in the first entry in the series. The basis for my dissertation was a survey filled in by about fifty of my colleagues who had a chance to teach EFL pre-schoolers in Russia. It was a joy and a relief to find out that most of them evaluated their experience as ‘overall positive’, although, as one of them said ‘Literally, nothing was easy and everything was new’.

This inspired me to ask the participants of the study to try to describe their first year of teaching in one line (although, to be fair, I did not quite specify at the time that I wanted to get a metaphor). Here are some of them, accompanied by clipart library images selected by me.

1950 Switzerland

What was your first year in the VYL world like?

‘A ring of roses, a pocket full of posies, a-tishoo, a-tishoo. We all fall down (in a good way!)’ (Keely)

‘Positively challenging in terms of experience gained and stress dealt with.’ (Rory)

‘Pretty tough. I had to learn everything quickly and often had no time to properly reflect on my lessons. But the experience I got is valuable and helped me a lot afterwards.’ (Victoria)

‘It was like a roller-coaster. Sometimes you are enthusiatic and excited, sometimes frustrated and stressed’ (teacher 3)

‘Challenging, full of errors on my side, but at the same time joyful and full of great memories.’ (Vita)

‘Challenging but absolutely rewarding’ (Irina)

‘It was a beautiful mess’ (Cristina)

Just a few words

Apart from the fact that now, as ‘a researcher’ I am collecting these gems, I also like to use them in my teacher training sessions and workshops. They help to encourage participants to reflect on why the first lessons with the little people might be more challenging than those with any other group . They are also a great starting point in discussions between the less and the more experience VYL teachers or in discussions between the VYL teachers and the non-VYL teachers.

My dream would be to use metaphors at the beginning and at the end of a training process, in one specific area of teaching, to compare how we change our beliefs and attitudes. It is not my original idea, I got it from the same article that inspired the whole series. Maybe next time we are running the IH VYL course…

Instead of a coda

When I started to write this post, I realised that I do not have a metaphor for these first days, weeks and months as a VYL teacher. Nobody asked me then and, somehow, I forgot to ask myself when I was carrying out the research. Does it even matter what it felt like, this something that took place fifteen years ago? Probably not, but for the sake of this post and for fun, I made a promise that I would have figured it out, while writing. I did. Here we go:

‘It’s like a whitewater rafting, while you are trying hard to keep on smiling.‘

Happy Teaching!

P.S. Big, big thanks to all the teachers who agreed to take part in my MA survey! Those that I could quote in this post and all the others!

P.P.S. Please remember, even if your first lesson is not what you would like it to be, the second will be much better!

P.P.P.S. Don’t forget to check out the wonderful directory of all the useful things in the VYL world created by Sandy Millin. You can find it here.

1950s, Brazil

A multilingual brain. One user experience story

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Salvatore. That was the name of one of the characters in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. The only character I still rememeber, after all these years since I first read this book (somewhere in high school). Salvatore was an estranged one, an eccentric one, suffering from some illness but that is not what made him unforgettable. Salvatore spoke multiple languages but he did it in the most unusual way because, for some reason, probably related to his illness, he spoke them all at once, mixing them in a discourse or switching even mid-sentence.

Back then, as a kid, I found it frightening that this poor man was excluded and that, really, he was never fully to be understood by his brethren. Unless someone spoke exactly the same combination of languages and could navigate around this mumble-jumble. Which, of course, very few did. Today, when I watch the film or when I simply find myself switching between languages, I am laughing. I am on my way to becoming a Salvatore.

Facts

My everyday (and my very un-glamorous) life takes place in four languages. If I had been a Netflix film, my list of audio and subtitles would be a list of (in the alphabetical order): English, Polish, Portuguese and Russian. This is how I communicate, how I read and write. These are my conversations, my notes, my books, films, TV programmes, TV series and music.

How to get there? By accident.

