Editorial
This article was first published in English Teaching Professional Issue 46, September 2006

PFlex Your Creative Muscles!

Simon Mumford, Turkey

Simon Mumford teaches EAP at Izmir University of Economics, Turkey. He has written on using stories, visuals, drilling, reading aloud, and is especially interested in the creative teaching of grammar. E-mail: simon.mumford@ieu.edu.tr

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Random association
Reapplication
Synthesis
Metaphor

Creative thinking is a skill that can be practised and learnt by anyone. It is not difficult to understand, and a few techniques could be useful in helping us design new language learning activities by changing our thinking habits, thereby giving us fresh ideas. Here are four simple techniques and some innovations they have generated.

Random association

Taking a random word, object or idea and making a link with the area you are working on is probably the best known and simplest technique for developing creative thinking.

What’s in the fridge?

This innovation connects spelling with a fridge. Draw a box on the board and write eight or nine of the most common letters of the alphabet in it. Tell the students this box is a fridge and get them to ask you questions like Is there any butter in the fridge? Are there any apples in the fridge? If you can spell the food item with the letters on the board, you say yes, if you can’t, you say no. After a few examples, see if the students can work this out. Finally, let students play in pairs.

Manual mouse clicks

A computer mouse associated with vocabulary produced this idea. Write the words you want to teach your students on the board. Now hold your pen in the middle of the board and ask a student to direct you to one of the words, using the commands up, down, right and left. When you have reached the word, say Click! , and erase the word, replacing it with a definition for example socks - something you wear on your feet. Tell the students the pen represents the cursor and saying click is the mouse click, which causes a word to change into its meaning. Definitions should be changed back into words when clicked. Get volunteers from the class to do the same. This game can also be played in pairs with pencil, paper and eraser.

Present perfect scissors

What’s the link between the present perfect tense and scissors? Stand in front of the class, holding the scissors pointing up. Explain that the right blade (as the class see it) represents the present and the left blade represents time moving from past to present. You can now illustrate the following sentences:

1. I have lived here all my life. (Move the ‘past’ blade slowly towards the ‘present’ blade till they meet.)
2. I have been to Paris three times. (The same, but stopping three times on the way.)
3. I have just had lunch. (Open the blades slightly, then suddenly close them.)

Reapplication

This technique uses an old idea in a new way to produce an innovation. Many new ideas are developments, and improvements, of old ideas.

Jailbreak

In this adaptation of the game ‘Chinese whispers’ students sit in rows of about ten. Tell them they are prisoners and they are having dinner. Tonight is the big breakout, and vital information concerning the escape has to be passed up the line – this is the only chance they have. Give a list of messages, which could include details of meeting times, places, signals, warnings and equipment needed, to a student at one end. The messages are passed verbally, one at a time, up the line to the student at the other end, who writes the list. However, the guard (i.e. teacher) is patrolling so the information can only be passed when he is out of earshot. The rest of the time, the prisoners should make innocent conversation! At the end, compare the new lists with the originals.

Blocked views

You may have played a game where vocabulary items and their definitions are written on the board, and students are called to the front, facing away from the board, and are tested on them. In this version, the teacher stands directly in front of a seated student, thus, at the same time, nominating the student to define a word and blocking their view of the board, thus forcing them to rely on memory. Several students can be appointed as ‘view blockers’ at the same time, moving from student to student. Those who cannot remember the meaning of the word asked can change roles with the blockers.

Synthesis

This technique involves combining two (or more) ideas which are already in use to create an innovation.

Double dictation

You can combine a dictation and a test where students have to choose between alternative answers. Choose the sentence you want to dictate, and then think of an alternative for every word. If your sentence is While I was eating, I found a fly in my food, give the students the first word to get them started: While, and after that give them a choice for every word: I or of, to or was, eating or eaten, my or I, find or found, terrible or a, fly or house, and so on. The wrong alternatives should be grammatically or logically impossible. Each time, the students have to choose the correct word to write the sentence.

Smileys

Pictures are a good way of teaching vocabulary, and ‘smileys’ are familiar to most students, so we could design ‘smileys’, using keyboard symbols, to show the meanings of words. Students can be encouraged to design their own. Explaining how the ‘smiley’ represents the word may help students to remember. Here are a few examples (some require you to turn the smiley on its side):

Metaphor

With metaphor, a parallel is drawn between the teaching point and something unrelated, so that a new way of looking at the subject is generated.

Mixed doubles conversation

A tennis match can be used as a metaphor for a conversation as follows. Put the students in groups of four, two teams of two, with a male and female in each team, if possible, as in mixed doubles tennis. One person starts a conversation by saying a sentence or two on a subject. Then the turn passes to one player in the other team who must continue speaking on the same subject, then the turn passes back to the second player of the first team, then the second player of the second team, then back to the first player of the first team, and so on. The idea is to take short turns to keep the conversation moving quickly. If you like, penalise slow or irrelevant turns by awarding points to the other team. Score as in tennis, 15-love, etc.

Playing the piano

Drilling a sentence can be compared to playing the piano. Write a sentence of up to ten words on the board. Extend both hands out in front of you and ask the students to do the same. Say the first word and move the little finger of your left hand down, as if playing the piano. Say the next word and move the ring finger on the left hand, then the next word and the middle finger and so on. Do the whole sentence like this and get the students to do the same. Practise sections of the sentence before putting the whole together. Emphasise stressed words with a more definite finger movement. Keep practising until the class can ‘play’ the sentence fluently.

Magic eraser

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could erase your past mistakes in life, just as you can with written mistakes? Put the students in pairs. One tells the other a mistake they made in the past, the other listens, and when the story is finished, waves the eraser over the first student’s head, saying, for example, I erase this mistake; you have never had a car crash. Then change roles. The language point, of course, is past versus present perfect.

Like language learning, creativity is an ability anyone can acquire, however it does need study, practice and application. I have found Robert Harris’s article ‘Introduction to Creative Thinking’ (www.virtualsalt.com/crebook1.htm) very helpful.

Please check the Methodology and Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.