Lesson Skeleton: On the phone

The conversations we have during the day can reveal a lot of fascinating information about what we do, our relationships with other people, our daily vicissitudes or just the hum-drum boredom of daily life. Like I have said before, I find interest in the mundane because, let’s face it, the mundane is never what it seems. These moments can be great topics for teachable moments or entire lessons. Think about the telephone conversations you have had today? What do they reveal about your daily life?

1. Put this question on the board:

 

Who have you spoken to on the phone today?

Ask learners to answer the questions. Give them some prompts for their conversation:

How did you feel?

Were you busy/free?

Was it someone close to you?

What sort of relationship do you have with this person?

2. Monitor for some interesting bits of conversations, mainly the themes emerging, but keep in mind also some of the language difficulties or bit missing from learners’ conversations.

3. Board some examples and discuss them with the class:

“X spoke to her mum to tell her she was late”

“Y arranged a good time to meet for football training”

What if nothing comes from the conversation?

You can add a few more questions for learners to answer:

Do you get annoyed when someone calls you all the time? Is there ever a good time for your parents to call? What is the worst time of day for someone to call you?

4. By now there should be a few different topics buzzing around: family, friends, work, free-time activities. Choose one to extend on or a language point. You could do it like this:

Language

• Ask learners to brainstorm collocations/lexis for one of these topics and board them.
• Take some language for corrections and make it into a reformulation activity, allowing for lots of discussion about language use. Elicit different ways of saying these to extend learners’ knowledge.
• Ask learners how they would carry out the same function on the phone in English (arranging, canceling on someone, asking for information etc). Create a dialogue on the board together as a class. You could do this by eliciting correct responses or allowing them to write the dialogue then adding extra phrases in a second part of the board for learners to substitute for what they said. Ask them to practise it then create another for a different situation.

Theme

• Take a theme, e.g. Having dinner at home, playing sport as a leisure time activity and ask learners to brainstorm their opinions for and against the topic. This could be extended into a for-against debate.
• Ask learners to draw a graph of the best and worst times of day to receive an important phone call and explain why, which extends the conversation further and goes deeper into our daily routines.

Lesson Skeleton: A place you once knew (creating texts)

I have just enough time to take out of my busy schedule preparing for TESOL France this Saturday to share this lesson skeleton. I tried it last week with a couple of classes and it went very well.

I wrote “a place you went to a lot when you were young” but any setting could work.

1. Asked learners to write the words that come to their mind when they think of this (no phrases, they’re going to add the grammar to them in the next stage).

2. Write “when I was young, I used to go to…”, or a story starter corresponding to the topic and hand the board pen to a student, who comes to the board and writes the next sentence.

3. Continue passing the pen until the board is full.

4. Elicit corrections on past tenses and vocab, trying to leave the text as much of the content as it is.

5. At this point I put some guiding questions on the board to direct students’ attention to the grammar in the text. In the two lessons in which I tried it, the grammar was ‘used to’ and ‘would’.

1. Which forms refer to the past?

2. Which refer to a past action that happened/took place many times?

3. What is the difference between X (past simple) and Y (used to)

4. Is there another way of saying Y (to elicit ‘would’)

6. Clarify form and pronunciation.

Optional: rub the grammar off the board and ask students to complete the gap-filled board.

7. Ask students to take the words they’d previously written and create the same text about their place.

I wonder how many pass-the-pen texts could be adapted to include language items?

Advantages:

• Involves the whole class in constructing a text and engages students.
• Provides a learner-created context in which to introduce new language.
• Provides a text which you can use to guide students towards to a language point.

Disadvantages:

• Be prepared for your pre-chosen language point not to emerge in the text.
• Could be time consuming, watch for timing.
• Students may be not so forthcoming about writing on the board if they are worried about making mistakes.

Extending Conversations

Lately I have found some really enlightening accounts of unplugged teaching, teachers opening the doors of their classrooms to give us all an insight into to what goes on in a Dogme lesson. In sunny Spain, Adam Beale is taking a leap of faith with his learners, giving us some colourful accounts and reflections of his lessons. In Japan, Oli Beddall is diving deep into post lesson reflection on his blog, providing an equally fascinating read for all those interested, with a sprinkling of second language acquisition theory thrown into the bargain. In Costa Rica, Chris Ożóg gives us some food for thought with post-lesson reflections. To add to that, Chiew Pang’s collection of reflections is an absolute must for any experiences, curious of aspiring Dogme teacher. All fantastic blogs I have learned a lot from in the past few weeks, so thanks for blogging.