First and foremost, I was not brought up as a bilingual or a multinlingual child. I did not grow up in a minority community or in a migrant family. These four languages just happened and these four stayed. Just like that.

I am Polish and until I was about 12, I did not know any foreign languages. Polish is, by all accounts, my mother tongue, the language of my parents, my brother, my family and my Polish friends.

When I turned 12, like all my peers, I started to learn a foreign language at school and that for me was Russian. I loved it because it was like the door to another world, similar but different to my mother tongue and unusual with its own magical alphabet. It lasted four years and then it stopped, abruptly because my high school did not even have Russian on offer. I stopped and, naturally, I forgot.

Or, to be more precise, I paused and I hid it somewhere, in the Room of Requirement of my brain, for good twenty years, and when I arrived in Moscow to teach and to live, this is where I retrieved it from. Slowly. Today I do communicate, effectively, and, with time, I even managed to improve my writing and reading, which, at first, due to the lack of practice, were atrocious. I use Russian at work and not at work and I would love to be able to know what my real level is. Eventually, I will make myself sit some exam, just to find out or to prove that I rock it. At the moment, I suppose I can pat myself on the shoulder for reading fiction and non-fiction (albeit it takes me a while to go through a book) and to have successfully dealt with a variety of linguistic challenges of the higher level such as: filling in random forms and questionnaires (tick), listening to serious and specific lectures (tick), presenting a workshop (tick), producing a long piece of writing for a competition (tick), having a conversation with an angry nurse and making her smile (tick), writing a poem (tick)…

English entered the stage when I was relatively old already, but, if the theory of the Critical Period Hypothesis is true, I must have started learning it before the puberty hit because my pronunciation does not bear any Polish traces. Not that I ever made an effort to obtain the perfect RP (at the time, long long time ago that was not even an issue, that you had to or that you didn’t need to). When I first went to the UK at the age of 25, I could already speak it well enough (CAE in my pocket) but, still, the multitude of accents and the richness did knock me off my feet upon arrival. I recovered. Then I actually did live and work in London, got my exams and got my degrees. And, since I am a teacher and a trainer, English is work but it is a lot more than that, too.

And there is Portuguese, too, the Brazilian Portuguese, straight from Sao Paulo. I bumped into it in London first and, after a lot of exposure, I started to pick my way through it. Literally. As a result, my Portuguese is a wonderful example of a linguistic mess. There was a time when it was Upper-Intermediate or even Advanced, in some areas at least, because I used it a lot. I did not have a choice. Some of my friends or their parents or families did not speak English so we did communicate in Portuguese. I never had a proper coursebook because I quickly got out of the beginner range and I’ve never found a book for the more advanced students. Out of some kind of despair, I started to read and watch what I could get hold of, the regular TV programmes, stand-up, journals, newspapers, poetry, fiction…It was not easy but, again, I had no choice. I used to have three teachers, my friends, here in Moscow, who helped me iron out some creases, work on accuracy and make sure that I stay afloat, as regards communication. Today, I have an accent from Sao Paulo (apparently), I know some colloquial phrases from the higher shelves, I am relatively fluent but, at the same time, I can slip (and fall on my face) on some banana skin of the A2 level grammar.

L1 + L2 + L3 + L4

It is a real temptation to try to label all these languages, to order them and to rank them. Alas, that does not seem to be feasible. Because, for example, there is no doubt – I was brought up in Polish and these are my factory settings, but does it still deserve to be my number 1 if the communication that I carry out in Polish takes up about 10% of my daily interaction (on a good day). I have no idea how to go about that.

I know that I have a dream for each of the languages: to improve my Russian and to make it top-notch so that I don’t struggle with declination and with the register…to have more opportunities to speak Portuguese on daily basis…to get to read and write more in Polish because I sometimes wake up with a thought that I am losing it…And to make time to write everything that I would love to write in English. And to have more time to read in all of these languages.

