Make Your Brain Hurt

Marcin Wolańczuk, Poland

Marcin Wolańczuk is a teacher at a language school in Zamość, Poland. He is interested in the concept of lexical approach and teaching spoken grammar.
E-mail: marcin_wolanczuk@o2.pl

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Activity
Rationale
Acknowledgement

Activity

Rods are in a bag so that students do not see what is inside. They are supposed to take 10 rods from the bag without looking at them and without knowing what they are going to do with them. When all students in the group have 10 rods each, the teacher establishes that each colour of rods stands for a different word class. Therefore red rods can be nouns, blue rods verbs, white rods adjectives etc. Do not forget about less frequent word classes like adverbs (yellow rods), prepositions (brown rods), conjunctions (black rods) etc. Now students have a collection of sentence slots and their job is to fill them with lexical items in order to make a logically correct sentence. Sentences need to be grammatically correct as well, but the rules of spoken grammar are the most important. They have to use all rods they have taken. So if a student chose 3 red rods, 1 white rod, 3 black rods and 1 blue rod, he or she must create an utterance containing 3 nouns, 1 adjective, 3 conjunctions and 1 verb. So this sentence could look like that:

Mary and, and, and… John find swimming enjoyable.

Or like that:

But, but bus driver or passenger, aren’t hurt?

Rationale

The activity is very artificial however results are pieces of natural (usually spoken) English.

Acknowledgement

I invented this activity together with Pinar and Nuria during very creative classes of Pilgrims’ teachers training course with Paul C. Davis. What is more it was Paul who invented the catchy title for this activity. Thank you again Paul.

Please check the Methodology for Teaching Spoken Grammar and Language course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the What’s New in Language Teaching course at Pilgrims website.