Editorial
For more ideas on using the coursebook creatively, please look at: The Alternative Way: Green Line 2 Ernst Klett Verlag GmbH by Mario Rinvolucri in the July 2007 issue of HLT.
Visit the publisher’s website at
www.klett.de/sixcms/list.php?page=titelfamilie&titelfamilie=Green+Line

The Alternative Way: Green Line 3 Klett Ernst Klett Verlag GmbH

Mario Rinvolucri, UK

Mario Rinvolucri teacher, teacher trainer and author. He has worked for Pilgrims for over 30 years and used to edit Humanising Language Teaching. Gill Johnson and Mario have a book out with Delta Publishing in 2009: “Culture in our classrooms”. An exciting collaboration. John Morgan taught Mario to think less crudely while preparing “Once Upon a time”for CUP and “Vocabulary” for OUP, back in the 80’s of last century. “Dictation”, ( CUP) is one of five books that Paul Davis and Mario have written together. “Laboration” is good but “Collaboration” is ten times better. E-mail: mario@pilgrims.co.uk

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Introduction
With neither head nor tail
Enrolling as a character
Speaking clearly and listening well
Grammar practice- relative pronouns
Cooperative dictation
Words in my house
From writing to reading
Family sayings
Quantification dictation
Grammar letter
The elastic band word stress exercise
Sentences to paragraphs as pre-reading activity
3rd Conditional near-miss stories
From blank page to reading text

Introduction

I am told that some teachers using Green Line 1 and Green Line 2 have found the “tipps” I wrote for these two volumes useful with their students. Perhaps this is what has prompted the people at Klett to ask me to provide a new set of teaching suggestions for Green Line 3.

I am aware that I am a “guest methodologist” and that in this role my task is to look at some of the texts in the book with a fresh eye and see what new possibilities they offer. My role is not to upset the tripartite balance between you, the coursebook authors and your students.

Some of the ideas I suggest will make sense to you and some will not appeal. Some of the suggestions that you like will go down well with your classes and some things that you like and want to use will bomb. Exercises, as we all know, can go pear-shaped because of the time of day, because of the mood the group brought with them from the last lesson or because certain leading students take against the particular task.

My hope is that some of the activities will go so well in your classes that they are admitted to your personal repertoire of staple procedures. This has to be the hope in the heart of any methodologist, and there is plenty of evidence that such miracles do, from time to time, happen!

The set of teaching techniques presented here are** different to the ideas proposed in my “tipps” in the two previous books, so if you find good things in this book, then have a look back over the exercise proposals in the earlier books, as many of the ideas are generic and so applicable to different texts.

You will possibly find yourself looking at an exercise suggestion and realizing that there is a much better way of doing it. If you find that your students’ reaction confirms your insight you may decide to share the new exercise you have thus created with fellow language teachers.

Grammar note:

**You will have noticed the use of “are” with a singular subject, “the set of….”. I guess I would have marked this wrong in a student’s work back in the sixties or seventies of last century. This kind of loosening of strict grammatical concordance is now common in the private and public speech of university-educated middle class Brits. By my criteria and those of The Cambridge Grammar of English, ( Carter and McCarthy) this makes it inevitably linguistically acceptable.

With neither head nor tail

Page 10 A New Trick

1. In your preparation photocopy the text below so that every three students can be given a copy.
2. In class tell the students to shut their books and form groups of three. Give each group a copy of the head and tail-less text: A new ric
   
   aur is ractisin at pi katepar in irmingha for a big ven ex ee .
   
   Harry: Wow , aur ! I’ve eve ee ha ric efor ! It’s rillian . Who augh you?
   
   Laura: obod . It’s my own pecia ric . I’m oin to do it in the ompetitio ex ee .
   
   Harry: it a rea new ric ik ha I’m ur you’ll win . il you eac me leas ?
   he I’ll av a ette han in the oy ‘ ompetitio .
   
   Laura: Oh I aven’ got im now. My ad’ ickin me up oo .
   
