Google Should...

A quick idea, inspired by these adverts made by unwomen.org, designed to highlight how different societies view the role of women. After having taught the model verbs, I think this would be a very thought-provoking way of putting them into context for your students.

Start by asking them to complete sentences beginning with women or men followed by a conditional sentence. For example (and I stress, these are not my beliefs. In fact I disagree with all of them!):

Men should drive.

Women shouldn't be unmarried after 30.

Women can cook better than men.

Men can't multitask.

After they've written them, and you've checked to make sure they're okay, put them in groups to compare and discuss their sentences.

If you have Internet access in your classroom, you can follow this up by asking your students to google the sentence stems and see what they find. This could lead to an interesting discussion on how sexism is ingrained into society, and how men and women's roles are defined in different cultures.

It would also be interesting to ask them to do an equivalent search in their own language to compare the results. If you don't have access to the Internet, you could ask them to search at home and discuss the results in the next class.

Read more ►

My Life In 20 Lines - a simple storytelling activity

Here's a simple idea for practicing the past simple with lower level students. I got it from Quora, a website that allows its users to ask and answer each other questions. Unlike other similar sites, you are required to sign up to get access, resulting in a higher calibre of contributions. If you're interested in the big questions, I recommend signing up.

Quora users were asked to share their life story in twenty lines, and I thought this would be a great practice for my pre-intermediate classes. Asking them to create a story to practice the past simple can be difficult for some learners as not everyone is a natural storyteller, but everyone has lived a life. It's also an opportunity for them to try out the tense in short sentences without having to worry about too much content.

Here's my suggestion for how the activity would run:

1) Ask students to think about the most important moments in their lives. Ask them to choose 5 and share them with their partner.

2) Show them an example “My Life in 20 Lines”. You could make your own life story if you feel comfortable sharing it with your students, or create an example. Here's one from the Quora page:

3) Ask them to note why number 20 is different (all the other use the past simple to talk about the past and 20 uses the present continuous to talk about how he feels now) 4) Ask students to write their own, possibly as homework. If you teach teenagers or young people, you could create some conditions, such as they are aged 19 or younger, they can write ten lines, between 20 to 30 years old, fifteen lines, and over 30's write twenty lines. 5) After you've given the students feedback on their writing, collect the students work and stick them up on the wall. Ask the students to go around and read them. Ask them to make a note of anything they didn't know about their colleagues. They can then discuss this in groups, asking follow questions as they talk about it. Check for their use of the past simple as they give more information about what happened.  

Quora users can find more examples of 20 line life stories here.

Read more ►

Songs In The Key Of ELT: Don't Worry About The Government

Here's a funny thing. Despite music being my number one passion and hobby in life, I've never once written about it here on my blog. In fact, I don't tend to make a big thing out of it in my teaching either. Well, I plan on changing both those things, starting here with a new strand on my blog, Songs In The Key of ELT.

But as is my way, I won't be using the most obvious songs and artists. They are obviously so many songs and types of music to choose from, so I'm going to find tracks by artists that are not as obvious as the ones you normally find in ELT materials. First up, appropriately enough, are my favourite band Talking Heads.

Artist: Talking Heads
Song: Don't Worry About The Government
Written by: David Byrne

Lyrics (taken from here):

I see the clouds that move across the sky

I see the wind that moves the clouds away

It moves the clouds over by the building

I pick the building that I want to live in

I smell the pine trees and the peaches in the woods

I see the pinecones that fall by the highway

That's the highway that goes to the building

I pick the building that I want to live in

It's over there, it's over there

My building has every convenience

It's gonna make life easy for me

It's gonna be easy to get things done

I will relax along with my loved ones

Loved ones, loved ones visit the building,

Take the highway, park and come up and see me

I'll be working, working but if you come visit

I'll put down what I'm doing, my friends are important

Don't you worry 'bout me

I wouldn't worry about me

Don't you worry 'bout me

Don't you worry 'bout me

I see the states, across this big nation

I see the laws made in Washington, D.C.

