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.
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 ‘Ilove 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!
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 ithere.
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.
I am happy to inform you that, inspired by your article, I have decided to follow your example and to start experimenting in the area of scaffolding…
Oh, how I wish I could write a letter of that kind. Since I first read the article by Bruner, Woods and Ross on the original research and how the term ‘scaffolding’ started to mean what it does to us, teachers and educators, it has become a kind of a life mission to spread the word about it among my teachers and trainees, conference attendees and, of course, the readers of my blog. This is also the area that I choose to invesitage in my first classroom research project as part of my MA programme.
Of course, the most important things keep happening in the classroom, in the everyday when you observe and adapt your instructions, gestures, voice and actions to better suit the young or very young learners as regards demonstration, marking critical features, reduction in degrees of freedom, recruitment, direction maintenance and frustration control (the six orignal features outlined in the article).
This time, the starting point was the lazy teacher…
I started to plan the final lesson with my three pre-school groups that also happened to be our Christmas lesson. And it was out of this tiredness and the madness of the end of the year that made me wake up one day and decide: ‘I am going to repeat the lesson!’
Three lessons in a row, three different levels, three different age groups and the same lesson plan. Well, to a point, of course. We would all study the same vocabulary set and sing the same songs, but the activities would vary, depending on what the children are capable of.
Topic, vocabulary and structure
There were eight words in the set (Santa, a reindeer, a stocking, a Christmas tree, a present, a start, a snowflake, a snowman) and I wanted to combine them with the question that we all had been practising before: ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s a…’.
The level 1 kids (and the youngest group) have got as far recognising the words and pointing at the right flashcards and participating in the ‘What’s missing?’ game although most of the time they would guess the missing word in Russian and they actively produced only some of them in English, such as ‘a star’, ‘a snowman’ and Santa. We also watched the ‘Guess the word video‘ and it was a chance for us to drill the vocabulary in a different way. We also introduced ‘What do you want for Christmas‘ and it was a nice opportunity for us to revise toys which we covered in the previous unit. But only that. In the end of the lesson we also had time for storytelling and we used Rod Campbell ‘My presents’, again as a way of revising the key vocabulary.
With the level 2 kids, we did pretty much the same but the kids were able to remember and to reproduce all eight words really quickly. We played the same game (What’s missing) but they were all actively involved and producing. We watched the video and guessed the words, pretty much just the way the younger group did, although it was interesting that I did not need to encourage them to repeat the words and, as soon as the full picture and the correct answer was revealed, the kids said the word without any cues from me. It seems that due to their age and to the fact that they have been in class for longer, they are much better used to that kind of reaction to the content. We seem to have developed that habit already.
As for the song, we even managed to personalise the song and talk about whether each of the presents featuring in the song are a good idea (or not? ‘Not’, according to some students:-) and we sang a verse for each of the kids:
‘What do you want for Christmas, Christmas, Christmas? What do you want for Christmas? Santa is on his way…’
‘I want a…’
I did not use the storybook with the older children. I had planned it only for the little ones. For the older ones, we had a back-up of an episode of Christmas Peppa, but, in the end, there was no time for that.
The oldest group, level 3 kids, need only a quick revision of all the words and then we could play a variety of games. We did not even play ‘What’s missing?’ as they are too ‘adult’ and this particular game is not challeging for them anymore. Instead, we played a team game, ‘Tell me about it’, in which the players choose a box, open it and say something about the picture hidden in the box. And they collect the points.
We did use the video mentioned above but in this lesson it was not just a simple guessing game, we also managed to talk about whether each round is going to be easy or difficult and then to comment on what it really was. And, of course, the song was also personalised and followed-up by a proper chat. There was also another song, ‘Who took the cookie from the cookie jar?‘, in its life acquatic version (nothing to do with Christmas, but the kids were curious and this is the game we are playing right now). This group are already quite good at personalising songs (aka ‘The original version is good but let’s see what we can do with it and how can we make it better?’) so it was the kids to suggest that we start singing it when we pick up our surprise at the end of the lesson from the reception. If I rememeber correctly, the final version of it (as shaped up by the kids) went along the lines of: ‘Who took the surprise from the surprise jar?‘
I was teaching, having fun and keeping my eyes and ears open and trying to remember what was happening. It was already very interesting but I was really waiting for the most important part, the cherry on the cake.
The cherry on the cake
Surprisingly enough, this time round, it did take a long while to choose the craft activity but finally I settled on the snowman. I found something that I liked among the 25 Easy Snowman Crafts For Kids on countryliving.com. I planned the lesson, spent an hour cutting out the circles, the noses, the hats, the arms and the Christmas trees and orgnising the room. And then we took off.
It so does happen that although my children are divided into groups by the level and by the age, there are exceptions and special cases in all three groups.