   Harry: el , et’ ee er gai omorro . I’ll pay for ou icke , no roble .
   
   Laura: Hm. I’m atchin the big ootbal atc on TV omorro .
   
   Harry: Me, too. But the atc oesn’ go on the hol day, oe it?
3. Tell the class that the title of the passage is A New Trick
   Ask the students to listen as you read the full text to them and to follow
   the truncated text with their eyes. Read fairly fast.
   Now ask them to add the missing letters, working in their teams of three.
4. Tell them to open the book and check their texts against the book version.

Pluses: in this activity students with good aural memories help the students who naturally tend to accomplish the task in visual puzzle-solving mode.
Both approaches are useful. Done more than once this exercise helps improve students’ spelling.

Minuses: some students are put off by the Russian salad look of the page.

Enrolling as a character

Page 10 A New Trick

1. Once the students have done normal language work on the conversation
   between Laura and Harry, ask them to come to the board and write adjectives
   on the board, in mother tongue or English, that describe Laura.
2. Ask the students as a group to turn all the mother tongue adjectives on the board into English. You help when they get stuck. All the German words should vanish into English!
3. Ask each student to draw a picture of the way they imagine Laura’s face.
   Ask them to draw their picture using the whole of an A 4 page.
4. Tell the class that they are going to interview Laura about her life and about her childhood. As each student to write 7 questions directly addressed to Laura in the second person. Move round the room helping the students with grammar and giving them new words they need.
5. Stick six of the Laura portraits on the board above an empty chair.
   Ask for a volunteer to come and sit in the empty chair and become Laura.
   The volunteer can be a girl or a boy.
6. Your role now is a back seat one as the students ask “Laura” the questions they have written and more that occur to them during the interview.
7. Round off the exercise by asking “Laura” how he or she felt and by asking some of the interviewers how they felt. Make sure the “Laura” impersonator is properly out of role.

1. Bring in a poster or big photo of a person well known to your students. Your students interview the picture following steps 4 to 7 above. (You tell them that the person in the picture has lost his or her voice and that you need a “volunteer voice”.)
   If you use the picture of a well-know contemporary person the students are working with information they have previously heard or read.
2. You may choose to bring in a more ambiguous and distant picture e.g. the picture of an Ancient Egyptian courtier or the head of person so old that no one is sure of their gender. This provokes more imaginative and projective interviewing.
3. You group the students in fours or fives. You ask one person in each group to
   bring to mind an old person they know and whom they are willing to talk about in their group. You ask them how the old person is dressed, how they typically sit and what sort of voice they have.

You ask the volunteer student to imitate the seated posture of their old person and to speak in a voice similar to theirs, i.e. to step into role.
The other students in the fivesome then interview the old person.
In a warmed-up group of students this exercise can become so fascinating they nearly forget they are speaking and usefully fumbling and stumbling in a foreign tongue.

Acknowledgement: these ideas are inspired by John Morgan’s section of ‘The Standby Book’, ed. Lindstromberg

Pluses: for some, even many, students speaking English is easier when they are playing a role. A second plus is that Laura, on Page 10, is a “third person” character. She connects with Harry but not directly with us.
In the role play Laura goes into I-you mode with the interviewing students. The I- you mode is more gripping than “third person” work when you are learning a foreign language.

Minuses: if the students are not warmed up and are not used to this kind of activity, you can expect that the first run-through of an activity like this will be angular, stilted and lacking in flow and rhythm. Things usually get better second time round.

When you first meet this set of role-playing ideas you may dismiss them as being contrivances from the dark side of the moon.

Speaking clearly and listening well

Page 13 Did you know?

