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’…
