Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 1; January 2002
Teacher Resource Books Preview
Using the Mother Tongue
The Mother Tongue as a Resource in the Foreign Language Classroom
By Sheelagh Deller and Mario Rinvolucri
( Forthcoming with ETp Delta in late 2002 )
( these are Sheelagh exercises ) - Secondary and adult
Three Phase Discussions
Type of Class : monolingual /
multilingual with at least 2 students per language
Teacher : doesn't need to know students' mother tongue
Level : lower intermediate
Purpose : to encourage students to listen to each other and to relay other people's opinions accurately.
- Set up a discussion topic that will interest your class. You could do this by offering a choice and getting the class to vote on their favourite. Alternatively ask students to write suggestions on the board and then have a vote.
- Put students in shared mother tongue groups (preferably between 3 and 6 per group).
- Each group appoints a scribe to make notes in MT on the main points they cover. They discuss the topic in MT for about 10 minutes.
- The scribe reads out the points that were made one at a time. As a group they then translate their discussion, point by point, into TL.
- In a monolingual class re-group the students so that there is at least one student from each original group in the new groups. Each student reports on the discussion they just had with their previous group, using TL.
In multilingual classes re-group them into multi-lingual groups of about four. They also report on their discussions in TL. They will have an obvious need to use the TL at this point.
Note
This process enables students to think of the content before embarking on a complicated discussion in TL. They also have the responsibility of relaying what they and their group discussed to other students, thereby ensuring that everyone takes part.