1. In preparation, add two more surprising paragraphs to the 6 given on Page 13. Choose things that are topical at this time in your part of the world. Make sure you use relative clauses in your new paragraphs!
   You now have 8 paragraphs. Photocopy them so that you can give one paragraph to each
   person in the class. Do the necessary scissors work.
2. Ask the students to make groups of 8, or thereabouts.
   Within each eightsome give each student a different paragraph. Give the longer
   paragraphs to the stronger students.
   Tell them to read their text over and over until they have it firmly memorized.
3. The students put their texts down on their chairs, stand up and find a partner within their own group. Each student tells the other their own memorized text. The listening student needs to pay a lot of attention as s/he needs to remember the new text.
   
   The students change partners within their group of eight. They tell their new partner
   the paragraph they have just heard.
   
   Second change of partner. They tell their partner the last paragraph they have heard.
   
   Third change of partner. They tell their partner the last paragraph they have heard.
4. bring the whole class back together and ask three or four people to recite the last paragraph they have heard. After each recitation allow the “experts” on this paragraph to add things that have been missed out and correct things that have been said wrong.

Pluses: This activity entails accurate and clear speaking and attentive, receptive listening. It puts social pressure on the lazier students to perform.

Minuses: Students who live very visually or very kinaesthetically are at a disadvantage compared to auditorily acute students. But then, language is primarily a reality in the world of sound.

Grammar practice- relative pronouns

Page14

1. Get a volunteer student to sit with you in front of the class. The student is to ask
   you one simple question, but to put it to you over and over again. They should question
   you in a kindly way.
   The question is: Who are you?
   
   Your demonstration could go something like this:
   
   ST: Who are you?
   T: I’m a teacher.
   ST : Who are you?
   T. Well, I’m your teacher.
   ST: Who are you?
   T: I’m a teacher who is strict about homework.
   ST: Who are you?
   T: I’m a person that gets cross quite easily.
   ST: Who are you?
   T: I’m a person whose children come to this school etc…….
2. Group the students in threes. Person A is the questioner , Person B is to give the
   answers and Person C writes all the answers down. They use the insistence question
   who are you? Tell them to do two minutes of this. You time it.
3. Person C then reads B’s answers to the others and the groups can check with you for language accuracy.
4. They swap roles twice and repeat Steps ii) and iii)

Variation: If you want the students to work on spatial prepositions then have them use the repeated question: Where do you live?

Pluses: this activity has students speaking about themselves in a meaningful way while virtually locked into a drill pattern. Naturally they are thinking about themselves much more than about language.

Minuses: some introverted students may sometimes blurt out things they later regret having said. This is a disadvantage with this sort of exercise in any of the rather reticent North European cultures. You wouldn’t need to worry about this if you were working in Brazil!

Cooperative dictation

Page 16 Eddie the Eagle

1. In preparation, choose a slice of the text near the middle and make 6 photocopies of it. I would suggest lines 26 to 51.
2. Have the students group themselves in fours at one end of the classroom. Stick your six copies to the wall at the other end of the room. Tell the students to shut their coursebooks.
3. Ask the students to decide who is A, B C and D in their four. Tell the A and the B people from each four to go to the opposite wall, read a few words of the text, run back across the room and dictate the words to C and D. A and B then dash back to bring more text back and dictate it to C and D. Make it clear to the students that A and B should collaborate closely and make sure that C and D both take down the dictation separately but suggest they help each other with words that are hard to spell..
4. Half way through the exercise ask the “dictators” to reverse roles with the writers. A and B continue the texts started by C and D.
5. When the running is done ask the students to open their book s to Page 16 and check their texts.

Note: This exercise is a significant variation of my “Tipp” ‘Running Dictation’, in Green Line 1 T. Bk, P……The main difference between the two processes is that in ‘Cooperative Dictation’ each task is performed by two students who help each other out.
The proverb that two heads are better then one can sometimes be true!

Acknowledgement: On Jan 3rd 2008 I presented Running Dictation to a group of London Further Education teachers. One of them offered the group the variation I am presenting to you here. I am simply acting as a transmitter wire. It is this sort of “ exercise dialogue” that allows EFL techniques to creatively multiply.