Continuing along the lines of unplugged ideas, I would like to share a few ideas for extending conversation.  Adam Beale wrote in a recent post, “now is time for the leap of faith”, which I think sums up very nicely the part of the lesson when an engaging conversation is coming to an end and it is up to the teacher to mould the language into the next part of the lesson. It is at this point that having a few activity skeletons up your sleeve comes in handy, which can be called upon for a variety of different topics. Hopefully at least one might be of use:

1. Conversation reviews

You have a board full of new lexis from a conversation. Now ask learners to write a review of their conversations using it.

2. Articles

Instead of a review a newspaper article provides an opportunity to reuse emerging language. A student comes late because of bad traffic, why not an article on the traffic problems in the city? Talking about how improve your English? Different languages? This can make up the focus of the final part of the lesson. Collect them in at the end of the lesson and use them for a language focus at the start of the next lesson.

3. Headlines

I used headlines in this lesson and lots of interesting and quite entertaining use of language emerged from it. Headlines can also be useful at the start of the lesson as an alternative to “what did you do at the weekend”. Include one of your own as a stimulus.

4. Telling lies, telling the truth

I came across this activity when one of my students started talking about how she had become obsessed with ‘Skins’, the British TV series about a group of dysfunctional teenagers in Bristol. When the chat had died down, I asked each learner to write three phrases about teenagers in their country, including at least one lie. We then read our facts or false-truths and used them as a springboard for discussion.

5. Do you agree?

All you need is a piece of paper and a pen. Ask groups to write a set of opinions on a topic recently discussed (some examples include changes to the school, homework policy, rubbish collection system, eating habits, how to best bring up your children). Make sure a gap is left underneath for other groups to discuss and write their opinion. Ask groups to swap, discuss and respond. At the end of the activity discuss some of the responses as a class.

6. Interviews

The school accommodation service, the price of a bus ticket, the best way to make a coffee, why do you use facebook? These sorts of topics emerge a lot in my classroom. Ask groups to make interview questions concerning a topic that emerged in class, note down answers in a sort of information-gap activity. After a few interviews, each learner writes up a short summary of the classroom opinion. In an IELTS class there is the possibility of introducing some language to describe trends, or drawing charts/graphs for habits/opinions and explaining them to the class.

7. Roleplays

Little explanation required. I normally try and make a role-play include lots of functional language for the real world and involve real-life situations. Presenting to the International Monetary fund a new plan to cure world poverty to me seems a bit much if the learners are never going to need to use English for this purpose.

I taught a business course once with a focus on writing. What I found hardest was finding materials that would appeal to a bunch of thirty-something business types in London. I found that asking them to conduct meetings about issues in their workplaces provided a good springboard for teaching note taking, writing reports, minutes and emails. Ask learners to write an agenda for a meeting, select a boss to manage the meeting and let things role.

8. Dictation

Even traditional dictation is useful to focus on specific language points. I usually use it to focus on connected speech, selecting some phrasal verbs in context or some functional language like “you really should think about…” and dictating them at normal speech rate, asking students first to count the number of words, then try as hard as they can to write every single word. Discuss the areas that were difficult for learners to hear (consonant-vowel linking with many phrasal verbs, elision, weak forms etc) and highlight them on the board.

Grammar up dictation: dictate a review of a conversation but leave out pre-selected grammar words which learners then fill in. Be careful not to make it too difficult or ambiguous. Keep it simple by selecting one language point, perhaps one that learners have particular difficulty with before.

Dictogloss: mentioned also on Oli Beddall’s blog, used at the start of the lesson to facilitate discussion or after to capture discussion. After a conversation, it is a useful tool to introduce new language already in context i.e. the conversation before. Let learners hear the text once. Ask them to discuss what they understood. Let them hear it again and take notes. From their notes they construct a final version of the text to compare with the original.

9. Sentence anagrams

Write a couple of sentences about what learners are talking about. This is a good chance to introduce some new phrasal verbs in context or highlight some collocations.

E.g.