The actitivity, the materials, the staging and the instructions were exactly the same in all three groups but the outcomes (visible in the photographs below) and the scaffolding necessary (not visible in the photographs:-) heavily depended on the age of the students.
The youngest students produced these beauties:
This was interesting, especially because this lesson came first and after a very short moment, I realised that, while preparing and planning, I gauged myself for a slightly older audience and I had to adapt on the go, especially for the almost 3 y.o. girl for whom it was the trial lesson and the first 45 minutes in our classroom.
It turned out pretty quickly that it is quite a challenge to glue the ribbon, to turn the circle over and to tie it and that the orange ‘carrot’ nose is actually very small. But we managed, with the pace really, really slow and the teacher keeping an eye and demonstrating everything twice. Plus, yes, the teacher had no other choice but to help with the ribbon.
The age of the students shows most obviously in the way that all the small parts were glued and how the eyes, the smile and the buttons were drawn, with a different level of accuracy and precision. Almost where they should be:-)
And it was because it took longer to produce the snowman that I decided to skip the little sticky arms. They were too thin, too fiddly and too risky. And the snowmen still look pretty without them.
The snowman created by the 5 y.o. hands looks like that
First of all, the five-year-old snowmen did not take as much time to produce and the little fingers were much more agile and ready. As a result, the teacher did not need to help with the ribbons, the noses were handles with much more efficiency and we did have time to add the arms.
It is interesting to see that at this age, the students did observe the teacher (the mentor / the expert) to do exactly what she was doing but they were observing to figure out what had to be done and to interpret it in their own way. Some snowmen were happy but not all. Some had the scarf tied on the neck aka above the arms and the others had it more where their snowman-y waist would be. Some had the buttons and some did not. Some snowman mouths were a string of dots, some were drawn with a line. Some of the Christmas trees were glued on the snowman’s chest (like in the teacher’s model) but then again, some were holding them in their hands (although this obviously involves even a higher level of precision).
The 6 y.o. snowmen look like that:
The older snowmen are even ‘neater’ (in inverted commas here because I adore all of these snowmen, even the ones that look as if they were created by Pablo Picasso) and the evidence of precision and accuracy as well as even a more detailed and a more personalised version, which were the students’ own additions as they were not modelled by the teacher such as the eyebrows, the hat decorations (not featured in the photos) or a bigger number of buttons.
And the oldest of them all, the almost 7 y.o.
This snowman was made by our oldest student, a girl who is actually in school but who is finishing the level with us. As regards the level of English, the development of the literacy skills, she is like the other students in the group, but her motor skills are more developed and for that reason she usually is the fast-finisher. That is not an issue and while she is waiting for the group to finish, she usually continues working on her craft or handout, adding details and decorations.
This time round, she decided that her snowman is going to be a snowgirl, with her and a bow, which was her own original idea.
Reflections of a small scale Jerome Bruner…
This was an absolutely fascinating experience and I would really recommend it to teachers who work with different levels within the same age group, especially within primary and pre-primary where scaffolding seems to be one of the most important factors deciding about the task completion and success.
It can be a great source of information, about the students’ skills and abilities…
…as well as an opportunity to trial something new, be it a song, a video, a game or a craft activity and to learn more about this type of a task.
It is a chance for the teacher to practise and to develp their scaffolding brain…
…and a great opportunity for a freer practice in the area of differentiated learning, not only within the group of learners (something that happens in every class) but on the level of different age groups and levels
Like in the original experiment, the design or the choice of the task and the material is crucial but the holiday lessons, not really closely connected to the coursebook curriculum, seem to be a perfect way out.
What else? Not much? Some curiosity on the part of the teacher, some willingness to experiment and some flexibility in order to be able to adapt on the go. Plus, the eyes wide open to notice all the little changes and proceedings.
These two, in the photo below, are my own interpretation of the original craft and a more complex version of it, here in the form of a card, made by an adult (myself). Perhaps this is what I am going to make with my oldest primary group in our Christmas lesson. If we do, I will let you know how it goes. That would be, indeed, a nice follow-up and an extension of our experiments. We’ll see. In the meantime:
The background: a group of 7-8-9-year-olds, who have been learning English for a number of years (some of them even for 5+ years), in the EFL context, currently in the A2 level and supposed to deal with the grammar structures that are quite advanced for their age and the current level of cognitive development. Plus an experienced teacher, ready for a challenge.
The challenge: practice activities that do focus on the target language but in the context appropriate for YL (sadly, quite a few of those that we have in our coursebook are just junior or even adult practice activities with kiddies characters’ names, we use them but there is very little joy, our last resort).
How to use this post: read the description of the types of activities and then look at the handoutswe did use in class, with my A2 kids while in the unit on the zero conditional.
