“Doubling” as a Language Learning Technique
Mario Rinvolucri, UK
Mario is a Pilgrims associate and from 1999 to 2006 was editor of HLT. He has co-authored several books with different Pilgrims colleagues, including Christine Frank, Paul Davis, John Morgan, Peta Gray, Herbert Puchta and Jane Arnold. Over the past 30 years he has written a trickle of articles for The Teacher Trainer, the first magazine that Pilgrims decided to bring out.
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Doubling a picture
Doubling a shoe
A worm tells its life story…
Being evaluated by two voices
Being doubled by two voices
Some background on the term “doubling”
Introduction
In your preparation choose a picture of a person (head and shoulders or full length) that you feel is intriguing and compelling. If the image is a bit mysterious or hard to place, so much the better.
If the picture is from an electronic source be prepared to project this on your classroom screen. If it is a physical image make sure it is big enough to be clearly seen from the back of the class. Plenty classes number 60-80 students.
- Show the picture to the class and give them a bit of time to take it in.
Ask them to take pen and paper and jot down between 10 and 20 questions they would like to ask the person in the picture. Tell them to address their questions directly to the person in the picture e.g.: Can you tell me your name?
How old are you?
Which historical period do you belong to?
Tell the students they have ten minutes to think up their questions.
As they write go round and help people who want/need it.
- Tell the class that to answer the questions the person in the picture needs to be lent a voice.
Place a chair under or near the image, facing the group, and ask someone who feels close to the person portrayed to come out in front of the group to answer their questions, taking the role of the of the person portrayed.
- The students ask their questions and the “voice student” answers them, gradually building up an ever more gripping character sketch.
- When the energy of the group and the voice person starts to flag round off the exercise. By asking the student in the chair and people in the group to explain how they felt as the character filled out.
Variation
Instead of choosing an ambiguous, intentionally vague picture choose someone who is well known to the students, so with teenagers someone well known on Facebook or in the music scene, with scientists someone like Marie Curie, with a history group a villain like Henry VIII of England.
I have tried both types of picture and both have produced valid results in my groups. If you choose well known people the questions and answers are usually more factual and informational, and rather less imaginative.
- Place a table and a chair in front of your class.
- Ask a student who is interested in shoes to come and sit in the chair facing the group.
Ask the person to take off one of their shoes and put it on the table***.
Tell the class to ask the shoe questions about its life and problems which the shoe owner then answers in role as the shoe.
- Break the students up into groups of 6. Ask them to do the same exercise with one person providing one of their shoes and lending the shoe his/her voice as the other five ask the shoe questions.
If you have time allow all the student s who want to “double” one of their shoes to do so.
Language: Either before the fun part of the lesson or after it you may want to get the students to brain storm shoe vocabulary e.g.: boot, shoe, instep, toe, heel, laces, climbing boots, gum boots, ballet shoes, sneakers etc... .
*** In some cultures shoes are regarded as dirty objects. I would not want to do this exercise as it stands with people from Arab countries or with people from the Muslim world.
The exercise works happily with any personal objects; you can get the students to interview some one’s hat, glove, handbag, rucksack, sun glasses etc... .
As preparation persuade a biologist colleague to write a letter to your students in role as an earthworm, in which s/he tells them about the earthworm’s life... something like this:
Dear Students,
I am an earthworm and I am quite different from you. I am hermaphrodite, not male or female like you. Did you know that my heart is right round the middle of my body? My main predators are… . Myself, I tend to eat... .I usually live for about... . . Etc...
Photocopy the worm’s letter so you can give each student a copy.
As preparation on the day of the class, dig a worm up from the earth and put it in a jar with some damp soil. (If the soil is too wet the worm may drown.) The worm should be reasonably large.
- Put your worm on some newspaper on a table facing the class. This tends to come as surprise to the students!
Tell them they are going to interview the worm about its life, its habits, its body layout and its fears.
Give a few starter questions:
How long do you live for?
How do you have little ones?
What do you eat?
How does the weather affect you?
Tell them to write down a dozen questions they want to put to the worm.
Go round helping them with language.
- Put a chair for a student to come and give the worm a voice.
(By now the worm should be moving a fair bit as it does not like the feeling of drying out.
To ease its discomfort cover it with a bit of damp soil.
The students put their questions for the “voice student” to answer as best s/he can.
- Thank the “voice student” and explain that the worm knew in advance that this student might get a few things wrong and so the worm decided to write them a letter.
Give out the worm’s letter.
Round the lesson off with a question and answer session and promise to tell them in the next class about any worm matters you can’t answer!