X is really getting behind with his studies

The weather is really getting Y down

Z finds getting around town really difficult when there’s a tube strike

Jumble them up into three anagrams, e.g.

studies getting X is really behind with

Ask learners to unscramble the anagrams, accepting grammatically correct alternatives but pushing students to come as close to the original as possible. Reveal the examples after and clarify context, meaning, form and pron.

10. Poems

For this activity a slightly more creative and confident class is required but it can produce some interesting results. Take a subject being discussed and tell learners they are going to write a poem. Ask each learner to write two lines. Form two groups and ask each group to construct a poem using their contributions and write it on the white board. There should be two poems at the end of the activity. Discuss topics in the poems and language used to extend the activity further, normally lots of interesting lexis arises.

Topics do not necessarily have to be poetic, great topics I have used are:

If I were a man/If I were a woman

What can I see sitting by the window in Starbucks

In London we stand on the right, walk on the left

What I didn’t do last weekend

 

11. Rephrasing cards

This activity works on learners’ ability to paraphrase and can be adapted for lexis or grammar, quite handy for FCE classes. Take some language that emerged from a conversation and clarify meaning and context, keep this language on the board. Distribute the language on cards to pairs and ask them to rephrase each chunk on he other side of the card, (again, this could be a different collocation or a rearranging the structure of the sentence, playing with modality or grammar). Give each group two or three then ask them to swap and guess which chunk is being rearranged from the examples on the board.

An alternative involves writing a paraphrase of the original phrase on the back of the card and swapping with other groups. This worked well after a conversation about first impressions, using adjectives and idioms to describe personality.

12. Ranking

Ask learners to make a top-five list, or a list of causes, effects, influences based on a recent topic of conversation. Form groups and ask learners to justify their choices to each other and discuss interesting points that come up. For example, after a discussion on how to get by on a shoe-string budget in London, we made lists of the top ways to pass a weekend in London without spending anything, which was then made into an article.

There, a couple of my favourites tried and tested with groups of adults. I hope these might be at least of some use.

How do you extend a conversation?

 

Dealing with emerging language

One of the many bits of Dogme terminology that perplexed me in the first year of teaching was exactly this, ‘dealing with emerging language’. I mean, if you consider that dealing with a problem generally means finding a solution to it, the whole idea seems kind of counter-intuitive if you ask me. Emerging language isn’t a problem, is it?  This issue perplexed a number of my colleagues on DELTA  during the experimental practice. Keen on trying Dogme, there was some doubt about the language focus even if there was great success in facilitating learner-centred, conversation driven lessons.

I got the impression that the easiest way to do this would be reformulation. During my first year and a half of teaching, this issue led me to ask myself whether dealing with emerging language meant only reformulating it to make it sound more natural. If this were the case, then surely it would become rather frustrating if every effort to engage in classroom discussion resulted in reformulation?

The questions that led on from those questions concerned how to expand my repertoire of ideas for dealing with emerging language. In addition to this, I thought about if my choices regarding which language and which topics to focus on, but that’s another story for another post. Now I’d like to share the ways of extending emerging language which have worked best for me in the past 6 months in hope that there might be of some use and that others out there might contribute their favourite ways too.

Gap-filling

For form

Ask everyone to close their eyes and rub off all the verbs for verb-noun collocations or all the prepositions in chunks. Ten should be challenging enough for any level. Although some classes have wanted as many as twenty! Ask everyone to write the answers then give them the pens to take turns filling in the gaps.

This was my board after a conversation on our favourite things to do in London. At the end of the lesson, about 20 minutes remaining, I gap-filled the board.

On the left hand side are some expressions recycled from the previous lesson written on cards.

Language from a debate

Alternatively, after a classroom debate, the gap-filling can be done in teams; one for each side of the board.

Tables can also be good for a focus on word formation using suffixes if I’ve heard a particular problem with suffixation of nouns. I use the emerging language as a basis for the activity and then continue it with dictionaries.

Collocations 

I also find that collocation webs can be a way of extending language from a conversation. If I hear difficulties with common collocations, I write them and put the words on the board, or in the case of a mistake, put the right word (I then mention the mistakes and ask them which is the correct way of saying what they said). The words are copied and joined to make as many collocations as possible.