One of my hobbies, probably somehow related to the fact that I am a teacher and a researcher (small-scale) is stepping out of the picture and looking at how the adult brain deals with this combination, the joys and the hiccups of the everyday. Here are some of them.

The adventures of a brain

  • I use all four languages every day.
  • Most of the time, it means dealing with two of them at a time. The office and the school is English and Russian. The home time is Russian and English or Polish and English. Or any other combination. It seems that the way we are connected to the world nowadays really does promote the multilingual life or, at least, makes it easier. Not only have I got the access to the media in all these languages but, also, since communicating via different messengers is a part of the everyday life, it is perfectly normal to be typing up in Portuguese in Telegram while watching a game in Russian on TV. Or going through the lesson plans in English while in the middle of the conversation in Polish with the family…Using one of the languages does not exclude the use of the other one, not completely.
  • Most of the time, the brain doesn’t mind and it does get better at managing it, it adjusts. In the past, it used to be more difficult to manage all four and to switch from one to the other. An intermission of a kind was necessary, a minute of silence after I stopped speaking one and before I started speaking the other. For the neurons to pause, to reorganise and to re-start. Luckily, practice makes perfect and it is much easier. Especially when I am jumping in-between English and Russian or between English and Polish or Polish and Russian because these shifts are more frequent.
  • The most interesting case of managing all four, all at once, was during a volleyball game between Poland and Brazil, held in Poland, watched on one of the Russian TV channels and with my English-speaking friends. There were times when I was hit by three different langauges at a time and the combination changed from minute to minute. It was a ride, but I did manage.
  • In the past, when I used to be really tired and not having slept enough, the languages would disappear. They would switch off, gradually, starting from the most ‘distant’ one, as if the brain wanted to shut down to save the energy and to focus on the most familiar one. For example, the listening skills in Portuguese would still be there but the brain would be too tired to produce, in Portuguese.
  • Today, in such situations, the brain is only sending signals asking for silence. There are days when I simply cannot bear listening to music with lyrics, in any language. It is too annoying and this is when Chopin or Stravinsky come to the rescue. Or Miles Davis.
  • I love the fact that whenever possible, I can go back and forth between the languages. I can do my small-scale Salvatore. Sometimes, I have to because I might not know a word in Russian and then I switch back to English to signal to my speaker that I need assistance. Sometimes, I resort to that simply because the word does not have its counterpart in the other langauge or that the original version is simply better…If my speakers know both languages, then I do not bother, simply.
  • I have sneakily used languages to guarantee the privacy of a conversation, going for the one that is least familiar to the other people.
  • I have used Portuguese in class, too, with my teens group. They don’t speak it but it works when I need to remind them that from 18:15 until 19:45 we are supposed to communicate in English, because that is the language that we share.
  • There are topics typical for a language. For a very long time I could talk about religion and volleyball only in Polish or in English. It took some time to get the brain used to do it in Russian, for example. I would choose Russian or English to talk about football. The methodology of ESL / EFL does not exist in any other language but English. The same goes for grammar and language awareness. The metalanguage in Russian and in Polish are beyond reach, at this point.
  • At the same time, my cooking vocabulary is top notch in all four languages. I follow different cookery channels and I cook food from different countries but I never bother to translate. My cookery notebook reflects my brain and each recipe always stays in the original version, whatever that might be.
  • I am greedy for the beautiful language. I sometimes echo some random phrases trying to remember them and, ideally, I would just pause the world to give myself a moment to write them down, at the cinema, at the doctor’s, in a shop, in a conversation with friends…I have had people look at me in a funny way, when, in the middle of a discourse, I chip in with my ‘oh, what a beautiful phrase!’