Comment: I would suggest that the worm exercise is an example of a lesson plan that can usefully be used in many CLIL situations ... say you are teaching history and you want to get students involved in thinking about Bismarck’s relationship with the Kaiser, or you are teaching chemistry and you want to focus students’ attention on the relationship between copper and other materials. I am not a CLIL teacher and do not want do more than suggest frames that might work.
Exercises of the worm type make warm sense, especially to students with strong relational or interpersonal intelligences. (See the work of Howard Gardner and Herbert Puchta’s book Multiple Intelligences published by Helbling.)
In preparation for this class ask an extravert student to prepare to speak to the class about something he or she is unlikely to have spoken to them about before, for instance the home/s his/her parents were brought up in or the most marvellous meal he can remember.
- Ask the speaker you have chosen to select two fellow students to act as his language monitors. One is to stand behind him to his right and jot down on paper everything he says which really sounds like really good English. The other one, standing behind his left shoulder, jots down all the mistakes heard or weak bits of English.
- The speaker gives his five minute speech. People from the floor can ask him questions which he/she answers. The monitors continue their note-taking.
- The three of them sit down in front of the class and the two “angels” give the speaker their feedback. Better if you, the teacher, avoid intervening.
- Break the class up into groups of four, one speaker (who chooses their topic). One listener and two mentors/angels. They play the exercise through once. (It often feels too heavy to have each person in the foursome play each of the four roles.
(The idea for this exercise came up when I heard from my Indonesian students that Muslims have two guardian angels, the right hand one noting down everything good that you do in your life and the left hand one keeping tally of the bad things. These two are your “advocates” on the day of judgement)
- Just before the class choose three strong students. Tell Student A s/he is facing a difficult problem for example s/he is a heavy drinker and s/he thinks he may have to give it up. Tell this protagonist student s/he will have 3 minutes to explain the problem to the class.
- Tell Student B their task is to stand behind student A and pour into his/her ear all the reasons for carrying on drinking. Student C stands behind Student A and explains into his/her other ear why stopping the booze is vital. The two voices from behind can sometimes contradict each other and will sometimes overlap.
- The two people doubling withdraw and the protagonist student tells the class the decision s/he has arrived at and the reasons for it.
(There are places in the world where the above problem topic could not be used for the legal reason that all alcoholic drinking is banned. Alcohol abuse may be rife in many homes so this topic might be too painful, say, in somewhere like Greenland).
When the Rumanian, Jacob Moreno, arrived as a young man in Vienna at the end of the first decade of the 20th century he discovered Freud’s work. He was over-awed by the brilliance of Feud’s discovery of the subconscious, However he felt that lying people on a couch and hoping they would drift into awareness of things they were normally unaware of was a pretty lame procedure. Moreno was deep in experimental theatre and wanted his patients to delve into their underlying mental areas by doing active drama work.
Over the next forty years Moreno built up a huge therapeutic structure that he named psychodrama.
“Doubling”, or speaking on behalf of another person, temporarily in their shoes, was one of the many ways of helping the central actor in their own personal drama. When the protagonist has managed to partially explain a problem s/he has, people from the group will come up behind him/her and speak over his/her shoulder sometimes saying things the protagonist cannot yet manage to get out. Sometimes the protagonist rejects what the double proposes and sometimes he picks it up and thinks on from it.
Yes, all the above is very searching and is part of a, to some people, quite scary therapy.
In the 1970ies a French couple, Willy and Nicole Urbain, who worked in theatre had the idea of modifying and softening the Moreno techniques for the much gentler purposes of teaching foreign languages. They called their method “Expression Spontanee”.
One of the main techniques they borrowed from Moreno was that of doubling.
When Bernard Dufeu , then working as a lecturer in French in the university of Mainz in Germany, saw “Expression Spontanee” in action he was immediately aware of its major strengths but also realised that it needed a great deal of further work to make it linguistically more efficient and psychologically safer.
Dufeu re-baptised “Expression Spontanee” “Language Psychodramaturgy” and has worked extremely hard over the past 40 years, with the help of his collaborators, to mature the method.
If you look up “Bernard Dufeu” in the HLT index of authors you will find a number of articles by him. If you google “ Psychodramaturgie Linguistique + Dufeu” you will come to the method’s main website.
What I have suggested above are ideas from Moreno, but re-jigged to make them useable in large secondary and university classes; when I say large in Southern Italian Universities I mean up to 200 people and plenty groups in China are 60/80 strong. I feel there is a need to let brilliant ideas, however watered down, reach right across the globe.
Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Drama Techniques for the English Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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