Type #1: Something is wrong here
This is usually the first practice activity with a new structure as this type of an exercise does not require any real knowledge of the grammar structure. Its main aim is the extended exposure to the structure that is our target language. The students are to read the sentences and find the problems and sort them out. These are usually the logical inconsistencies and they can be corrected in many different ways. It is an open ended activity. According to my kids, some of the sentences contain no issues as, apparently, ‘If you run in the hallway, the teacher runs with you’ is exactly what happens in their school. LOL.
This activity can be follwed up with a quick memory game in which the kids word in pairs and try to recreate the original sentences with only some hints from their partner. For example, student A calls out ‘ice-cream, the sun’ and student B tries to produce the full sentence.
Type #2: Find a mistake
This type of an activity is a good idea because it helps the kids develop the linguistic awareness in the very limited area of the chosen and practised grammar structure. We have found those very useful since the kids are slowly becoming aware of the structure and they are slowly being introduced to looking at grammar in a more adult way.
The handout is basically a set of sentences, with some grammar mistakes. In the sample sentences you can see in my handouts, these can be: missing words, additional words, incorrect froms.
The instructions are super simple, the kids work together or individually (depending on how independent your kids are) and underline and correct the mistakes. In this and in the previous activity, my students adore taking colourful markers and play the teacher here, treating these as my tests which they correct and give back to me. With marks that are not necessarily the best one.
Type #3 Your ideas!
This kind of an activity gives the kids even a greater opportunity to produce personalised sentences and to express themselves. It is entirely open-ended especially that the kids also have a chance to choose the sentences which they want to complete. In the handout available, there are ten sentences in total and the students were asked to complete five they like most.
The kids complete the sentences in any way that is true for them. In the follow-up stage, they work in pairs, read their sentences to their partner and explain why. The most important part of is the written sentence with a strong focus on the TL but this is only the springboard to a lot more productive task. If there is time, the students can change partners and to produce a lot more language. Another opportunity is to keep the handouts and ask the kids to complete the remaining five sentences in the following lesson and to repeat the pairwork, with the same or with different partners.
Type #4 Caption this!
This is a slightly more productive task, but still a very open-ended one. The kids are required to create their own captions to the images provided and, of course, the selection of the images and the language used has to be relevant to the topic of the lesson.
It can be set up in (at least) two ways: either at the desks with the students working together and writing the captions which we compare in the feedback session or with the images displayed on separate pieces of A4, with one image per page, which are circulated in the classroom and with the new ideas being added by the students as we go along.
If there are appropriate conditions in the school, the kids can also be invited to walk around the school, look at the visuals and add their ideas to the visuals that they like most. This offers more freedom as it is not a given that they will write something under all of the visuals (unlike in the activity when the cards are circulated when we are sitting) but this set-up requires proper stations (aka any horizontal working space which allows for comfortable writing) as the young kids might struggle with writing on the posters displayed on the walls.
The visuals can be very specific or, like in our handout, they can simply help to narrow down the topic.
Type # 5 Role-play starters
First of all, kids prepare the conversation starters. They can work in pairs or individually and they write one sentence for a specific situation (see the handouts). Ideally this is done in the end of a lesson. The teacher monitors, encourages and suggests. The kids are put in pairs, they read the sentences to each other and choose the funniest ones or the most interesting ones. The teacher collects the handouts.
For the following lesson, the teacher cuts up the sentences and divides them into sets. It does not quite matter if a set has more than one situation of the same type. The idea is that the kids will work with a set of random sentences.
Kids work in pairs. Student A takes out a sentence and reads out the situation. Then they start the role-play in which the sentence should be included. Student B reacts, as appropriate. Then they swap and student B takes out one of the cards and starts a conversation.
And this is, more or less, how we roll, me, basically, throwing things at the walls and see if it sticks. So far it has. Then, onto the next one. Although, of course, we will have to wait and see about the long-term results.
Bonus tasks. A grammar-focused project: How we became scientists
These particular activites are very specific to the particular topic or the target langauge here and they will not be easily transfered into other contexts and topics. However, they were very effective and they did help us practise the target language and for that reason I am including them here.
We have already practised a lot and this handout was set a homework task. I was very open-minded (or almost very reckless) about the mode of completing this tasks. The kids were asked to complete the handout but, because they asked, I also allowed them to complete the questions with mistakes (which we would correct later), in Russian or just to think about these situations. The only thing I had to highlight was for them not to do these experiments at home.
I had to choose the experiements following a few criteria (something we can do in class, something that does not involve any fire or potentially dangerous materials if the kids decided to do them again at home, something that will not involve any langauge or structures that are too advanced for us) and to prepare the materials and the classroom set-up, too, with all the desks in a semi-circle and a table in the middle.
In the following lesson, we went step by step, using the following framework
the hypothesis and the ideas from kids, introducing some of the key vocabulary, mostly verbs
doing the experiments, highlighting the results, producing the key structure
asking additional questions and follow-up questions, letting the kids play, when appropriate ie with spinning the eggs or mixing the water etc.
