Editorial
For more ideas on using the coursebook creatively, please look at: The Alternative Way: Green Line 2 Ernst Klett Verlag GmbH by Mario Rinvolucri in the July 2007 issue of HLT and The Alternative Way: Green Line 3 Klett Ernst Klett Verlag GmbH in the June 2009 issue of HLT
Visit the publisher’s website at www.klett.de/sixcms
The Alternative Way: Green Line 1 Klett Ernst Klett Verlag GmbH
Mario Rinvolucri, UK
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Introduction
Part 1:Generic exercises for working on text
Running Dictation
First letter last letter dictation
Interrupted Reading
Correct your teacher
Words/phrases students like
Words/phrases that seem very English
Chopping out words to improve a text
Learning a passage by heart
Weeding text of intrusive words
Students control how a dictation is given or “teacher as tape-recorder”
Dictogloss
Too many questions
Part 2: Generic exercises for working on grammar
Miming Grammar
Expanding sentences on the page
Expanding a sentence round the group orally
The exercises you will find below were commissioned by the Klett publishing house in Germany to go in the Teacher’s Book accompanying the textbook Green Line 1.
HLT is grateful for permission to re-publish this material on the web. All the exercises refer to material in different units of Green Line 1 Student Book, but you can use them equally effectively with the texts you have in your current coursebook.
- Example text: Sam p.14
- If you have 30 students make 8-10 copies of the text.
- In class stick the copies up along the front wall of your classroom.
- Pair the students. Ask all the A people to stand where they can read the text copies.
The B students sit at the back of the room with pen and paper at the ready.
- Tell the students that the A’s should read the first two lines, memorise them, go
across the room to their partner and dictate them to them. The B role is to write.
The readers then go back and bring their partners more text.
- Half way through the exercise ask the writers and the readers to swap roles.
- When most people have completed the text ask them to go back to their normal
places, open their books and check for spelling mistakes.
Pluses: This classical technique allows the students to move and be active. It forces work on pronunciation and spelling. It gets them grappling with the text.
Minuses: The first time you use the activity the release of energy in the students may make them over-boisterous
Variation: Do the same exercise but not in pairs. Each student reads at the front of the room and writes at the back. This is a quieter and more reflective way of working.
For further ideas: see Dictation many ways, Paul Davis et al., CUP, 1989
- Example text: No Problem C p.21
- Explain that you are going to dictate some sentences to them and that they are not to
write out the words in full. They should write the first and last letter of each word.
So if you dictate “a” they write “a”.
If you dictate “an” they write “an”
If you dictate “the” they write “t—e”, leaving a sensible gap.
If you dictate “problem” they write “p m”.
- Dictate section C on Page 21 and dictate slowly
- Pair the students and ask them to write in the missing letters, without
looking at the book
- They open their books and check for errors.
Pluses: this activity helps students to visualise English words and so helps them to spell better.
Minuses: The activity focuses minds on form rather than meaning.
For Further ideas: see Humanising your Coursebook, Rinvolucri, Delta Books, 2003.
Example text: At Home in Greenwich A , P.26
- Before opening the books and reading for themselves, the students listen to you
reading the text three times.
Your first reading is in a slow quiet voice
Your second in a fast agitated voice
Your third reading is in a whisper ( they all lean forward to hear).
- Now read the text stopping expectantly so they complete you utterance like this (
their books are still closed):
You: “ The Jackson……. ( upward intonation)
Sts: “ family”
- Carry on this way stopping as suggested:
My parents are Grace and Ted……………….
They are ok but can be…………..
I’m an only………….
There’s our cat Tiger but she is only ……..
Our house is in Hither Farm Rd, with a …………..
There’s shed ……………..
My drums are there and my chemistry set……
It’s my….
.. Friends are Ok there- but not……….
- Repeat step 2 so the pace of the completions is faster.
Pluses: this is an excellent exercise for students with good ears.
Minuses: the exercise can favour the noisier, more confident students.
Words/phrases the students dislike
- Example text: Barker’s story P.49
- As above, only ask them to underline what displeases them.
