In
my classes I believe in getting my students to do the majority of the work. I
think that the more they actively participate in a lesson, the more
motivating that lesson will be and the more they will retain of its content. I
ask them to predict content, to
prepare questions for other students to answer, to guess the meaning of
vocabulary from the context and to prepare homework questions for their
classmates.
Below
is an outline of the lesson I have taught over the last couple of days, which
will give an idea of what I mean. The topic was stories in the news.
Stage
1
I asked the students to discuss in pairs any stories that were currently making headlines, either at home, in the UK or the wider world. A natural discussion evolved from this task, with students asking questions about Scottish independence, the Pistorius trial, the Royal pregnancy and, loosely connected, the Princess Diana conspiracy theories. In most instances, the students were able to discuss these topics without intervention. In other cases, they asked for my view. In yet other cases, we looked online for information.
This
discussion also threw up a range of collocations such as a shifty man or woman,
to be neck and neck, too close to call, to have a field day, to lose face, and pompand ceremony. Once again, this vocabulary arose naturally from the discussion
and from the students’ questions – it wasn’t vocabulary I had prepared earlier.
Stage
2
I
showed the students the 11 pictures below which I had taken from the BBC In pictures site. I asked them, in
pairs, to write a sentence to describe each picture. If they knew what story
the picture referred to, they could use this information. If they didn’t, I
simply asked them to describe what they could see. Some of the sentences they
came up with were:
A man holds
onto a rope to avoid dirty water
 |
| http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in_pictures/ |
A volcano is
erupting
A man is
repairing cables
A man wins or
loses?
The
language wasn't complicated but, again, the students had done all the work
themselves and had also discussed what they thought the pictures were showing.
Stage
3
I
gave the students a photocopy of the captions that went with each picture (also
taken from the BBC In Pictures site).
One of the captions was a red herring and, as there were only 7 captions, two
other pictures didn’t have a matching caption.
I
asked the students, again in pairs, to match the captions to the pictures.
However, I did give them a fairly strict time limit so they didn’t have chance
to read all the words and start asking complicated vocabulary questions at this
stage! At the end of the activity, students checked their ideas with each other
and I only intervened if there were any problems.
Stage
4
I
focussed students on the caption that matched the Joan Rivers star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame. The caption was:
Flowers
surround Joan Rivers’ star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles
following the announcement that she had died. Rivers, 81, had been on life
support in Mount Sinai hospital since having a cardiac arrest in New York last
week
 |
| http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-29077084 |
I
asked the students how they would transform this caption into an appropriate
headline for the picture. They could only use the words in the caption itself
(and I stressed that they couldn’t change the form of the words in any way).
They also had to use words in the same order as they appeared in the caption
and their headline obviously had to make linguistic and grammatical sense!
Valid examples would be:
Joan Rivers’
star
Flowers
surround star
Rivers died
last week
In
pairs, the students then did the same with the remaining pictures, leading to
headlines such as:
40 explosions
on Monday
& volcano activity
Shasta lake
near 30% capacity
& Shasta hit by drought
Man repairs
cables on pylon
Cameron greets
Merkel
The
students seemed motivated by the fact that there wasn’t a definitive ‘correct
answer’. There was also a lot of discussion about whether they could leave out
certain words and whether what was left made sense and/or was grammatically
correct. And, once again, the students were doing all of the work!
Stage
5
From
the students, I elicited the wh questions
(who, where, when, why, what, how). I then asked them to choose one of the
headlines they had written and pass it onto another group. This group then had
to write wh- questions relating to the headline and the picture. They came up
with the following suggestions:
Electricity in China
What
is the man doing?
Who
told him to do it?
When
did he start doing this?
Why
is he doing this job?
Where
is the electricity pylon?
How
long has he been doing the job?
Alpine sheep in Switzerland
Who
do the sheep belong to?
Where
are they going?
When
did they leave?
Why
are they grazing up a mountain?
What
are they doing?
How
will they get home?
The students then swapped both headlines and questions. Their homework was to write a short paragraph about the picture making sure that they answered all the questions. So the students had prepared their own homework!
Follow-up: tomorrow’s class
I
will ask the students to compare stories. They will have a minute or two to
read over what they have written. I will then ask them to tell a partner (who
has written a story based on the same headline) their story and find the main
differences between their stories.
As
I said right at the beginning of this blog, I believe that my students should
do most of the work in class. If I look back at this particular class, I had simply taken pictures and
captions from the BBC website. During the class, my students participated in discussions, used dictionaries,
explained the meaning of new language to each other, wrote sentences, made
headlines, and wrote questions. For homework they would write a story. They
had also touched on all 4 skills as well as working on grammar and vocabulary.
All with very little input from me!
I’d
be very interested to hear what other teachers think about this approach to
teaching and whether it would work in your classroom. Please comment!
BBC Day in Pictures page 1
BBC Day in Pictures page 1