Pluses: when you present the students with a fairly long text like that on P 16-17 it makes sense to get them working on parts of it actively. Movement dictation is rapidly becoming a “classic” exercise across World EFL

Minuses: This is a boisterous exercise which is appropriate for a teenage group but which can get noisy. It is worth maybe warning colleagues working in adjacent rooms. A silent music lesson is hard to imagine…ditto a silent language lesson.

Words in my house

Page 33 The Diary and the vocabulary list page 162

1. tell each student to take an A 3 sheet of paper. ( It is easy to stick two pieces of A 4 together.)
2. Ask each student to draw a large ground plan of their flat or house. ( If it is a two or more storey house, tell them to choose one of the floors only) Tell them they have 5 minutes to make the drawing. Tell them to put in as much detail, furniture etc… as they can but not, at this stage, to write on the plan.
3. Ask them to read page 162 that gives all the new words in The Diary with explanations.
   Now tell them to write the words and phrases in the places they feel appropriate
   in the floor plan. Give some examples:
   
   You might put great-great-grandmother in the easy chair near the fireplace because your gran will often sit in this sort of place.
   
   You might put ending in the waste bin in the kitchen.
   
   You might put to drown on the table where you do your maths homework.
   
   Etc…..
   
   Tell the student to do their best to find appropriate places on their ground plan for all the 30 + words in the vocab list.
4. when most students have “classified” more than half the words stop the exercise and
   group them in fours. They show their plans to each other and explain why they have placed the words as they did.
5. Round off the exercise by calling out a few of the words and asking who put
   this particular word where. Tell the students that placing words in a mental space is a classical memory technique which goes back at least to Ancient Greek times.

Acknowledgement: This is way of spatialising words is from Vocabulary, Morgan et al, OUP 2nd edition 2004

Pluses: This sort of categorization appeals to students with a strong spatial intelligence and also to those of them who are divergent rather than convergent thinkers. The exercise may please some of the “weirder” folk in your class. When students come to revise vocabulary for a test the ground plan layout is much more interesting than parallel German-English lists.

Minuses: Some students find it hard to get their heads round the exercise when you first present it and have a “Quatsch!” sort of reaction. You need to help them over this stage by giving them more examples.

From writing to reading

Page 38 The ruby in the smoke

1. before the students work on this text write the following words up on the board( the words are atmospheric ones taken from the first 35 lines of the text):
   
   grey     scared          empty       old      thin
   
   brown         careful
   
   not large         cold      too big       untidy        sad
2. Ask each student to write five short sentences and to include between one and three of the above words in each of their sentences. Tell the students the sentences can tell a story or they can equally well be separate.
   Look over people’s shoulders and help with vocabulary and grammar.
3. Ask the students to get up, move about the room and read their sentences to each other.
4. Read lines 1- 36 of the passage as atmospherically and dramatically as you can. They listen with eyes shut. Play them the CD of the same lines. They listen with eyes shut.
   Now ask them to read the text for themselves.

Pluses: The active, creative writing phase opens students up to the power of these very simple, descriptive words. It prepares them to be receptive in both listening and reading.

Minuses: You may feel iffy about reading the lines yourself. For sure, your English may not be as 100% native sounding as the voices on the CD, but the students are learning English from you. The book and the CDs are psychologically secondary, in your students’ minds, to the fully human, three dimensional reality of Frau/Herr X, their English teacher, i.e. you.

Family sayings

Page 43 Grandpa’s wise words

1. In preparation, think of some of the wise things your parents and grand parents said to you . Just to get you thinking, here are some of the childhood injunctions I remember:
   
   My German Nan: Morgen Morgen, nur nich heute, sagen alle faule Leute
   My mother: Lift your feet up- shoe leather costs money!
   My father: Mario, distraction will be your ruin……
   
   Forget mine and prepare three or four wise dicta you remember from your childhood.
2. In class write these up on the board……..high in the top left hand corner…
   Ask students to come and write parental injunctions from their family up on the board. Tell the students to write these in English if they can, and if not in German. Fill the board with this wisdom!
3. With help from the students translate all the utterances that are in German into English. Rub the German sentences out as you go along.
4. group the students in fours to decide which of the sayings on the board they would feel happy exposing their own children to. Ask them to choose the three they feel most appropriate for the next generation.
5. Have the board wiped clean. Ask each group to come up and write up the three sayings they are happy to pass on the next generation.