I think of the ones I consider my favorites

I think of the people that are working for me

Some civil servants are just like my loved ones

They work so hard and they try to be strong

I'm a lucky guy to live in my building

They own the buildings to help them along

It's over there, it's over there

My building has every convenience

It's gonna make life easy for me

It's gonna be easy to get things done

I will relax along with my loved ones

Loved ones, loved ones visit the building

Take the highway, park and come up and see me

I'll be working, working but if you come visit

I'll put down what I'm doing, my friends are important

I wouldn't worry 'bout

I wouldn't worry about me

Don't you worry 'bout me

Don't you worry 'bout me...

Handout: here
Level: Beginner

Lesson Plan:


1) Ask students to complete these sentences in anyway they want:

They visit...
I live...
I smell... 
I think...
They own... 
It moves... 
They work... 
I see...
I pick... 
They try...

Check their answers as they work. Group feedback.

2) Give out the handouts. Ask the students to place the verbs in lyrics. Play the song more than once if necessary.

3) Ask students to make a note of any new vocabulary in the box. Discuss it with their partner. Collect the vocabulary as a class, put it on the board and give it meaning and context.

4) Ask them to discuss the song. The chances are they they won’t pick up on the double meaning of the song. On one hand the song is a mundane description of a man’s life and the choices he has made, but on the other it represents how the modern world has been shaped to his needs. If they only pick up on the first meaning, that's fine, but it would be interesting to try and give them a deeper understanding if possible.

Read more ►

Cheat!

Here's a lesson idea I came up the other day. I was trying to spice up a rather dry FCE coursebook reading on animal cheats so I decided to add a video to the mix. After figuring out these activities, I realised that I wasn't so much improving the reading activity as I was replacing it with a listening, so I changed direction and did something else.

But rather than waste all that hard work, I thought I'd share it with you here instead...

1) In groups, ask the students to list all the things they think of when they think of the word 'cheat'.

2) Put their answers on the board in a mind map.

3) Ask them to discuss for a couple of minutes if they think animals can cheat. Get feedback on their opinions.

4) Put students into pairs. One student is A and the other is B. A watches the video without sound.

5) Students A then describes the video to their partner. B tries to remember what happened.

6) Mix up the pairs so all the A's have new B's to talk to. B's have to try and describe the video to their new partner. A's add any missing information to their description.

7) Play the video still without sound. Ask the students to see how they did and what they missed. Did it look how they expected?

8) Ask a couple of students to volunteer to describe the video while it plays. Put some of their best sentences on the board and analyse them with the class. Use them to create a script which class collectively builds with your help.

9) Show the students some vocabulary from the video. You could put it on the board or show it to them visually like this:

Ask if any of the students know what these words and phrases mean. If they don't (and they probably won't know most of them), ask them to identify whether they are nouns, verbs etc.

10) Now play the video with sound. ask the students to try and understand the new vocabulary from the video. You might need to play it more than once.

11) Once students have grasped the meaning, ask them to fit the new vocabulary into the script that you created together.

12) Ask the students to discuss a time someone played a trick on them or deceived them in small groups. Optional homework: Write a description of when someone deceived you.

Hopefully nobody will write about this...

Read more ►

P Is For Bacon

Crispy

A couple of weeks I hosted a workshop at my school on the subject of parsnips. Parsnip is an acronym standing for the subjects that coursebook writers are allegedly supposed to avoid:

Politics

Alcohol

Religion

Sex

Narcotics

Isms

Pork

We had a really interesting discussion on the subject, looking into the reasons behind why this happens and the result of this decision to omit what many people would consider to be some of the fundamental building blocks of life. For our homework, we took a parsnip each and created an activity which we could share in the following week's workshop. I decided to try and create a pork lesson plan.