  • Before an important conversation, especially in Russian, I like to think about what I am going to say and how. I sometimes even rehearse it or write down the key verbs. Basically, I am worried that people will not take me seriously because of the mistakes I make or because I am not as fluent as a native speaker would be. That they might dismiss and disregard the message focusing more on how (or ‘how inexpertly’) I am trying to get it across. Not that it stops me from communicating altogether but I sometimes feel like I am going into a battle.
  • That is also the reason why I like to set the context and to activate the schemata in the real life situations, in the very same way I would do in my own classes. ‘I don’t speak very well but I need to change this reservation. Please bear with me.’ Or ‘I got really upset with this situation.’ Or ‘I am going to ask you a lot of questions.’
  • I do use swear words, in all four languages, instinctively now going for the one that the world around me is least likely to understand and to be offended by. At the same time, when I am really, really, really angry, to the core, I stick to my mother tongue.
  • My diaries are in English. So is this blog.
  • Over the years, I learnt other languages, too. German – because I had to, at university. I dealt with it as with any other subject: learnt, passed the exam, forgot. I had French at school for four years and then I returned to it on at least two occassions. It was fun, it was beautiful but it did not stick. I tried to teach myself Swedish because it was odd and random and funny. It did not last, there was no real exposure and no real need. Swedish, however, helped me realise that there is one more element that I personally need to get involved with a language and it is the emotional connection. It works on two levels. First of all, each of the languages I speak is the language that I actually use, be it for family, personal or professional reasons. I know that there are people living abroad and not speaking the language but I cannot put myself in such a situation. I like to be a part of the place, linguistically, too. Second of all, with all four languages that I do have there was a time when I really did fall in love with them, with their grammar, texture, melody, weirdness. In English it was the moment when I got hold of the Oscar Wilde play in the original version, I do remember the awe I was in. In Portuguese, it was the first song I did listen to consciously, the repeated verb ‘sorrir’ (smile) and how I learned the word for star (‘estrela’) from a four-year-old boy. In Russian, I remember the joy mixed with aprehension when I went (slowly, very slowly) through my first novel and my favourite novel, Master and Margarita. Perhaps that is exactly what happens with your mother tongue that you need to grow up to love it consciously. For me, it was the second reading of our national epic, Pan Tadeusz and, then, a short while later, falling into the stories written and drawn by Bruno Schultz.
  • Spanish is an interesting case. I lived in Navarra for less than a year, I did learn the language but when I did, it was already after I had done Portuguese. For that reason, I could never fall in love with it and, no matter how hard I tried, instead of ‘yo‘ I always produced ‘eu‘ (‘I‘ in Spanish and Portuguese respectively) and then I gave up and used only the verb form (which is almost always the same in both languages). Until recently, I thought that Spanish for me was the lost child (‘Are you sure it even happened?’), the one that I gave up on and almost blocked out. I thought. But, somehow, I discovered that now I am still fine watching Almodovar without subtitles, I love Javier Bardem for a reason (and Penelope and Antonio, who, by the way should only speak Spanish in films) and when the Spanish songs come up in my player (and there are surprisingly many of them there), I sing along.
  • I try to read books in the original version. I love having this privilege. Translated from the original, they get on my nerves, too, especially when the translation is really bad and I am reading in one langauge but I can hear the original. The good translations are an adventure. And I love reading my favourite books in all the langauges available.
  • I have had debates, discussions and fights in all four languages here. I have cried in all four languages on the list, happy tears, angry tears and sad, too. I have been heard and I have said ‘I love you‘, ‘eu te amo‘, ‘я тебя люблю‘ and ‘kocham cię‘.
  • I’d rather not dream at all but I have had dreams in English, in Polish and in, to quote my brother, from a long time ago, ‘the ones that I don’t understand’