Pluses: In this activity students draw on powerful language from their home environment. This naturally comes in mother tongue and so the language challenge is to re-render it in English. In the exercise deep, feelingful language from home is transformed” into middle-distance English, thus making the target language a bit more emotionally real and close.

Minuses: Some introverted students feel embarrassed in this sort of activity- don’t press them- if they don’t want to contribute family sayings they can “pass”.

Quantification dictation

Page 45 Myself or me

1. Dictate the sentences below to the class. Each student should complete the sentence writing in the age which was true for them.
   Have one average-level student do their dictation on the board.
1. I could feed myself by around the age of…….. ( read with rising intonation)
2. I was able to get dressed by myself by the time I was……..
   ( check that everybody remembers to quantify)
3. I could go to the loo on my own when I was…….
4. I could read to myself by……..
5. I began to do up my car seat belt myself when I was……….
6. They allowed me to cross the road by myself when I got to around….
7. My parents let me go to school on my own at something like….…..
8. I taught myself to swim at……….
2. Group the students in fours to share those first moments on independence!
3. Get the class to help correct the student text on the board.

Acknowledgement: This technique comes from ‘Dictation Many Ways’, Davis et al, CUP.

Pluses: this little autobiographical trip helps make the use of “myself” more grounded and real. Anchoring the language in the teenagers’ own experience is one way of ensuring fast and deep learning.

Minuses: any personalisation runs the risk, with a few students, of feeling invasive.

Grammar letter

Page 47 Chatroom Messages , the so-called “2nd conditional”

1. To introduce the new grammar, write your students a “ grammar letter” about how you would feel and react if you belonged to the other gender group. You letter might start:
   
   Dear Everybody,
   I am sitting at my computer and wondering how things would be if I was a man, instead of a woman. How would the world look to me? Would people see different to me? If I were a man I would probably….……..
   
   Give yourself temporarily to the fantasy and complete a short personal letter to your students.
   Copy the letter so each person gets one.
2. In class give out your letter. They read it silently.
3. Use the board to explain how this structure works.
4. Ask the students to work on their own and write you a letter in which they talk about how they would feel as the other sex. Take in the letters.
5. In the next class go through any mistakes they have made with the target structure.

Acknowledgement: This activity comes from ‘Humanising your Coursebook’, Rinvolucri, Delta 2002.

Variations: you can use the “grammar letter” technique to present virtually any structure to the class. It is important that your letter really is a letter to the students and not just a grammar presentation text. The students need to learn something mildly interesting about you and your world. “Grammar letter” is a generic technique that works across levels.

Pluses: personalised presentation of structures makes this phase of the lesson much less dry than when you use impersonal texts for the same purpose. Your students would have to be anaesthetized not to be interested in you as a person.

Minuses: At first writing “grammar letters” can mop up too much of your out-of-lesson, professional time. I would suggest that if you take more then 15-20 minutes to create your letter, then this is a technique to bypass. There is a danger that you may stock-pile “grammar letters” and end up using the same texts year after year. If the technique begins to taste stale to you, the students will pick up on it. They have terrifyingly accurate noses.

The elastic band word stress exercise

Page 54 Sounds: word stress

1. Put all the words in this set up on the board.
   Give the students a rubber band each.
   Demonstrate what they are going to do: Say answerphone and as you say it take
   an elastic band with two hands and pull your hands away from each other big time for
   the stressed syllable and give two little pulls for the two unstressed syllables.
   For laptop you give two equal strength pulls.
2. Have all the students standing facing you with elastic bands at the ready.
   