Pork is perhaps the parsnip which stands out the most on the list. For many people, at first sight it takes a moment or two to figure why it's even there at all. Then the realisation hits, and you remember that for a large proportion of the world, food from a pig is a serious taboo. But in a culture such as the one I teach in where pork is not so much forbidden as it is a national dish, was it possible to create an interesting and challenging lesson plan that effectively communicated this issue?

Well that's what I tried to do. I haven't had the chance to teach it yet, but I think it would provoke some interesting reactions, some cross cultural awareness and of course, some meaningful learning opportunities. And if you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments below.


1. Ask the students to discuss this questions in small groups: 

• Do you have any food taboos? Is there anything that you would never eat? Why?
• In some areas of the world, there are foods that are not allowed. Do you know any of these  places and the foods that are banned?

2. List these religions on the board and ask the students to match them to the banned possible foods:

Judaism

Islam

Hinduism

Mormons

frogs / hot drinks / cat / blood / pig / cow / onion / crocodile 

Answers (make sure the students know these answers are in some cases generalisations, such as onion and hot drinks):

Judaism - Frogs / Crocodile / cats / 

Islam - cats / blood / pig

Hinduism - cow / onion

Mormons - Hot drinks

3. Tell students "You’re going to watch an interview with a man who was raised a Muslim. He’s talking about bacon. What do you think he will say about it?" Students discuss in groups.

4. Give the students a handout with this group of sentence stems repeated on it three times.

“One of the other waiters dared me to eat bacon, and he dared me because he knew I was a Muslim and it was a forbidden thing, and ……………………………………………………………………………………...…………......”

“We have a choice ...……………..…………………………………………………………….”

“Eating pork for me is ……………...…………………………………………………………..”

Ask them to predict how he will finish the sentences.

5. Now tell the students "If I told you that the man now considered himself an atheist, how would you now finish the sentences?". Ask them to try and finish the sentences again with a new version.

6. Students watch the video and then compare their predictions with his answers.

7. Ask them to watch the video again and try to write his actual answers.

8. Discuss in groups your reaction to the video. (Possible discussion questions: Did you realise that a food could be so meaningful to someone? Is there anything like this is your culture, food or otherwise? How do you think his friends and family reacted to his decision. How do you think his co-workers reacted when he ate the bacon?)

9. Follow up written activity - ask students to write his diary entry for that day, describing the incident and how he felt after.

Pigs in blankets

I am indebted to Clive Elsmore (@CliveSir) for the video that this post is based on. It was originally posted in the comments of this blog post:

http://esolinshetland.blogspot.com/2012/07/pork-and-final-parsnip.html


Photo credits: 

Crispy - Photo taken from http://flickr.com/ by @cookbookman17, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/"
Pigs in Blankets - Photo taken from http://flickr.com/eltpics by @sandymillin, used under a CC Attribution Non-Commercial license, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Read more ►

A North Korea Q&A

Last month Ann Loseva, a fellow teacher in Moscow, asked me to answer some questions from one of her students about North Korea. She asked me because I visited the country in 2010 and had written about it for the travel website Global Grasshopper. She had used the article with her student who wanted to know more, so together they made a list of questions and sent them over to me.

I'm certainly no expert, but since I've been there, I did my best to answer the questions. I decided to answer the questions in a video, and since I'd gone to the effort of making it, I thought I'd might as well share it with you. Hopefully some of you will find something useful in it.

The questions I answered:

1. What do people do when they take rest?
2. Where do people travel?
3. What programs are shown on TV?
4. What is daily routine of people?
5. What are the main subjects at school?
6. What is the level of healthcare?
7. Who do children want to be?

If you do find a use for it, let me know, I'd love to see what you do with it.