Instead of a coda…

…I thought I could do a bit of a Salvatore here.

A lingua portuguesa e para mim são as pessoas, os amigos proprios e a gente da cidade grande com que eu mim apaixhonei mesmo ao primerio olhar e ao primeiro andar. Todos eles eram meus professores queridos e até este dia eu lembro historias como eu aprendi certaz palavras ou de quem ouvi certas musicas.

Num livro de Ray Bradbury tem a historia de um general. Ele é muito velho, so fica na cama, mas, quando pode, escondido, ele liga para um amigo no Mexico City, pede para ele abrir a janela e fica ai, num orelhão, ouvido de todos os sons da cidade amada, no outro lado de oceano. Sempre imaginei que este general sou eu, no futuro, so que a cidade minha é differente.

Eu fico com saudade mas tambem sei que ‘Ela vai voltar’.

Есть дни такие, когда я вообще супергерой и иду вперёд, и не могу остановиться, говорю и пишу, всемогущая. Но есть и тоже такие, когда ели-ели, когда не попадаю в суффиксы и когда люди переспрашивают, а то непонятно что говорю. Очень хочу говорить красиво, но тоже знаю хорошо, что никуда не спрячу ни этого произношения (после двух слов угадывают что я полячка. Обидно даже!) и этой странной структуры фразы, в которую иногда попадаю. Как говорится – я знаю, что я катастрофа, но я стараюсь. И какое это счастье что можно получать удовольствие просто говоря. Это для меня русский язык (и еще Москва, Мельников, Булгаков, футболь, и всё мое образовательные дети. И зяблики).

I jeszcze mój polski język, taki piękny, taki dziwny. Ale mój. Kiedyś pięknie pisałam też po polsku. Tęsknię za moimi książkami, tymi wszystkimi które są daleko i za klawiaturą, na której byłyby wszystkie polskie znaczki. Na pociechę mam tutaj polskie ksiażki audio i raz do roku wielkie święto, festiwal polskich filmów, kiedy mogę się podzielić Polską z bliskimi mi ludźmi.

Niech będzie wiersz, taki z ‘dawno, dawno temu’, kiedy mialam lat naście. Edward Stachura

Ruszaj się, Bruno, idziemy na piwo;
Niechybnie brakuje tam nas!
Od stania w miejscu niejeden już zginął,
Niejeden zginął już kwiat!

P.S. If there is anyone out there who would like to share their experience with multilingual lives, please use the comments box. I would love to hear from you!

Teaching teens. EFL metaphors #1

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Vintage poster – Air France, São Paulo, Brasil – Galerie 1 2 3 (1976)

Metaphors in EFL? What? Why? How?

Using metaphors in teacher training is not a new concept. I found out about it thanks to Thomas S.C. Farrell while doing the research for my MA dissertation two years ago. In his ‘Novice Language Teachers: Insights And Perspectives For the First Year’ published in 2008, he included a great article by Steva Mann (all the details below) devoted to teachers ‘making sense’ of the experiences of their first year in the classroom specifically through metaphors.

I do recommend reading the whole article, of course, but just to give you a taste and to show you why it has been kind of a breakthrough for me, here are a few quotes.

Mann writes ‘Metaphors play an instrumental role in using a familiar image to explore more complex concepts and meanings’ (2008: 11) and they can be ‘consciously employed by individuals for reflective purposes’ (2008:12). A bit further on he also highlights the fact that ‘metaphorical exploration may be particularly useful for first year teachers in attempting to come to terms with the complex nature of teacher knowledge and its relationship with experience’ (2008:12). I found this quote especially interesting although I think it is true about any teacher that becomes a novice in a field (ie an experienced teacher taking the first steps in the area of exam preparation, EAP or early years) or, even more broadly, any teacher learning new things and trying to apply them in practice.

Anyway, I got inspired. First of all, I quickly added the metaphor question to my MA survey and I started to experiment with using the metaphor in my everyday teaching and teacher training, for example a few weeks ago, while running the session on teenagers as part of the IH CYLT course at our school. Here is now we did it.