   Run through all the words on the board, saying them loudly yourself and leading the
   elastic banding. They pull their bands and shout the words.
   
   Say the words again but do not model the actions. They do the actions and repeat the words.

Acknowledgement: I learnt this technique from Chaz Pugliese, the Pilgrims Teacher Training DOS.

Pluses: Chaz’s activity gets people up and moving, and in a linguistically purposeful way. It only takes between five and 8 minutes and it appeals to people with both musical and kinaesthetic intelligences.

Minuses: the game may at first seem a bit childish to some mid teenagers.

Sentences to paragraphs as pre-reading activity

Page 60 Welsh relatives

1. With books shut and before they study the passage dictate :
   I miss my aunts and uncles (line 8)
   Now tell the students to write the next two short sentences they imagine.
   Tell them to read the three sentences on their page to their neighbours,
2. Dictate: They work on projects for the poor
   Tell the students to write the next two short sentences they imagine.
   Again they share what they have written with people near them.
3. Repeat the above with this sentence: D’you remember that guy we saw?
4. Dictate: The music he listens to is awful
   Tell the students to imagine the two sentences that come before this one.
   They compare their texts with those of their neighbours.
   
   ….and now books open for the reading….

Pluses: the students go from modest creative writing into having a look at the whole text. Before they meet the text they have already imaginatively “domesticated” a bit of it.

Minuses: the writing takes 20 -30 minutes and some colleagues will find this too long as a lead-in to reading

3rd Conditional near-miss stories

Page 80 Revision of if clauses

1. In preparation, bring to mind the story of near-miss you have had and be ready to tell it in class. Give the story a near-miss punch-line…….something like, for example:
   
   If the lorry wheel had been six inches nearer the toddler’s bootee, he’d’ve been a goner.
2. In class, tell your near-miss story and put your punch-line up on the board.
   Ask if any of the students have a near-miss story to tell. Help the first volunteer to tell their story, supplying any words needed, and help them to get their punch-line up on the board correctly.
   Do the same with a second volunteer.
3. Ask the students to stand up, mill around and find some one to tell them a near-miss story. (They will tend to cluster round the more extrovert and self-expressive students).
4. Round off this part of the lesson by asking all the story tellers to put their punch-lines on the board which normally leads to some of the stories being re-told.

Variation: a sadder version of this activity has students working on very good things that nearly happened, but didn’t. Near successes!

Acknowledgement: this idea is from ‘Grammar in Action Again’, Christine Frank et al, Pergamon.

Pluses: the activity brings the grammar structure off the page and uses it to carry vivid student experience. It breathes emotional life into the so-called third conditional.

Minuses: at Green Line 3 level the activity is a bit elitist, favouring the students who already have a better command of English.

3rd From blank page to reading text

Page 97 Emergency on the motor way

1. Tell each student to take a blank sheet of paper.
   Tell the students that the page has a transcript of a TV reporter’s script. written on it in invisible ink.
   The story is about a lorry, a coach and a crash on the motorway.
   
   Ask them to stare at the page until, here and there, some words become visible.
   Ask them to write down 10-12 of these words wherever they “appear” on the page.
2. Tell the students to swap papers with a partner. They now try and write the whole passage from the words their partner has “seen” and written down.
3. Ask four of five students round the group to read out what they have written to the whole class.
4. Books open on P 97 so they can compare their texts to the book text.

Acknowledgement: this idea is developed from one in ‘Vocabulary’, Morgan et al, OUP

Pluses: students shock themselves with how well their imaginations work when confronted with a page if invisible writing! This is a joyous exercise.

Minuses: many teachers find it hard to believe this mechanism will work in anybody’s class, let alone in theirs. I have to admit that when I first tried the activity I had my heart in my mouth and was ready with something else to do, should the activity go pear-shaped. Instead it went swimmingly. The exercise is unlikely to work well unless the student group is decently warmed up..

Please check the Making the Most of a Coursebook course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.