Read more ►

A Classroom Full of Poets

Poetry is one of those things I rarely use in class, but whenever I have, I’ve got a great reaction from the students. For example, my Korean teachers loved making their own stem poems. This involved them completing sentences to describe their classmates which became a poem. However asking someone to just write a poem could be a very intimidating thing to do, so I always try to limit the activity and place parameters on it so they can create without that pressure.

So I’m always on the lookout for a way of introducing poetry into the class in a way that feels natural and doesn’t place too much of a burden on the student. Hence my interest in a recent article on the ever reliable Brainpickings about ‘book spine poetry’. In this, the ‘poet’ takes a handful of books and using their spines, makes a poem. Here are a few of my own works...

The blind assassin

On the road

Dead man’s footsteps

Farewell my lovely

The monk and the philosopher

Dining with terrorists

Headhunters

All men are mortal

The old man and the sea

Catch 22

Big fish

Breakfast of champions

Birds of Costa Rica

Without feathers

You are nothing

I love the idea of asking the students to create their own book spine poems, but there are some issues to resolve first. Firstly they need to get hold of the books. If they don’t have their own, then they can visit the library or a bookshop (with permission). If that’s not possible they could use the bestsellers list on Amazon and if you’re really desperate, you can always bring your own books, although that would obviously limit the range available.

Secondly, you may have to resolve some language issues. When ‘building’ the poems, the temptation is to try and find titles that give you articles, prepositions and other connecting words in order for it to make sense. You might want to let your students cheat and add a few words if they think it is necessary.

A second idea is Newspaper Blackout poems. Simply, the ‘poet’ finds a newspaper or similar text, finds words on the page that they want to use for their poem and blackouts the rest of the page. So all you need to do is take a handful of markers and newspaper articles to the class and off you go! You can even do them on an iPad if you’re more technologically minded (although I used different apps from those mentioned in this article - Safari for the text and Screenchomp for the colouring in.)

Here are a couple of my own newspaper blackout poems:

The original text for poem 1

Alternative health 

Alternative Health

l read a headline
I flinch with shame

So over the top

Diptheria, tetanus, tuberculosis, pertussis, polio,

But we had a fridge full of organic vegatables.

Alternative health left me paranoid.

The original text for Warhol

Warhol

Warhol

Misunderstood

Shocking
Laconic

A vacant, heartless worshipper of money and fame.

Yet a sensitive, shy man

Hidden away

Lost then found

Away from the sleaze and glamour

with his mask off.

Obviously just creating these poems is not enough, so I would print the poems to share with the other students. They could then discuss what they think the poem is about and why the poet chose to put them in that order. The conversation could then switch to them speaking to the poet, telling them what they thought and finding out whether they were right or not.

But of course there are many other ways the students could use these poems, and if you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments below.

Read more ►

Matching Pairs

Matching activities are as old as the hills. Sometimes it seems that some coursebook writers just can't resist asking students to link a word to its definition, or to reunite two halves of a sentence, such as this example from a recently published coursebook.

As an activity, it doesn't exactly thrill me. It's very functional and helps the student to connect ideas, but it's also very rigid and doesn't give the student an opportunity to work on creating their own, more personally relevant sentences.

The problem isn't so much with the actual task, but with the idea undergirding it. Personally I'd rather see these activities used as warmers, acting as a fun quiz to engage learners in the subject. Here's an example I found in a back issue of Wired magazine recently that could make a great intro to a lesson on town and cities.

All together more engaging, don't you think?

Read more ►

52: Bailout

52 by Lindsay Clandfield and Luke Meddings is an e-book collection of subversive activities for the ELT classroom (see also the support blog Subversive Teaching 52). Each of the activities in the book attempt to engage the learner and the teacher in a challenging conversation. They are both forced to question, investigate and debate the world that we live in.

Since I like to push my students to engage critically with materials, I’m always on the lookout for interesting and demanding stimuli for my lessons. Subsequently this book was just what I was looking for.