Example text: Sam and Tiger first two paragraphs, p 44
- Before the students open their books, read the text to them three
times:
do a first sad reading
do a second happy reading
do a third very serious reading
- You will now read the text to them wrong. Their job is to spot the
mistakes and correct you.
Read this text:
Sam and Tiger
It is four o’clock on Saturday morning ( pause for their correction)
Terry and her ( correction) family are in Bristol for the weekend.
Sam goes to Terry’s mouse.
There is a note from Terry on the bed.
First Terry writes the note and then he goes into the shed.
He cannot find the dog food but then he hears the tin next to Terry’s
Drums.
“Mm- chicken flavour. This looks tasty! Tiger, where am I?
Tiger comes in and sees the tin. She says: “woof, woof”.
“ Hi , Lion, here’s your food” say Sam. First he makes a hole in the
tin and eats Tiger.
- Read the text with mistakes in twice more till they are correcting you
loudly and energetically
Pluses: The technique provokes laughter and kids of this age love correcting teacher. The focus is strongly on meaning.
Minuses: some colleagues may be worried that showing students semantic trespasses may lead them into temptation. These colleagues are wild behaviourists and are wrong!
For further ideas: see Vocabulary, Morgan et al., OUP revised edition, 2004
- Example text: Barker’s story P. 48
- Ask the students to carefully read P 48.
- Now ask them to underline any words or phrases they like.
These may be words they like the shape of, the sound of or the meaning of and
for whatever reason.
- Ask various students to read their words and then to explain, in mother tongue,
why they have chosen them. ( Given the level, mother tongue use is sensible
here.)
Pluses: You will be amazed at the interesting things you learn from your students, unexpected things. The activity allows students to express some of their feelings towards target language words. Vocabulary learning is not without affectivity.
Minuses: This activity breaks the taboo against German in the English classroom and some colleagues may see this as a theological no-no.
- Example text: Transport in Greenwich p.58
- Explain to the students that ugh in line 10 of the dialogue
is a very English way of expressing disgust. Ask them to underline
two or three other words or expressions that they feel to be very English.
- Proceed as in the two earlier exercises.
Pluses: this is an excellent contrastive exercise.
Minuses: A few students find the concept of “ very English” hard to grasp, at first.
- Example text: the does game p.62
- Pair the students and tell them that most texts can be improved by chopping out
words. Give them this example, from line 6:
It’s my turn now becomes much more natural and colloquial if you chop out: It’s. Explain that My turn now is exactly what Emma would be likely to say.
Ask the students to work together to cut out at least 5 words from the
rest of the conversation.
- Tell them to fill the board with their shortened sentences. Check that
they have excised things that can be usefully and correctly excised.
Explain your decisions.
- Get the pairs practising the “lightened” dialogues.
Pluses: student become aware of more colloquial forms of the language, as described in the pioneering work of Carter and McCarthy. They also learn a major editing skill for writing in any language: weeding out redundancy.
Minuses: Some students may be shy of improving their textbook. They
may never have been asked to do this before.
- Example text: Captain Terry and the Pirates p.67 E
- While the students are doing other work pull out one person with good handwriting
to copy P. 67 E into the board down as far as: and wins the fight.
- Call the group together and ask three or four different people to read the passage
aloud. After each reading correct pronunciation by silently pointing to the word
misread and indicate silently that you want the person to read again. Mostly students
are capable of self or peer-correction.
- Now rub out three or four words here and there in the passage. Ask
a student to read the text , including the words which have gone.
Encourage other students to help the reader. Keep on silently correcting
pronunciation.
- Bit by bit rub out most words in the passage so that the last student “reads” whole
text which has now 90% disappeared.
Pluses: Some students really benefit from learning gobbets of text off by heart. The activity is excellent for getting students to correct their own pronunciation
Minuses: None occur to me for this venerable but really useful activity.
