Three Ideas for the Language Classroom
Daniela Villani, Italy
Daniela Villani teaches at Scuola Media ‘G. Cassano’ in Trecate, Italy.
E-mail: borando@libero.it
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Living the map
The White-Paper Syndrome
A language is not maths!
The activity was carried out in one of my third year classes of Middle School, with students aged 13-14. The cultural topic was the USA. The lexical focus was jobs.
The students visited Daniel Siddiqui’s website (www.livingthemap.com) and learnt about the various jobs Daniel tried out during his 50-50-50 project (50 different jobs in 50 different states in 50 weeks). They saw Daniel’s photos for each of the states he had visited and found out that each of the jobs he got was in some way exemplar to the state: cheese maker in Wisconsin, surf instructor in the Hawaii, park ranger in Wyoming, meteorologist in Ohio, petroleum engineer in Texas, corn farmer in Nebraska, cellar master in California, lobsterman in Maine, and so on. It was like finding out the ‘quintessence’ of the fifty states! And it was an interesting way to see how multifarious the USA is.
As a follow up, one of the students had the idea of doing the same for the 20 Italian regions – finding out jobs which are typical of each of the regions. And the result of their group work was quite interesting. Here’s a selection of it.
Ski instructor in the Valle d’Aosta, fisherman in Sardinia, tourist guide in Lazio, lifeguard in Emilia Romagna, fashion photographer in Lombardy, worker in the automobile industry in Piedmont, sailor in Friuli Venezia Giulia, florist in Liguria, marble dealer in Tuscany, orange farmer in Sicily, chocolate manufacturer in Umbria, wine maker in Abruzzo, gondolier in Veneto, shepherd in Calabria, cook in Basilicata, pizza maker in Campania, olive picker in Apulia, alpine ranger in Trentino Alto Adige, worker in a shoe factory in the Marche, craftsman in Molise.
After that we discussed whether an experience like Daniel’s could be possible in Italy, why or why not. Most of the people in the class thought it couldn’t, for a series of reasons - lack of flexibility of the job market was reason number one but they also mentioned attachment to family and lack of such an adventurous spirit among the Italian youth.
After the class discussion we read an article about the same topic which was published in the daily paper La Stampa in the October 15th 2009 issue (page 23). Economist Giacomo Vaciago, who commented on this, reached about the same conclusions as the students’: impossible to do something like that in Italy! He pointed out that in our country you usually get a job only if you know the boss or someone who can recommend you to the boss. Very little credit is generally given to young people who apply for a job without being recommended by someone.
The activity proved to be a good way to explore some cultural and social differences between our country and the US. I recommend it to other teachers!
How about the kid who won’t write a word in the test you have assigned to the class? It seldom happens but it does. Total refusal. Better not write a thing rather than try and make a lot of mistakes. Better not take any risks, better not show the teacher how poor my performance is. This is probably what crosses a student’s mind when he doesn’t even try.
The other day an older student who was put in my class after failing a couple of exams acted exactly like that. I gave the class a revision test covering a few points from the previous year’s syllabus and he didn’t write a word.
The next period I gave him a different assignment: Write all that you remember from your English lessons so far (words, phrases and grammar rules). Anything that comes to your mind! You have 45 minutes.
I wrote the three headings on a white sheet for him and asked him to fill the whole paper in. Well, he did, he actually filled the whole paper with words (a lot), phrases (a few) and grammar rules (not many!). This way he had shown me that he wasn’t a complete failure and that he knew quite a bit of English.
P.S.
After he got his paper back with an encouraging note he did the same test as his classmates and scored 6 out of 10.
Like most teachers I guess, I sometimes give my beginner classes tests that are as objective as possible - exercises of reordering or filling the gaps with clear, self-evident, one-to-one correspondences. They are easy to grade and to evaluate. But almost every time some of my students find a way to puzzle me and provide a solution that was unexpected.
Here are a couple of examples:
1. Reorder the sentences.
- are in gym They the. They are in the gym.
- is Britain not from Martin. Martin is not from Britain.
- brother is old How your? How old is your brother?
But Andrea wrote: How is your old brother?
Just fine! I hadn’t thought about this possibility! Actually, Andrea candidly admitted that he was unaware of the meaning of the sentence he had written. But we discussed it in the class and everybody became aware of the two different sentences you can build up with those four words.
2. Complete the questions with What / Where / When / Who / Why.
- .........are those boys over there?
- .........are my books?
- .........is she happy?
- .........is your email address?
- .........is John’s birthday party?
Because I hadn’t said ‘Use each of the words only once’, they came up with lots of different solutions.
For number 1, for example: Why are those boys over there? (What I expected was WHO, but… just fine! It works like that too)
For number 3: When is she happy? (I had only thought of WHY)
For number 5: Where is John’s birthday party? ( WHEN was the choice I had in mind)
In conclusion, what is so obvious for you may not be obvious at all for your students. And each individual mind follows different paths. Fortunately!
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
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