Put on the Red Light

Jamie Keddie

Jamie Keddie is a writer and teacher based in Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: jamiekeddie@hotmail.com

Susie wants her class to look at a poem by a man called Gordon Sumner. It is called Deborah. She gives out a copy to each student and asks them in pairs to decide what Deborah does for a living.

Deborah
You don't have to put on the red light
Those days are over
You don't have to sell your body to the night
Deborah
You don't have to wear that dress tonight
Walk the streets for money
You don't care if it's wrong or if it's right

Some students seem to think that she is a prostitute (Deborah that is, not Susie). Some aren't sure. Susie asks them to isolate 6 words or items from the poem that may suggest this. In order of importance, they select: -

Red light
Sell your body
Streets
Night
Money
Wrong / right

Susie decides that it's time to come clean - she tells her learners that this is not a poem at all. It's a song.

Today, Gloria is on the ball. She says that she knew she had seen these words before and correctly identifies the song as Roxanne. Then everyone realises that Susie changed the name to deceive them. Some of them frown at her and roll their eyes back but basically, they forgive her. They also realize that Gordon Sumner is of course better known as Sting.

Susie now takes back all the poems and gives out the following gap fill. Can her students remember the missing words?

Deborah You don't have to __________ (1) on the red light Those days are __________ (2) You don't have to ________ (3) your body to the night Deborah You don't have to ________ (4) that dress tonight __________ (5) the __________ (6) for money You don't care if it's __________ (7) or if it's __________ (8)

Everyone's face is blank. Susie attempts to tell her Spanish students that you can't just put something. You have to put it somewhere. Yolanda is a bit confused. She says that if you put your dress, your aren't putting it anywhere, you are just putting it. Then Arnau suggests that the phrases should be you don't have to put you that dress tonight and this turns into you don't have to put yourself that dress tonight. (This is a direct translation from Spanish - ponerte ese vestido).

Susie is a bit confused. After all, this is logical but then she decides to make her rule more technical. She writes on the board: -

She explains that the verb "put" requires an object and a preposition. Neither the words "you" nor "yourself" are prepositions. She asks the class to think of examples.

"Put a record on"

"I put the pen on the table"

"You don't have to put on the red light"

"Put the table"

"No - we don't put the table," Susie says. "We set the table"

But the class are adamant that there must be something that you can just put. They ask questions that involve words like always and never. Susie decides to take her students to the computer in the corner of the classroom. She logs onto the British National Corpus simple search: -

She types in the word "put" and clicks on "Solve it!" She is told that in the corpus database, 57,637 results were found for the word. She draws her learners' attention to a few of the fifty random textualised examples that are given. For example: -

In each case she asks her students to focus on structure before meaning since she wants them to be able to recognize that the verb "put" is accompanied by objects and prepositions as discussed. She asks students one at a time to identify the objects and the prepositions in different examples. Then they talk about meanings.

They look at collocations such as put down, put forward and put back. They remember that next weekend they are going to have to put the clocks back. One learner asks what "don't put me on the back burner" means - a lyric that he liked from a Killers song.

Some of the students take to this activity more than others but most seem to get the idea. Finally Susie feels that it is safe to say that the verb "put" is always accompanied by a preposition.

Images to accompany the song "Roxanne" can be downloaded at www.flickr.com/groups/imagesforlanguagelearning

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