Some of the experiments have been completed in the same lesson (skittles) and some of them will be completed and finalised in the following lesson (we have used the lemon juice to write and in the following lesson we will see if these letters show after we have ironed them).
Despite the fact that the experiments meant a lot of work for me, I am very happy with the outcomes because we did manage to create an almost perfect context for the target language and the students really did produce a lot of language. I might not do it in every unit but it was definitely worth it.
Hello! My name is Anka and I am here to tell you how to be a lazy teacher. ‘Lazy’ here is to highlight ‘no preparation‘ although that does not mean ‘doing nothing at all‘. That never happens in the pre-school classroom.
All of the songs featured here are the favourites of my students and that is one of the two reasons why we turned them into games. The other one is the fact that all of them contains the most precious structures and an opportunity that I could not just miss.
One disclaimer that needs to be included here (and the most important one here) is that things do not happen overnight and these are not the games that we play in the same lesson in which the songs are introduced. The song games are the freer practice activity, the follow-up, the spontaneous production opportunity and the fun opportunity, yes, but we start playing them strictly only when the kids have become entirely familiar (‘borderline bored’ even) with a song. All due to the age of the students and the way they process songs and the world.
This post will be about our (mine and the kids’) Top Five Songs, those which brought us most fun. If you are interested in the logistics, please have a look at the older post in which I describe the stages of un-singing a song in more detail. You can find it here.
Do you like broccoli ice-cream?
If, by any chance, you are not familiar with the phenomenon of broccoli ice-cream, it is definitely time to catch-up. This is the song that my own personal ‘un-singing’ started with and I have safely say that since I found this song, this has been the only tool I have been using to introduce and to practise ‘Do you like…?’ with both my primary and pre-primary students.
We start with singing and talking about food, we created our own most random, disgusting and delicious, food combinations and then we slowly move towards the non-culinary questions, too.
What do you like to do?
When I was first introducing this song, I was in two minds. On the one hand, the song was very tempting – lots of useful verbs, a beautiful complex sentence with a linking word ‘but’ and lots of fun. On the other hand, my 5 year-old preschoolers, beginners and all these verbs…I could not imagine all of these being pre-taught all together. We would have to have a whole separate unit, flashcards, two weeks of practice and then the song itself. I didn’t want to do that.
And I did not. We turned everything upside down and inside out and we started with just watching the video, for the fun of it and for pleasure. The practice and the speaking, started with these few verbs that we did know already such as ‘dance’, ‘ride a bike’, ‘cook’. They were the main focus and everything else was acquired, bit by bit.
When we create our own ideas for things we like and don’t really like to do, the kids first tend to change only little details, for example ‘I like riding a bike but I don’t like riding a dinosaur’ instead of the original ‘shark’ or to use the ideas from other verses, for example ‘I like reading but I don’t like reading in the air’, instead of ‘upside down’. But the important thing is that they speak and the song helps them produce complex sentences. The really amazing thing happens later on – the more we play, the more creative and original these contributions become.
As a teacher, I am mostly interested in maximising production, of course, but there are some hidden bonuses here. The kids know that it is the creative part of the lesson and they are really looking forward to hearing their friends’ ideas (aka ‘we work on the focus and extending the attention span’), they listen (aka ‘we develop one more skill’) and they react either by just laughing or expressing opinion when their own view on riding dinosaurs or drawing on the moon differs from that of the author (aka ‘we develop interactive skills’).
As quiet as a mouse
As soon as I found this song, I knew that I would be singing it with all my students. After all, conditions are perfect: a yummy piece of a structure that wonderfully lends itself to language games, the theme of the animals, some great adjectives (a most recent obsession of a VYL teacher) and, last but not least, a few music genres that were chosen to represent different animals. What’s not too like here?
I liked it so much that I decided to introduce it ‘just because’, not waiting until the next animal lesson or the next adjectives lesson. Actually, at this point, my ‘advanced’ pre-schoolers got bored with all the hello songs (of which I was informed) and so this has become the new hello song or the piece that we start our lessons with now.
And then we play, making new sentences about the animals (‘as beautiful as a lion’), ourselves (‘as happy as Anka’) and all the impossible and sarcastic combinations (‘as big as a ladybird’ and ‘as little as a giraffe’). With lots and lots of laughter.
I’m rocking in my school shoes
This is the only song in this set that does not come from Super Simple Songs and which we owe to Pete the Cat.
Here, the story took a completely different turn – I did want a module on school (it was the start of the year) and on the Present Continous (which would help us later to get the kids involved in the telling of the stories and in the describing the pictures) and so I wrote it for my kids and the video and the song, of course, were the basis for it.
