Language production Archives - Page 4 of 4

The beginning of this particular story was at best inconspicuous. We were finishing the food unit and to celebrate that, I decided to have a little party at the end of the final lesson. The parents were asked for permission, they approved of our food and at the end of the lesson, we got up, made a train, choo-chooed to the bathroom to wash the hands and then we just had fun. As luck would have it, one of the items on our ‘menu’ were the animal biscuits. Unfortunately (or, actually, very very fortunately) some of these animal-shaped biscuits were beyond recognition and it was not long before the kids started to ask questions and discuss what these mis-shapes could be…Naturally, some of it was in L1 but, amazingly enough, a lot happened in English, too. And this was the first time when I realized that ambiguity is the mother of production. Then I just had to figure out what to do with that next. Here are a few ideas…

Stencils and inkblots can be one of the ways of getting started. Stencils can be easily found on the internet (if you google for example ‘animals stencils) but they can also be drawn and cut out of cardboard. Inkblots can easily made at home or in class. The idea has been also used in some of the songs by Super Simple Songs such as Knock, knock, Who are are You? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jxcWlq3CBg) or games such as Fruit Guessing Game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVE9pYdwX-I&t=45s) so this can be the first step, too!

Then, there are also jigsaw puzzles and half-pictures. Existing jigsaw puzzles depicting the key vocabulary will be the resource that first spring to mind but these might not be very easy to get and very often consist of very small pieces. English classroom jigsaw puzzles can be easily produced by photocopying the flashcards and cutting them up, into two or three pieces if the students are quite young. There will be another advantage of using the coursebook flashcards as students will be familiar with the images and that is going to make the task achievable. To make them more durable, they can be laminated before cutting. In class, the teacher can be showing only one of the pieces and encouraging the children to guess the word, before the students are asked to find the other missing pieces and putting the picture together.

One of the resources that is very useful and very easy to make and, I think, needs to have its place on a shelf in the VYL classroom is, what I call, a funky envelope. I have taken the idea from one of the older coursebooks I Spy which contained a template for a page with a keyhole that children could cut out and move against a picture and guess what they can see. I made it into an envelope made out of 2 A4 pieces cardboard stapled together, with different shapes cut out in one of them. I put inside the flashcards that we are using at the moment and then the fun begins. It is very easy to make and easy to manipulate, too.

Whereas the funky envelope is usually used with the familiar images and flashcards, the post-it notes activity work better with unfamiliar pictures. A similar approach is used in the song What is it? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_sdGxUxz_4&t=114s) and some of the flashcard games on different platforms but it can be easily recreated in the classroom. Any poster, illustration in the coursebook, drawing or photograph can be used for that and the parts of these, covered by the teacher with post-it notes before the lesson can be used in a prediction game.

Equally fun will be a magic bag and some realia. Ideally, of course, they will be relevant to the topic of the unit ie plastic or real fruit, toys, plastic animals, school objects but I also like to throw in some unexpected distractor such as a plastic dinosaur among all the fruit. The teacher can either put only one of these in the bag and ask the students to guess the word, taking turns or guessing together. They can also fish out one of the objects and try to guess what it is, without taking it out of the bag.

A few tips

Make sure the kids have the language to participate in the activities ie introduce and practise the key vocabulary beforehand.
Introduce and practise the key question, too. ‘What is it?’ and ‘It’s…’ and ‘It’s not..’
Later on, consider introducing more advanced structures, too, such as ‘I think it is..’ or ‘It looks like…’ and ‘It is like…’. Providing these will be a good long-term plan and it will equip the students (and the teacher!) with the tool to clarify any confusion in the future.
Remember that saying what things are not is even more fun and important as guessing what they are. Don’t miss this chance to be creative and to produce even more language!

Happy teaching!

Creative use of the language or…LEGO!

Because that’s what language is: LEGO blocks.

