Giving Students a Voice: A Classroom Phrase Display

Ángel Luis Pérez Vela, Spain

Ángel Luis Pérez Vela has been teaching English since 1993 and has experience both in Secondary and Adult Education. He has also taught Business English and has run several teacher training courses locally. He is now teaching general English at the Official School of Languages of Murcia (Spain). E-mail: angelluis@eoimurcia.org

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Background
Procedure
Follow-ups
Methodological implications
References

Background

A British teacher once told me that our schools looked like hospitals. Unlike other countries in Europe there is little tradition in Spain at least in Secondary and Adult Education of using classrooms and schools as a springboard for a variety of learning or educational purposes. The activity detailed below is aimed at making a better use of our classroom space in order to consolidate and brush up some previously learnt language.

Procedure

At the end of each didactic unit (each unit might take about two weeks to complete and revolves around a lexical topic) I would give out blank strips of reused paper to students and I would invite them to choose a phrase that they have learnt in the unit and that for any reason they liked and they thought they would use themselves.

I would let them flip through their textbook, notes and extra handouts for a few minutes. Then, I would get them to write down the sentences/phrases (and their names!) in big capital letters before collecting them and reading them aloud as I show them to the class. The following day I would put them up on the walls.

My advanced students have come up with phrases like: “we need to put things under perspective”; “that’s a storm in a teacup”; “It left me cold”; “…and stuff like that”; “I’m having second thoughts”; “much to my shame”; “under the circumstances”, etc.

It is quite important to give students absolute freedom to choose the language they please. None are wrong. The only actual restriction is that students should preferably choose phrases or short sentences instead of isolated words and also that the samples should be self-explanatory with no extremely difficult language in them.

This year I have virtually wrapped up the walls of my classroom with phrases chosen by the students themselves. And I would not take the phrases off the walls until the end of the every term (it would be counterproductive to leave them on for any longer than that!).

It seems quite obvious that students do not pay attention to what is going on in the class all the time. Time for daydreaming or healthy distraction is and should be allowed. And it might well be that some students will set their eyes on the phrases strategically displayed on the walls… and learn them!

Follow-ups

1. A way of making students aware of the phrases displayed on the walls is by asking them to walk around the classroom for one minute. Then the teacher would say a word contained in one of the phrases (for example “perspective”) and the students would have to find the strip with the word as quickly as possible (“put things under perspective”). This is often an enjoyable and energetic warm-up. This can also be used to take off all the phrases to make room for the next ones.
2. Modern art exhibition. I leant this activity from Mario Rinvolucri. Students work in pairs and are given a phrase from the walls. In three minutes, they should draw a picture that goes with the phrase as part of an exhibition in a museum. The picture is then put up again on the wall above its phrase.
3. The teacher would prepare longer sentences and show them on a Powerpoint presentation. These sentences would have blanks that would be filled in with the phrases on the display. Students have to go and take the corresponding phrase off the wall.

Methodological implications

Even if the idea sounds simple, there are a few interesting methodological principles that lie behind this rather innocent classroom activity:

• A bit of learner training. This is part of what I call free vocabulary learning. According to my experience, after reading a text or listening to a recording, students (especially advanced students) usually focus on the oddest words when it comes to learning vocabulary. They will be happy to learn words just because they look new and difficult (or because the textbook author thought they were meant to be learnt!). And they will try to remember those intricate and new words even if they are not going to need them at all when they are communicating in the L2. I am not saying we should discourage students from acquiring new lexis, but they would be better off if they looked at the language they already know, but never thought of using themselves. Making progress in the L2 is often a question of activating passive knowledge rather than enlarging their lists of vocabulary or grammatical structures.
• Going beyond the word level. A lot of students (and advanced students are no exception) understand lexical learning as making lists of isolated words and finding translations for them in their L1. This might work at some elementary levels when students are learning concrete language, but it is advisable to give students some instruction in phrase-learning or, to put it in the terminology of the Lexical Approach, get students to study and remember examples of grammaticalised lexis and collocations. That is why I would get my students to pick out short sentences or phrases as in the examples above, in order for them to see exactly how the new words they learn are put into use.
• Cyclical learning. The idea that learning does not take place in a linear way is often neglected by language teachers. By asking students to get back at their materials, they are re-learning or re-discovering samples of language they might have forgotten. Likewise the teacher can draw students’ attention to the phrases already displayed should they come up again in a class activity, which often does!
• A personal touch. Students love seeing their names on their walls as authors of beautifully written sentences in English. Weak students in particular get an extra push as there is no correction implied on the part of the teacher. All examples are accepted as valid.

References

Rinvolucri, Mario (2002) Humanising your Coursebook. Delta Publishing

Lewis, Michael (1997) Implementing the Lexical Approach. LTP

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