- Example text: The birthday cake p.78
- Prepare the text by adding in irrelevant words e.g.:
Today and tomorrow Sam, is making his crocodile’s birthday cake. There is little time now before his great granddad’s birthday. He is late again and again and again.
Grandma has got lots of very bad recipe books. “ Here’s a good recipe for a birthday cake , “ she tells Sam.
“Cool. How much sugar salt and pepper do I need? And how many millions of eggs? “ he wants to know.
Sam is having a lot of fun in the kitchen bath. But what a mess!
The bag of sugar falls over. Then Sam sits down on box of cat’s eggs. And a few eggs break. There is lots of flour everywhere in the kitchen and on the roof, too.
( In preparing your own text do not mark the intrusive words by a change of typeface!)
- Pair the students and ask them to delete the words that have no business in the text.
To make it easier you can allow them to read the clear text first. Round off the
exercise by writing the “intruders” up on the board.
Pluses: This activity focuses students’ mind strongly on the meaning of the text.
Minuses: The exercise can be hard for weaker students, so it makes sense to put weak and strong students together
- Example text Stories for a ghost p.82 , first 13 lines
- Tell the students you are going to give them a dictation but that you are going to
role-play a tape recorder which they can control.
You are controlled by these three oral commands:
Start!
Go back to….( and say to where)
Stop!
- Ask them to set the process in motion by saying Start! . You begin reading and
carry on till some one shouts Stop!
Continue the dictation this way, being very carefully to stop as soon as you are told
to and to start again from exactly where you stopped, even in mid word!
- Ask the students to check their dictations by opening the book at P.82.
Pluses: the excitement , for the students, of controlling the teacher. The thrill of playful power.
Schiller said that to be fully human you need to be able to play and that to know how to play you need to be fully human. ( He must have known, after all those years he spent in a Prussian military boarding school)
Minuses: the boisterous noise of commands and counter-commands.
- Example text: Penzance p.90 lines 10-14
- Tell your class you want them to listen very carefully to a short text.
- Read it to them once.
- Now tell them that you want them to try and remember it this time and write the
text out from memory the moment you finish speaking.
- Read the text a second time.
- They write as much as they can.
- Tell them to work in pairs and get as much down as they can.
- Give them a third reading
- They fill in more of the gaps. Give them a fourth and fifth reading if necessary.
- Ask one person to come to the board without what they have
written. This person is the class secretary. Students round the room tell this person
what to write. Yourself go to back of the room and do not intervene to sort out
differences or recall. Let the group work autonomously.
- Finally, ask one student to read the passage out from the book, very
slowly, so that the secretary can correct what is on the board.
Pluses: The activity gets students working very hard and independently of you. They are doing serious listening comprehension.
Minuses: When you first introduce the exercise some students may feel it is too hard and feel frustrated.
- Example text: Grace Darling’s adventure p. 96 A and B
- Prepare a wide ranging set of questions like this about sections A and B
- Does the story happen in summer?
- How old is Grace?
- What colour is the sea?
- Does she live in an ordinary house?
- What year is it?
- Is it very warm in the story?
- How many brothers does she have?
- Does she love her father?
- Where is the ship?
- Did her father love her?
- What kind of woman is her mother?
- Who does she want to help?
- Can her father take the boat out?
- Is the boat a big one?
- Do you like the pictures in the book?
- Why does her father want to wait?
- How old is her father?
- Do you like storms ?
- Does your mother like the sea?
- Does Grace have a dog?
- Ask the students to read sections A and B and help them
with any hard words.
- ive them the questions and ask them to cross out 10 of them that they do not like
for whatever reason. Avoid guiding them about this. They do the crossing out
individually.
- Pair the students. Ask them to swap papers . Now tell person A in each pair to ask B
the questions not crossed out. B answers these questions.
They then work the other way round.
Pluses: Students get satisfaction from getting rid of the questions they do not like and the activity offers them plenty detailed reading practice.
Minuses: Some students are initially shocked at the “wickedness” of crossing questions out! They get over this quite fast!