It does come nicely packed and organised in our coursebooks, with a set of instructions on how to assemble it to make our own city, farm, car or whatever it is that we have been dreaming of. So we show the kids how to play it (and the name, LEGO, comes from Danish phrase ‘leg godt’ or ‘play well’)

However, if you are a true Lego fan, you know that keeping this Death Star on your shelf forever and ever is not what it is about. The feat has been achieved, it is there but after a while it starts to collect dust and it just get boring. It is not the end of the story; it is when the real fun starts! You take it off, you disassemble it to the very last, minute block and then… you start putting together your own, innovative spaceships.

With languages, the same rules apply and our students should be taught that, even those young ones or those very young ones, too.

How? Easy. Keep on reading…

It can start with a favourite song, one that everyone has already mastered, one that everyone knows very well and one that is somewhere on the brink of becoming yesterday news, not yet but soon.

The only thing that you need to do is to sing it but change a word and wait for the students to correct you. It will not only help you check if they were really listening but it can become a great new game – ‘correct the teacher’. It will generate the language from the students but, most importantly, it will show them that a song or a chant are not a chain of random sounds but a collection of bits and pieces that can be manipulated and replaced with other bits and pieces. This is also the first step to inviting the students to create their own versions of the song (more on that in another post).

Another way of encouraging the students to be creative about the language is to come up with the new, alternative names for the familiar objects, for example colours of crayons and pencils. Of course, for that they have to have some vocabulary in order to be able to participate but asking for ‘apple pencil’, ‘chocolate pencil’, ‘pumpkin pencil’ instead of the red, brown or orange one can be a fun game which will create an opportunity to climb onto the higher level of the Bloom’s pyramid, from knowledge to comprehension or perhaps even application as we are going to encourage the kids to create new associations with the familiar colour. Not to mention that, as language teachers, we are going to provide them with an opportunity to revise the language in a fun way and make it memorable.

The same game can be played with any chunks of language that the kids are using to create the impossible combinations i.e. put on (put on your jacket, shoes, hat or put on your apple), verbs and body part verbs (clap your hands or clap your…nose), classroom instructions and nouns (open your book, bag or open your…pen).

Making purposeful mistakes is a great incentive for the students to take over and to produce the language. Most frequently, it will be a typical teacher support technique. When the students cannot recall the word they need in a lesson, the teacher can ‘make a mistake’ and point at the picture of a dragon and say ‘I can see a tiger’, in the hope that it will help to bring back the forgotten word from one of the students. However, it can also lead to generating more language when it is applied to the content familiar to the student, for example, a story which is being retold in the following lesson. Even if the students are quite young and pre-A, they can participate by echoing after the teacher but supplying the correct word, for example the teacher can say ‘Ben is a cat’, kids can ‘correct’ the sentence by saying ‘Ben is a boy’. If the students are very familiar with the story (for example because it is the third or fourth lesson in which the same story appears), they can be even encouraged to produce more complex sentences, i.e. ‘Ben is a boy’, in an attempt to correct the teacher’s incorrect sentence of ‘Lucy is a giraffe’ and so on.

Another way of reinforcing this idea and fostering creative use of the language is using visual representation of the chunks that constitute a sentence or a phrase. A good example that will help to demonstrate the idea is the structure ‘I like’ that is depicted with the use of hearts, for example a red heart might stand for ‘I like’ whereas a crossed heart will mean ‘I don’t like’. When these are used with the flashcards depicting some food items, students will be able put them together and recreate the sentence and generate a lot of language by manipulating one of the elements, the heart or the food flashcards, at the same time learning that while the combination ‘I like’ + ‘pizza’ is a correct one, the other set ‘pizza’+’I like’ will not be accepted. The same technique can be used to create other structure and the only challenge for the teacher here will be coming up with symbols for ‘I’ve got’, ‘I can’ or ‘I’m wearing’…

Ambiguity is the mother of…production. Maximising production in class.

We Want More! (vol.1)