Parikrma Teacher Training

Rani Innes, India and UK

Rani Innes is a freelance business communications trainer and an English language teacher trainer. She specialises in training corporate clients in skills like effective business writing, successful presentations and negotiation, grammar for business, team building and leadership, non-verbal communication and accent neutralisation. She has trained school teachers and professionals from private and public sectors in Malaysia, India, Japan, the Middle East and the UK. With a background in English language (DELTA) and literature (MA), Rani draws on 30 years experience as an English language teacher and teacher trainer, vice principal in a sixth form college in the UK, and senior trainer for the British Council.
E-mail: raninnes@aol.com

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Introduction
Teaching with limited resources and little or no preparation
Cutting TTT

Introduction

This is the second of my two-part article related to my work with Parikrma, a non-profit organisation in Bangalore, India. My earlier article introduced Parikrma and the amazing work they do in feeding, educating and nurturing underprivileged children. Here I will talk about two specific workshops from my 4-month teacher training for this organisation. The focus here was on:

1. teaching with limited resources (or no resources at all), and with little or no preparation ( useful when a teacher is called upon to do an emergency cover for a colleague, for instance)
2. making lessons student-centred and interactive by reducing TTT (teacher talk time). This was an extreme example of a demonstration lesson teaching grammar without any teacher talk at all. Instead, I used a combination of approaches and methodology: story telling, miming and The Silent Way

The rationale was that:

• Some schools may have limited resources.
• Teachers may be called upon to cover for an absent or sick colleague at short notice.
• Children, even grown up students, like story telling the world over.
• Miming is a challenging and fun way to teach grammar and language functions – much more than using textbooks.
• In most schools in India, like in many Asian countries, the approach for language teaching is teacher-dominated. The teacher talks almost all the time and the students usually listen passively. I wanted to turn this approach on its head and make teaching grammar student-centred.
• There is heavy dependence on text books.
• Finally, I wanted to show that grammar is not something that lives between the pages of a book but is part of our every day real-life communication. So this approach was a way to humanise language teaching and make it real and relevant to the students.

Teaching with limited resources and little or no preparation

1. Level: pre-intermediate or intermediate
2. Language function: making comparisons
3. Target language: comparative forms
4. Skills: main – speaking and listening; sub - writing
5. Materials needed: board and markers (optional Cuisenaire rods)
6. Duration of lesson: 90 mins with the writing task at the end; 60 mins without

Step 1: 10 minutes - On the board, draw an oval representing a “country”; draw a line across the middle dividing it in half. On the top half, draw sandy beaches along the “coast line”, sea, fish, birds, bright sun, palm trees, a couple of “villas” etc. On the bottom half, draw apartment blocks (simply tall and narrow joined rectangles with dots for lights), blocks of factories with chimneys belching smoke, cars and buses on lanes, stick people, etc. Keep talking to the students, keeping them involved all the time by eliciting a name for this imaginary country (my group chose Palomas) and names of the two ‘states’ or halves (Coral Coast and Delta). Remember, they choose the names. The drawing can be extremely simple and crude – and quick. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life but our students appreciate we are language teachers not artists! It will elicit laughter and jokes which is fine, and also give them a degree of confidence to see the teacher not mind being a novice at something, or even being laughed at!

Step 2: Whole class. 10 minutes - Elicit and write in a column on one side of the board, a list of nouns (pollution, weather, beauty, entertainment, transportation, education, cost/pace of living, people, etc.); elicit adjectives (convenient, exciting, beautiful, crowded, expensive, friendly, fast, pretty, dirty, large, big, hot, good, bad, etc.) and write them in a column on the other side.

Step 3: Group work. 15 minutes - Ask where the students would prefer to live. Put them in two groups according to their choice of place. Instruct them to discuss in their groups the reasons for their choice. Give them 10 minutes. The focus here is on fluency. A scribe can take down their reasons.

Step 4: Whole class. 10 minutes - A spokesperson in each group reports the reasons for their choice to the whole class. Make sure they use comparative forms in their sentences and write these on the board. You don’t have to write all the sentences but select sentences that demonstrate all the different forms of comparison. I want to live in Coral Coast because it is cleaner and prettier than Delta. I want to live in Delta because it is more exciting than Coral Coast. Peer-correct any errors and give feedback at the end.