( I will not link each of these techniques to a specific structure taught on a specific page of the book. They are techniques that can be used to teach whatever structures you decide need working on. )
Students become a sentence
- Tell 14 students to come to the front of the class. Designate each boy or girl as a
word, a punctuation mark or a morpheme.
You are a full stop.
You are “she”
You are “Greenwich”
You are “ s”
" " “in”
" " ”live”
“do”
“North”
“where”
“a question mark”
“ a comma”
“actually”
“South”
“ not”
- Say the first sentence and ask the relevant students to line up facing the rest of the
class and “ become “ the sentence:
SHE LIVES IN GREENWICH.
- Each student says their part.
- Have the “live” student and the “s” student cuddle up close to each other and each say their part in quick, smooth succession.
Ask the “full stop “ to do something properly full-stoppish!
DOES SHE LIVE IN NORTH GREENWICH?
- Have the “do” and the “s” student cuddle up together and tell “do “ that with “s” she becomes “da”.
Get the question mark to do something question mark-like!
ACTUALLY , SHE LIVES IN SOUTH GREENWICH.
- Make sure the comma mimes well!
SHE DOES LIVE IN SOUTH GREENWICH, DOESN’T SHE?
- With this sentence “do” and “s” have to move quickly to form the question tag ,
integrating “not”, which in their company becomes “n’t”.
- On reading the above you may think “ why complicate life so much?” Why have
students “become “sentences? The real answer is that a minority of very
kinaesthetic students, mainly boys, only understand English grammar when they
become the third person ”s” or the “do” helping verb. Such exercise wake the whole
class up but seriously help the kinaesthetic students understand how the grammar of
English works.
It is clear that you can use the above exercise type to practise any structure in the English language.
- Get an extrovert student to come out and tell them you are going to ask them to
mime a sentence you give them. Tell them this must be done in complete silence
and tell the group that they must find the exact words the student has on their
sentence card.
- Give the student this sentence card:
I USUALLY GO TO THE GREENWICH ORCHESTRA
- Make sure the miming student draws out the exact words from their fellow students.
When the sentence has been accurately guessed get another student to put it up on
the board.
- Get a new student out to mime the words on the next sentence card:
I DON’T ALWAYS DO MY HOMEWORK
- And try these sentences with new mimers:
MY FRIEND RIDES HIS BIKE TO SCHOOL
I GO SWIMMING WITH MY PARENTS
WE OFTEN GO TO THE CINEMA
The beauty of this mime work is that the students practise the grammar you have in mind, but on the way they also come up with loads of language that you and they possibly did not know they somehow knew. Most students know more language than both they and you think they do.
For further ideas: see Drama techniques in the language classroom, Maley and Duff, CUP, 2nd revised edition, 2005
- Give the students a simple sentence like We can take the bus.
- There are 5 words in this sentence. Ask the students to work in pairs and write eight
new sentences each of 6 or 7 words. They must retain the original 5 words, which
must stay in the same order vis a vis each other. For example:
We can take the bus, ok? ( 6)
She said we can take the bus. (7)
Only we can take the bus. (6)
We alone can take the bus (6)
We cannot take the bus ( 6)
We can take the green bus (6)
We can usually take the bus here.( 7)
- I have given you a lot of examples to show you the power of adding one word or
two to a base sentence. Only give the students a couple of examples to illustrate the
rules.
- As they work, writing their 8 sentences go round helping and correcting.
- Ask several students to read out all their 8 sentences.
This kind of heuristic exercise allows people with little language so far to play convincingly with what they know.
- Give the students a base sentence e.g.: I LIKE DOGS
- Tell them to expand it orally round the class by adding one word or two. This time
the sentence will get longer and longer . It must always be a complete sentence.
- This is how it might go:
St 1: I like black dogs
St 2: I don’t like black dogs
St 3: I don’t like white and black dogs
Teacher: …black and white….
St 3: I don’t like black and white dogs
St 4 I don’t like black and white dogs in here. Etc…..
- Students who are good with their ears tend to like this kind of exercise.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Making the Most of a Coursebook course at Pilgrims website.
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