The contents of the module included: rooms in the school and a set of Present Continous sentences, but the original set from the song was later extended by the set of places which the kids studied before (such as ‘the cafe’, ‘the volcano’, ‘the park’) and the other verbs which we have been using for two years in our movement game. Now they came in very handy.
This particular song is the song that we have modified the most and our key structure, sung and then spoken, went according to the formula ‘what I am doing’ + ‘where’, for example: I am reading in the garden.
What’s your favourite colour?
I have mentioned it before, in one of the previous posts, that I utterly love this song. Not only is it a very dynamic way of practising colours (we sing it, touching and pointing at everything green, blue and yellow around us) and, as such, it can be introduced even with the youngest beginners, but it also has got the advantage of introdcing a superbly generative and adaptable ‘What’s your favourite…‘ together with an equally superbly generative and adaptable (and straightforward) answer ‘I like‘. We sing it first with colours but, as soon as the kids are ready, we start singing (and then talking) about our favourite colours. And then, as we progress through the unit, about our favourite fruit, pets, toys, weather, food and animals. If there is any structure that can be and should be introduced as the first five ones…
In class, I sing the verse for each student, using their name ‘Sasha, Sasha, What’s your favourite colour?’ and Sasha is expected to answer by choosing a flashcard from the pile of colour flashcards as she answers. Which is a procedure that we repeat later on with all the topics. To make it more managable, I have also created a set of special flashcards which have the question on one side and a selection of items in each category on the other side. This way I do not have to keep a huge pile of flashcards from all the categories to practise this question.
With my older students we have managed to take this activity one step further and turn it into a pairwork activity. At this point, we have a beautiful selection of categories (sport, hobbies, lunch, dessert, transport, toys, jungle animals, farm animals, ocean animals) and the kids are good at accepting the flashcard of a tractor to stand for the entire category. We put our ten categories of the day (aka ten flashcards) on the floor, we sit around it in pairs. One child in each pair gets five counting sticks and they ask their chosen five ‘favourite’ questions to their partners and, as they do, they put one stick on the relevant flashcard. After they are done, I collect the sticks, divide them into the packs of five and redistribute and the other child in each pair asks their chosen questions.
As a follow-up, they ask me a question each, as we collect the cards of the floor. A beautiful, personalised pairwork activity that started a long while ago with a Super Simple Song.
What are you waiting from? Have you got a song that you have been singing for a while now and that your kids know very (very) well? Are there any interesting structures that could turn this song into a game? Go on! Use it to maximise production! It will be fun! I guarantee!
When you suddenly notice how the everyday is beautiful. The metro station Universitet
Ingredients
A group of teenagers or pre-teens
Paper and pen
The theme of the story. We are preparing for the Cambridge exams and so we used pictures and the exam format of the story writing in KET (three pictures) and the exam format of the story writing in PET (the opening or the final sentence).
Procedures
We start with some warming-up activities and they depend mostly on the coursebook and the curriculum but they all they have one thing in common – they help the kids get ready and get in the mode for the proper writing task.
Some of the potential exercises include: talking about the story, generating vocabulary to support the weaker students or less creative students, see the post here (especially Sstep 2: Two crazy words) or the following two
One-line stories
Make it better: students start with a set of simple sentences and work in pairs or individually, trying to develop it in a few rounds. The students can either work on the same handout using a set of colourful pens (a different colour for each round) or a few copies of the same handout. It can be followed up with a reading session and choosing the most interesting sentences of all but it is not quite necessary to include one more competitive element. The number of rounds can be limited or extended, depending on the age and level of the students.
We include ‘The Thinking Time‘ to give the students a chance to imagine their story and make the necessary decisions. These are the questions which they might be asked to consider:
Everyone can choose their own pen name, too.
I make it more formal by announing that we are going to choose the best story and that I am going to ask my colleagues to help me.
The students start writing, the teacher monitors and I help out with vocabulary when necessary.
There is not one time slot or the number of words required. We are practising in the exam format but without too many limitations at this point.
Afterwards, we type the stories up and share them with our BKC teachers who vote for the one they like best. I don’t correct any mistakes at this point.
I prepare diplomas of participation for all the students and one more for the winner and there is a reward (food as this is the one hobby that we all share, me and the students). We have a ceremony that involves a speech from the teacher, applause for everyone and for the winner and eating because they all share the reward. Our winner is the master of ceremonies of the day.
The final stage is the error correction. In the original handwritten copies I underline a few mistakes that the kids correct later on. So far, these have been mostly in the area of spelling, tenses or the general style.
Why we like
The students get really involved in the writing process and looking at how they write away, it is really difficult to believe that teenagers don’t like writing, that they are not motivated or that they are not creative at all.
If carefully scaffolded, it is an activity that all the students can complete and it is very mixed-ability-groups-friendly. Since there is not word limit, everyone writes as much as they can and want. The last time we did it, using the PET format with 100 words as the limit, I received entries of about 70 words but also entries of 400 words.