Form for noun modifiers 

After a quick explanation of noun modifiers, I ask everyone to think of nouns and verbs on the topic of the conversation just had, then we add them to the board and make noun phrases with noun modifiers in groups. They can be as long as as absurd as possible, the only rule is that the person who makes it must be able to explain the meaning of it. These are then written on cards and passed around for groups to guess the meaning.

“a dancing sandwich box”

“A sandwich box which dances”

“an eye removal safety department”

” a department to make sure that eyes are removed in a safe way”

Good for helping students create and make sense of chains of long and complex noun modifiers. At lower levels it fits in well with situational vocabulary, for instance in a hotel. You might get phrases like “hotel swimming pool service”.

2. Pronunciation

When I’ve covered pronunciation, I often take a photo of the board and then remove the stressed syllables, schwas or weak forms and ask students to fill them in, working in groups so that they have to say the phrases to each other to guess. I find it’s sometimes better to leave it a while before doing this to revise, perhaps at the end of the lesson.

Another thing that has worked really well, which I adapted from an idea my DELTA tutor gave me involves take chunks from emerging language written on the board and writing the stress patterns for students to match. This can be done on the board or on strips of card if available.

Here’s an example of the board

Since then, I’ve found that the activity works better with as outlined above with small cards. I sometimes put them around the room for students to match or dish them out to individuals for them to find their pair. Either way, it gets them to focus on stressed and unstressed syllables and keeps thing a bit more student-centred while you’re free to monitor and do a bit of one-to-one pron teaching.

Other times, I’ve drawn a table on the board to focus on past-participle endings and asked learners to mark the consonant sounds, doing the first as an example to help

In this case we also focused on elision of final consonant sounds in past participle endings. I got the class to create every-day phrases where these might appear, for example I missed the bus, a missed call, you’re not allowed to etc.

3. Focusing on meaning

Lexis

1. If I have lots of vocabulary on the board, I ask people in pairs to write a paraphrase of the word/chunk and then the word on the back. I monitor during this stage and make sure paraphrases are not too difficult and do some one-to-one clarification if needed. Cards are then collected and distributed, paraphrase-side up and pairs guess the phrase and check.

2. Alternatively, with higher levels, I write down on card some good phrases said during conversations and reformulate some less accurate phrases. While I’m doing all of this I’ve asked everyone to make a list of the topics they spoke about. I then distribute the cards to groups and ask them to match them to the topic. This will often throw up phrases like “Yeah, we were talking about X and I wanted to say something like this” or “I remember that X said this when we were talking about Y, it means Z”. As a teacher you’re then free to monitor any problems in connecting the meaning to the context and can ask other people to explain.

What I really like about this activity is that it really connects meaning to context, forcing people to think back to the context in which the utterance was said or the context it could be said in. Make sure the phrases aren’t TOO difficult, as it the task is quite challenging already. At lower levels, the reformulated phrases could be added to one side to help. This activity has only worked well for me when the whole class has been in the conversation, otherwise it’s better to make group-specific cards.

Grammar

What I try to avoid is standing at the board explaining grammar. I imagine myself in my students’ shoes when their teacher explains a load of grammar to them and this usually stops me. Although, having said that, it’s nice to have your questions about grammar answered, which is why I often devote time to questions about language. I ask everyone to write one question about the grammar on the board. In groups they try and answer it, the ones that cause difficulty or don’t get answered I then answer after.

Exchanging modals

Exactly what it sounds like, ask them to exchange the modal in the sentence and discuss how this changes the meaning.

Time lines 

I normally put some sentences said on the board and some timelines and we match them. The discussions are always full of questions and beliefs about grammar… it’s possible in these cases to highlight personal preference or stylistic preference. I’m lucky to have intelligent and curious students who ask lots of questions… when asked by them, they are always more meaningful.

The drawback of this is that it has a tendency to draw out lots of rules, some of them helpful, some of them not so helpful. I do however encourage students to make theories about grammar and suggest possible alternatives, making sure not to accept anything absurd or just plain wrong.

Not that reformulation doesn’t play a part in my classroom, it just seems to me that ‘dealing with’ means more than just changing it but also ‘extending’. I guess this falls into the category of ‘doing language work’ too. Also, I want to point out that not all the dealing with emerging language takes place on the board, its just I have the most pictures of this!

So this leads me to ask you: how do you deal with emerging language?