Step 5: 10 minutes - Finally, eliciting the “rules” from the students’ own sentences, make a grid on the board and write the comparative forms (and superlative, if you wish). Let the students tell you what the rules are.

If time permits, and to make it more challenging for higher levels, equal and unequal comparisons can also be practised by using Cuisenaire rods.

Step 6: Individual work. 30 minutes - Finally, ask them to write, individually, a paragraph (could be homework) comparing the two states or even their own hometown and another city. You end with a product and this also allows for checking accuracy and giving individual feedback.

Cutting TTT

1. Level: elementary
2. Language focus: past simple and continuous
3. Materials: Cuisenaire rods, board and markers, and a cardigan or shawl (mime the last if you don’t have one)
4. Duration of lesson: 90 mins with the writing task, 60 mins without

Step 1: 10 minutes - Check students’ understanding of past simple and continuous tense by eliciting answers of what they did the day/week before and what they were doing the day/week before. Write sample sentences on board using red for past simple and blue for past continuous.

I played with my friends after school yesterday.
At 8 pm last night, I was eating dinner.

Step 2: 10 minutes - As a warmer, mime simple actions like brushing teeth, washing face, etc; get the students to come up, read written cues and mime the actions from the cues which the others guess, eliciting sentences in the past tense all the while (turn this into a game or a competition if time permits and if the students find it fun).

Step 3: 5 minutes - Now that you have checked their understanding of the contrasting tense and of what miming is, say you will mime a story - two times. The first time they simply watch. The second time, they narrate the story as you mime. Show them *two Cuisenaire rods and explain that the shorter red rod is past simple and the longer blue one is past continuous, the same colour coding as on the board. During the narration, if they make a mistake, hold up the rod to show which tense is needed.

Step 4: 10 minutes - Get them to stand or sit in a semi-circle around you. ‘Zip up and lock’ your lips and give the ‘key’ to a student for safe-keeping. Write ‘One night while I was sleeping,…’ on the board (this creates a sense of anticipation and gives the story a context); then mime the story:

‘…suddenly I was woken up hearing a sound; I opened the window, it was raining and windy outside; it was cold, I put on my sweater and shoes and opened the door, went out, astonished at finding a little kitten in the rain (crouch and meow), it was meowing, I picked it up and brought it in, gave it some milk, put it down on a cushion, took off my shoes and cardigan and went back to bed’.

Add more details if you wish. The students watch silently.

Step 5: 10 minutes - Mime again and this time the students call out the story as you mime it. Don’t forget to hold up the rods as and when they use the wrong tense. Since you can’t speak, **you need to use body language and gestures to indicate when they are right, when they need to be silent, when they need to repeat or speak louder etc. Good classroom management skills are essential.

The benefits are many. This works particularly well in a class with shy students as it involves team work and there is no focus on any individual student; it is engaging, you are eliciting not telling the grammar; it is fun provided, by using classroom control, you are able to keep it from getting chaotic. It helps to do the vocabulary preparation before the story and final feedback at the end (use the same colours as the rods on the board for the two tenses – colour coding helps retention). Use realia like a sweater, a cushion, a toy kitten etc, if you wish.

Step 6: 10 minutes – Ask one or two volunteer students to mime this story, or better still, take them out of the class and give them a different story, short and simple, to mime practising the same contrasting tenses.

For extension or home work, the students write out the story individually which the teacher then checks for accuracy.

*If you do not have rods, use the colour markers/pens instead.
**The students should be familiar with your body language and understand your gestures for “correct!”, “well done!”, “louder”, “shh, quiet”, “all together”, “repeat” , and any other instruction you need to give them without speaking.

I was lucky to have motivated and keen teachers who willingly assumed the role of their students. It was good to hear teachers of other languages who also trained in these sessions report that the story-telling through miming worked well in their own language classes and drew out the shy students. The most gratifying feedback was when they said the children came up with their own stories and mimed much better than they did!

Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.