It is an amazing opportunity for the students to express themselves. They can choose the storyline, the genre and the style. This year they produced a horror story, a love story, a post-modernist short story and a diary entry, among others. We have been working together for at least two years (and for about six with some of them) and yet, I was still surprised that they can write like that. Because they can and they are amazing kids although this is not some kind of a writing-obsessed and literature-obsessed group (unlike their teacher) but a bunch of typical teenagers: always tired, always under-slept, who’d always choose ‘no homework’ over ‘homework, please’ and ‘no test’ over ‘test, please’ and so on. And yet.
This time round I have decided to include the most beautiful comment that each story got from the readers and, in a way, it started to resemble the categories that we have at different film festivals, although, to be fair, they can be quite random as they are generated by the readers, such as ‘your dreams will come true award’, ‘I can’t believe a child has written it’ or ‘A kind heart’. And my students really liked it and were touched by that.
P.S. I would love to share these stories here but some of my students keep them secret even from their parents. Their stories and their copyrights. So be it.
Storytelling (a definition for the purpose of this post): story-everything in class: telling stories, reading stories, listening to stories, writing stories, making-up stories, watching stories…
All the reasons to use stories in class when you teach children…
Stories, storybooks, traditional stories are a part of the child’s world
Stories help children learn about the world and the concepts
They also provide models of behaviour
They introduce children to other cultures
Telling stories and listening to stories is a social event
They help to develop focus and concentration
They can be a starting point to developing learning strategies such as predicting or making hypothesis
They expose children to different illustrations and they help to develop visual literacy
They help develop imagination
They help to develop kids’ memory
Stories help children to know the sounds, rhymes and this way to develop early literacy skills
Working with stories helps children learn about the value of books
They help children learn about the real and the imaginary world
Stories help faciliate interaction between adults and children
Children who read and listen to stories find it easier to understand other people
Kids who read stories are likely to have higher confidence levels
Stories are a natural way of teaching children
Stories help children relax
Stories help children understand their own feelings
Reading and stories can develop critical thinking skills
Storytelling and story reading can be a source of fun and pleasure
All the reasons to use stories in class because you teach a foreign language…
They create the context for the language
They help to build and develop the vocabulary
They can be used to introduce the langauge
They can be used to practise the langauge
They can be used to revise the language
They help develop listening skills
They expose the children both to dialogue and to narrative
Listening to stories is the first step to producing the language
They help develop literacy skills
Stories are a wonderful opportunity for integrating skills ie reading with listening or speaking with writing.
The stories created specifically for the EFL / ESL context have the graded language and they are built closely around the vocabulary and structures that they are already familiar with
Traditional stories have the advantage of being familiar to the children already and this will make their reception in a foreign language much easier
Storybooks are a source of the beautiful and natural language that can be made accessible to children. Some of them might be known to children (for example Gruffalo or The Very Hungry Caterpillar) and this will make the L2 version more easily understood and easier to use
Visuals accompanying the stories can also be used as a resource to introduce and to practise the langauge
They are an intergral part of the Young Learners Exam so using stories in class from early on will be contributing to preparing students for them
They can help connect studying English at school and studying English at home
They can motivate the children to learn the language
Using stories in class can encourage children to read for pleasure
Storytelling can be used as a classroom management tool as they are natural settlers
Some of the concepts in stories can be used to manage children’s behaviour in the EFL/ESL classroom ie ‘Boris goes to school’ is a story about making friends
Telling stories or reading stories can be an introduction or a follow-up to song lessons or craft lessons
Many stories have a set of structures and that makes them easier for the EFL/ESL students to learn
A story is usually used in more than one lesson. This repetition is also beneficial for the students as they can get more and more involved in the retelling or the re-reading of the stories
Telling stories can be an introduction to role-plays and drama activities
Even the lower level students can be encouraged to create stories. They will use their ideas based on the vocabulary they have (Wright)
Storytelling activities appeal to children with different intelligences and learning styles (Read)
Stories can be used to supplement the coursebook
Or they can be used as the basis for a curriculum
Reading and listening to stories can help with pronunciation in L2, too.
Stories encourage the kids to contribute ideas and to express themselves
Have I forgotten anything? I must have. Although 50 is not a bad number to start with. More later…
Happy teaching!
Bibliography
I will give myself a permission to be slightly reckless about referencing everyone since it is not a very serious research article. While preparing this post, I have consulted:
Sandie Mourao and Gail Ellis (2020), Teaching English to Pre-primary children, Delta Teacher Development Series
Opal Dunn (2012), Introducing English to Young Children: Spoken Language, Collins
Teaching English through has been something that I have been playing with for quite some time now and it started in the most selfish of ways, namely, I simply wanted to bring my favourite things to class. You know, have these beautiful Georgia O’Keeffee’s skyscrapers hanging by the whiteboard or practising prepositions of place not with the description of the classroom but of everyone and everything in one of the Chagall’s villages. My favourite things, nothing else.