Teaching teenagers in metaphors

We started with a game of hangman in which the group had to guess one of my own metaphors for what teaching teenagers is like and that is: Growing Cactuses, mainly because it is not as straightforward, pretty and easy as growing violets, tulips or even roses, but it is equally rewarding and fun. If you know how to do it, of course. If you are interested about it or if you are just starting to teach teens, you can read more about it here.

If you are here, it must be either because you already work with teenagers and you already have your own view of the teenage classroom. Or you might be a novice teenagers teacher who is about to enter this classroom and you are preparing, mostly because you have heard ‘things’.

One way or another, you are ready for the exercise that I prepared for the activity that we did with my trainees later in the session. Since all of these metaphors and visuals are open to interpretation (just look at the two different images I have found for ‘writing a novel’) and prone to be influenced by the personal experiences (which is the best thing about the metaphors, admittedly), instead of me just analysing all the metaphors in detail and telling you what to think, first I would like you to read what my trainees have created and answer these questions:

  • Why do you think the teachers expressed their ideas in such a way? What kind of classroom experiences have led to that?
  • Were your experiences the same? Do you agree?

Here are the metaphors, in no particular order. I have decided to combine the words with the images and these come either from my trainees themselves or from the obliging clipart…

Teaching teenagers is…

…writing a novel

…per aspera ad astra aka ‘Through hardships to the stars’

…touching a melting ice-cream

…playing the lead role in every play

…riding a roller-coaster

…breaking stereotypes

…about mood swings

…keeping a heart on your sleeve

…a role-play

…about the strength of materials

…working with/through moods, feelings, hormones

Just a few words…

Just as the visuals do it, the metaphor invites the audience, students, trainees or readers, to personalise the reality and to share opinions and views and, by doing so, it offers a unique opportunity to look at an item in a multitude of ways. The horizon widens straight away.

Some of the interpretations might feel like that your own thoughts expressed by someone else, something that might have been on your mind, although they were never properly verbalised. Sometimes, some of them might be contradictory to all of your beliefs, they are still valuable because they might help you understand the basis for the beliefs we hold.

It is funny that even the same set of metaphors that we put together and mine interpretation of them change, from day to day. During the session, I got really drawn to ‘writing the novel’ and ‘touching the melting ice-cream’, because these two were the most unexpected ones although they did strike a chord with what I think about working with teens. Right now, while I am typing up these words, about three weeks later, I am most drawn to ‘breaking stereotypes’ and to ‘strength of material’, mostly because of the image that popped up, which reminded me that strength is at the same time about being fragile and that is what you find out while teaching teens, that what you see is not always what really and that is a good thing to be taking with you into the classroom. As is remembering that the most important thing is to remember that we teach not some imaginary age group but a very specific Sasha, Kasia, Pedro, Pablo, Idoia, Carolina, Rita and Luis, who might or might not match the list of dos, don’ts, ares and aren’ts, likes and don’t likes of ‘a typical teenage group’.

Instead of a coda

Big thanks to all my trainees: Anna, Nico, Hanif, Olga, Oxana, Padraig, Olga, Padraig, Polina as well as Daniel and Joe, for all the amazing ideas in this session and the permission to use them here.

If you want to read more about teaching ‘the almost adults’, here you can find some bits of theory and of the activities that worked well with my groups.

And if you liked this post and you would like to add your own metaphor to the list, please comment in the box below. We will all have some more food for thought!

The original ‘growing cactuses’ metaphor

This is how this post becomes the first one in a mini-series devoted to metaphors in the classroom. The next one, almost ready, will be devoted to teachers taking their first steps in the VYL world. Coming soon!

P.S. Vintage posters from around the world will be accompanying this series, too because that is my most recent love and a great metaphor for a metaphor…

Happy teaching!

Bibliography

T.S.C. Farrell (ed), 2008, Novice Language Teachers: Insights And Perpectives For the First Year, Equinox Publishing: London.

S. Mann (2008), Teacher’s use of metaphor in making sense of the first year of teaching, In: Farrell (2008), pp. 11 – 28.

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