Love circle [YL/AL]

Family and family members is something that you're just bound to teach as an EFL teacher, whether to younger learners or adults. The problem is, most activities you find in books are pretty boring and don't seem to engage students, especially children, a whole lot. Songs are usually okay, but besides helping them with pronunciation and memorisation of single items (i.e. father, mother) songs don't really get them to actively and engagingly use focus language, which is usually the toughest challenge in EFL teaching to children.

I must admit I'm a bit of a TBL kind of guy (if you don't know task-based learning, check it out on its Wikipedia article, it'll be worth it), but TBL activities just make perfect sense when it comes to teaching lexis. I've found that if you get your kids to actually ask you for new vocabulary and to use it because they have an intrinsic reason to do so, then well, Bob is pretty much your uncle (no pun intended).

So anyway this is what I came up with to teach family members in a way that is both engaging for the kids and effective in terms of memorisation.

Here's how it pans out:

Get a set of nine pictures featuring you and members of your family, relatives or just people who are important to you, e.g. your best friend, your boy/girlfriend. You can either draw these yourself (which gives the activity a nice touch) or use photos, just make sure they're large enough for everyone to see, especially if you're teaching a big group. Stick them all face-down on the wall to create a 3x3 square. Turn over the middle one (which will be the picture of yourself) and ask kids who they think it is. Make it fairly easy to guess, think of a feature that children will immediately recognise, like a tuft of hair or a peculiar pair of glasses. Then proceed to call one child at a time and ask them to choose a square and turn it over. Ask them to look at the picture, show it to the rest of the class and try to guess who the person is. Have them ask you:

Is this your... 

E.g. Is this your father?

It is advisable to drill this using your body. What I usually do is gently heaving my shoulders up and down for a total of three times (once for each word). Have the kids do this as well, it'll help them remember. Hopefully they will associate the movements to the sound and so next time they can't think of the question you just heave your shoulders up and down without speaking at all. Most of the time they will get it.

Every time you tell them whether they were right or wrong, tell them using always the same tone or making always the same facial expressions. What I usually say is:

This IS my father!
This is NOT my father!

Soon enough children will start asking you for a lot of words, either to guess right or to make fun of you. Say for example you show them a picture of an old woman (your grandma) and the tomboy of the class wants to make fun of you, she'll ask you how to say girlfriend or lover or wife and, most importantly, she'll be more likely to remember it.

Try and include a wide variety of people, your family members, a couple of relatives, perhaps your best friend, your partner and, depending on the level of the class, your pet (pets are decidedly quite easy to guess). What I like to do is include the children as well, as in, I include a drawing of a bunch of kids that look like them:

Is this your class?
This IS my class!

This is great because 1) it's fairly easy so it'll boost their self-confidence, 2) it's funny, 3) it's great for rapport-building.

Continue until all the people have been correctly identified, which might take a while, but the great thing about this activity is that the more wrong guesses they make, the more they will practise focus language and, most importantly, they won't be thinking about their English, they'll be thinking about the game!

Once the game is over, ask them if they can remember all of them. If you have some spare time or you want to give them some homework ask them to draw their own love circle (even if technically it's a square) to play the same game next time in pairs. The feasibility of this however will largely depend on your class size.

My umbrella is for... [YL]

I teach English in a primary school and although I have to stick to the programme set out by the school and the state, I give it my own twist as often as possible.

The whole idea of teaching English EFL style to classes of twenty or twenty-five is very questionable and what teachers usually end up doing is drilling ad infinitum until the poor things know everything by heart. So whenever possible I throw in a task-based lesson that will entertain and stimulate the kids creatively.

One of my favourite activities I came up with last year was "My umbrella is for...", which we did jointly with the art teacher.

Here's how it works:

Bring in an umbrella, perhaps make fun of British weather if you're from the UK, and ask the kids what it is. My kids knew it as the English word is pretty similar to the Italian one, but if they don't just teach it and drill it. The umbrella works pretty well for drilling. Open it in three steps, one for each syllable, and have the kids repeat each syllable after you. This way they won't rush it and really have the pronunciation down.

Next, ask them what it is for (this can be done in their L1). Most of them will smugly reply that umbrellas of course are for sheltering from the rain. Act unimpressed. Say something like

"Well, yeah, of course, that's ONE use for them..."