I wanted and I did. Only once I started (and once I started to read about it, to research it, to experiment with the younger and the older, and to read even more and to reflect), I realised that there is a lot more to it, for me and for my students.
Somehow, once you start, it is difficult to stop because new ideas and new projects emerge and there is a lot to write about. This is not my first blog post about combining Art and EFL so if you interested, please have a look here (How to see a city through Art), here (How to hear Stravinsky, although the format can be adapted to any piece of music) and here (How to read storybook illustrations, a lesson not for kids) or here (if you are interested in using realistic and not realistic visuals with children).
With this post, I have decided to take a more organised approach to teaching English through Art, going a little back to the basics, to tell you why you might even want to think about it.
A bit about me and my background
My name is Anka, I am a teacher of English as a foreign language but I am also interested in Art. My first degree is in History and as a part of that adventure many years ago I did have a privilege in taking two terms of History of Art with one of the most amazing teachers ever but I still consider myself only ‘a human interested in the visual arts’, not a professional.
First and foremost I am a teacher of a foreign language and the main aim is always teaching them vocabulary and grammar, the four language skills development and, sometimes, exam preparation. However, I do believe, that there is always room for a bit of Art, here and there, smuggled, hidden and used to develop the language skills.
At the moment, I am taking part in three different projects which, to some extent, involve Art Etc.
my regular classes at BKC IH Moscow, classes which have a clear focus, a curriculum, a coursebook in which I use Art Etc to supplement what we do, for variation
my Art Explorers lessons, a bonus, free-of-charge once a month class for the students of our branch, a project that we are launching only this month
Kids in the Avant-Garde, a cooperation between BKC IH Moscow, Fun Art Kids and the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow, which gives the kids a chance to express themselves creatively in a variety of ways.
In the long-run, I would like to share here some ideas and activities which we used in all of these projects, but before we get there, here are some of the reasons why including Art in the EFL lessons is a good idea. Let’s go.
The alphabet book based on the animals from the paintings at the Tretyakov Gallery
Teaching English Through Art: all the reasons why you should at least consider it (in a rather random order)
Paintings used in regular EFL lessons as flashcards to introduce or to practise the language are a wonderful tool and a source of variety, to compliment the drawings, cartoons, illustrations and photographs. They will be especially appropriate while teaching animals, clothes, transport, activities, food, the city or the natural world.
Using painting also means exposing children to different styles in Art will help develop their visual literacy skills, even without any special lessons on the theory or the artists’ biographies.
Teaching English through Art with younger children, preschoolers or primary, usually involves some creative activity. This gives the children an opportunity to interact and to experiment with a variety of artistic materials such as paints, watercolours, crayons, fingerpaints and techqniues, for example collage, prints, scratch art and so on.
Kids, of the age, are learning to make decisions, choosing their own composition, lines and colours, not only attempting to become a five or a fourteen-year-old Walhor, Mashkov, Goncharova or Rousseau but personalising it and owning it every step of the way.
Since this creative activity is only an add-on in the regular English classes, it might help children discover a talent and interest in the artistic world, something that might not become obvious otherwise.
Just like any content-and-language-integrated lessons (CLIL), also the Art lessons give the students an opportunity to use the language to access other subjects and areas of knowledge and, especially in the case of the older learners, to see the real purpose of learning a foreign language
Interacting with the world art can be a springboard to discussions which generally generate a lot of language for the students, in relation with their level of English. Since ‘all ideas are good ideas’ (one of the mottos of our classes) and since all interpretations are welcome, students feel free to express themselves and to share what they think.
Art lessons especially lend themselves to learning and practising the language of expressing and asking for opinion, agreeing and disagreeing, talking about associations, possibilities and hypothesis.
Somehow (and this bit is really beyond me) during the Art lessons students, juniors and teens alike, are more likely to use the beautiful English. All of a sudden they realise that there are other adjectives than ‘beautiful’, ‘nice’ or ‘interesting’ and so the language they produce is of a much higher quality than what they normally during the conversations about the everyday topics.
Art can supplement lessons on practically any topic and they will help to ensure that the curriculum and the programme is diverse and engaging.
All of these are simply my reflections based on what I have observed in class. The real research will follow.
If you are interested you can continue reading here:
7 Amazing Benefits of Art for Kids That You Might Not Know Of from the artfulparent.com
Bonus titles: lots and lots of resource books – in the photos accompanying this post.
There is more to come!