As they say themselves at the beginning, “This book is not for everyone” and they are right. Indeed, there are activities that I wouldn’t use in there. But I would always choose to use a book that advertises itself in this way over a book that suggests that it appeals to everyone. Something that designed to be liked to everyone is going to bland and unchallenging, and I don’t want anything to do with that.

And in case you’re wondering, my students have never had a problem with it either!

I recently taught a lesson from the book and I thought I’d share it with you here. This classed was based on activity number 32 and is simply this picture below:

There is no lesson plan, no levels and no language exponents, so that’s how I taught it. No planning, no pre-set ideas of grammar that should be covered or vocabulary acquired, just an improvised lesson. (I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with planning, by the way, this time was just an experiment.)

The Setting:

A one to one business lesson, 2 hours long. The first 30 minutes was spent on conversation.

The Procedure:

I showed the image to the student and gave him a minute to look at it. We then discussed the following questions / points:

1) What’s your immediate reaction?

2) What’s it about?

3) Who is responsible for this advert? (He took another look it at this point.)

4) What does the slogan mean? (He thought it was written by the car companies.)

5) We discussed Wouldn’t referring to the past in the headline sentence. (He understandably found this confusing as the structure of the sentence is complex.)

6) Again, who is responsible for this advert? (We discussed this again, as he hadn’t yet grasped the nature of the advert. At no point did I explicitly tell him that it was a criticism, I just dropped hints as we went along.)

7) The meaning of the headline to the paragraph (“The auto bailout...”) (He was becoming more suspicious by this point, but hadn’t yet made the leap to satire.)

8) Pronunciation of precedent. (He was pronouncing it like president.)

9) Tone of the paragraph (It was here that it finally grasped that this was a satirical criticism of the car companies.)

10) What impressions does the final sentence of the paragraph give you?

11) What’s the message behind the satire?

12) You work for one of these companies, how would you respond? (His novel approach was to suggest that they should acknowledge that the advert was correct and that they will be better from now on.)

13) The final line (“We’re learning to...”)

14) Have you any experience of a company that doesn’t need to compete?

15) What happens to a company that thinks it doesn’t need to compete? (The word ‘struggle’ came up and we discussed how it can be used.)

16) I told him about Adbusters and showed him a few more examples from their website, which we discussed the meaning of in less detail.

The Homework:

I asked the student to find another advert on the Adbusters website that interested him and to bring it next week. He chose this image:

Taken from http://www.adbusters.org/content/philip-morris-out-business

The Next Lesson:

1) Why did you choose this ad?

2) We discussed the message.

3) Who is this aimed at? (new vocabulary included ‘preaching to the converted’, ‘activists’.)

4) Would you ever work for Philip Morris? (Interestingly, despite agreeing with most of the things in the adverts, my student would still work for them. He also told me several scandalous stories about the company that I won’t repeat for fear of libel!)

5) We reviewed new vocabulary that had come up during the discussions.

Conclusion:

I had a quick chat with my student after we had finished to see what he thought of the lessons. He thought it was very interesting and thought provoking. It was a different experience for him to see this kind of material, in or out of the classroom, so he enjoyed the challenge. He is someone who is not afraid of expressing an opinion which is why I chose this particular image to use with him, so from the perspective of student engagement, the lesson was a success.

From my point of view, I was very happy with how it went. The student didn’t understand the tone of the advert at the beginning, but I led him towards it, pointing out key words and phrases (shitty, taking your money, corporate irresponsibility, market share loss, too big to fail) that eventually made him realise what the advert was really about. I thought it was particularly interesting to observe how, even in the face of such explicitly critical language that he understood, the format of the advert was so compellingly authentic that he dismissed the linguistic clues, instead choosing to continue to believe that this must be a real advert for this companies, because frankly it looks like one. It’s interesting to consider how often we are convinced by a text simply by the way it is presented.

To conclude, I consider the class to have been a worthwhile and successful experiment and I’ll be using both this image and other materials from 52 again.

Read more ►