Kids will look perplexedly at you. Go on with:

"Surely you must know at least a few more!"

Keep it up as long as needed, then finally proceed to show them a different use for umbrellas. My favourite is draining pasta, poking holes in it and using it as a colander. Do a funny drawing on the board to show them then ask them if they can think of some more uses. Collect a few ideas, praising their creativity, then tell them they've come up with so many ideas they will have to draw them in their exercise books to keep track.

Once that's done all you need to do is scurry back and forth from kids with their hands up telling them how to say things in English. Here are some ideas my children came up with:

My umbrella is for... Sailing!

My umbrella is for... Showering!

My umbrella is for... Dancing!

My umbrella is for... Flying!

Secret object: His/Her/My [YL]

Grammatical words can be hard to teach, especially to younger learners. In fact, the younger they are the harder it becomes, doesn't it? Typically, I wouldn't even care to focus on grammatical words unless I had a specific reason to, but sometimes you simply might have to do it.

Such a situation might occur, as it occurred to me, when you're dealing with exam preparation. Time is tight and you need to make sure children know what they're expected to, so down with the sour grapes and on with it. However, if you've ever taught kids for some time at least you'll know that you can hardly afford to bore them and what usually makes you a good teacher is your ability to entertain them even when you're teaching supposedly boring stuff.

So anyway I was preparing 7-year-olds for Trinity level 2 last spring and they just had to have his/her/my down. This is what I came up with to help them learn them in a fun way.

Here's how I did it:

Children are asked to form a circle in the middle of the room (preferably no deks in the way) and close their eyes. Here you might need to come up with a clever way to have them really close their eyes, because some of them WILL peek.

A child is chosen and he/she is asked to pick an object in the classroom, one belonging to a classmate, and place it in the middle of the circle. Once this is done the rest of the group can open their eyes and look at the object. Now children try and guess whose the object is and do so by touching the classmate they think it belongs to and saying, for example,

This is his pen!/This is her hat!

If the first child is right then the game is over, otherwise you can just keep on calling children and ask them to guess. One way of helping yourself keep them with their eyes shut is to set a time limit when choosing the secret object and have the rest of the group count up to ten before they can open their eyes.

The great thing is that it doesn't really matter whether their guess is correct or incorrect, what matters is they will keep on practising and won't even notice it too much, as they will be so engrossed with the game.

Just a word of advice: don't keep the game too long or children will get bored. If you really need to, try and ginger it up a little bit, perhaps by having them play in teams.

The serendipity of lexis learning [AL]

The term Serendipity refers to the fact of something nice and unexpected happening by chance.

Learning new words or, more generally, lexemes can be a tricky business. The typical student will have plenty of recorded words and expressions he or she would love to use but never really gets to use and hardly ever comes across again anyway, so the whole chore of collecting and organising them ends up being, to a very large extent, a bit of a waste.

There are a few tricks students can use to make some use of their notebooks and all the untapped potential, but perhaps I will talk about this in a different post: what I am concerned with now is what we, as teachers, can do in our lessons to help our students memorise new lexis.

I have found that in order to learn new lexis students need two things: repetition and meaningful context, or rather cotext (i.e. other words that words occur with). What I mean by repetition is clear: students need to see words not just a couple of times but several, and the more often they see them the more likely they are to remember them; but if you just drill them over and over again the learning value of each repetition progressively lowers. What they need along with repetition is meaninful context. And meaningul context, in short, is provided by unexpectedness, the exact opposite of drilling. Here's where the concept of serendipity kicks in.

We can have our students make serendipitous encounters of lexis, or rather sneakily use words that we know they are going to come across in future lessons and make it all seem serendipitous.

Here's how we can do it:

Before teaching a lesson or, better yet, before starting a new course, you skip ahead to following units and make a note of all the interesting lexis you come across, especially words and lexemes that you know you could spontaneously use in class. Next step, of course, is use them, so that when you reach the following units and your students see them for the second time they will be more likely to remember them because you've providided them with meaningful context.

An example of how I used this in class is the word swap. I noticed it was going to turn up in one of the reading texts in the very following unit so what I did was, I used the word during a lesson to give instructions for a speaking activity.