Happy Teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
Well, well, well, this is officially my post #100 on the blog and I am in the mood for celebrating. That might take the form of sharing some random numbers (8,280 visits and 5,563 visitors over a year and a half (and mind you, I have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER if it is ‘impressive’, ‘not so good at all’ or just ‘why even bring it up?!’) and pondering over the fact that these have been my 5 most popular posts:
Which means that there is some interest in teaching pre-schoolers, using visuals in class and that Pasha, the invisible student, has become a bit more real, overall.
Apart from that, however, I would also like to take this opportunity to share with you my top 10 wordwall activities that I use with my primary and pre-primary students.
Disclaimer: Wordwall is amazing, no doubt about that, but it is still only a resource, a material. Its main aim is to provide opportunities for the students to produce the language. For that reason, in all of the games (for the lack of a better word) described below there will be always a differentiation between the material (the actual tool created with wordwall formats) and the activity (how we use it in class).
Activity: Kids take turns to ask everyone the key question using the cue on the card. All the students in the group answer. The same pattern can be used with any question ie Do you like…? Can you…? Have you got…?
Works well with: primary (they can attempt working in pairs and taking turns to ask a question to their partner only) and pre-primary, individual and groups
Activity: Kids play in teams, ask for the box to be open, produce a sentence (or sentences about the picture), win the number of points. The game about seasons is a very simple one, for preschoolers, the one such as this one here, about animals, can generate a lot more language, also with preschoolers and, of course, a lot more with primary.
Works well with: primary and pre-primary (with pre-primary we play T vs the whole class), groups and individial (we play T vs the student).
Activity: Kids play in teams, team A asks the question ‘What’s this?’, team B tries to answer. Afterwards the teacher flips the card to check. Depending on the vocabulary kids then say whether they like it or not or try to describe, too.
Works well with: pre-primary, individual and groups, it might be a bit under-challenging for the primary students
Which one is correct? Spelling
Materials: Flashcards, double-sided, with visuals and correct and incorrect spelling of the word Places in the city or a quiz with a similar idea, for example this oneSuperminds 5, Read andchoose
Activities: Kids read both versions and choose the correct one. With the flashcards the teacher is flipping the cards back and forth, I use it mostly with my 1-1s. With groups the quiz version works better and it can turn into a proper quiz, with the kids writing the answers down.
Activities: Kids work in pairs, one student in each pair has to sit with their back to the TV/ interactive whiteboard, the other is looking at the board. T keeps dealing the cards. The student looking at the screen has to describe the word for their partner to guess. After a certain number of rounds they change. The cards usually have the words on them, too, so it works well with mixed ability groups.
Works well with: primary and teens. I have only tried it with groups.
Activity: We use the cards or the matching activity to sing the song, slowly, with pauses, to practise and to revise before the actual video / track. The set such as the one for the ‘As quiet as a mouse’ can be used to start creating own versions of the song as kids have only the animals and they can (if they are ready) to come up with their own adjectives.
Works well with: primary and pre-primary, individual and groups.
Story / video comprehension check
Materials: Match to accompany Peppa Pig ‘Fruit Day’ or a quiz to accompany Peppa Pig ‘George is ill’
Activities: We normally learn the vocabulary, get ready for watching the video and then watch it. The games described here are used to check comprehension. The quiz is read by the teacher and the kids answer ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ and correct the incorrect sentences (unless I use the same story with primary who can read it themselves). The matching activity is always accompanied by a structure. It can be a simple ‘Apples are for George’ or a more comples ‘George would like apples’.
Works well with: primary and pre-primary, individual or groups.
Activities: The game itself is usually set for homework. We check it together, whole class. Afterwards the kids are divided into pairs and they test each other, for example Student A says: I am going to the supermarket’, student B has to recreate the second half of the sentence. To help the kids a bit, I put up some key words (ie places and main verbs) on the board. The kids change after a few rounds.
Activities: Kids work in pairs and the kids interview each other, reading the questions or prompts of the computer / TV / interactive whiteboard. Afterwards they swap.
Works well with: primary and teens, individual and groups
Activities: Kids look at the cards and listen to the teacher describing the pictures. If the sentence is correct, they say ‘Yes’, if there is a mistake, they reply with ‘No!’ and correct the mistake. Later on, there is a lot of potential for the kids to take turns to lead the game. The older students can work in pairs, too, while looking at the screen / the interactive whiteboard / the TV.
Works well with: primary and pre-primary, individual and groups.
If you are looking for inspiration or ready activity, you can find my profile (Azapart) there. I share all of my activities so there is plenty to choose from, especially if you work with Playway to English and Superminds.
Here you will also find Part 2 of this post and even more ideas for using Wordwall games in your YL classes.
Happy teaching!
P.S. A request!
It is very simple.
I would like to know a tiny little bit more about my readers. There are so many of you, popping in here, again and again, and the numbers of visitors and visits are going up and make my heart sweel with joy. But I realised I don’t know anything about my readers and I would love to know, a tiny little bit more.
