A New Experience - Spatializing Language on a Walk around Canterbury

Rosie Norman, Germany

Rosie Norman is a Pilgrims Executive Trainer and owner and founder of the Language Center in Erlangen, Germany.
E-mail: rosienorm@gmx.de; info@Lc-erlangen.de, www.LC-erlangen.de

If I say in our classrooms today it should be one of our first tasks to find out about our learners, you will probably think this is so obvious that it really does not need to be mentioned. Sometimes, however, we find out ways of exploiting our learner’s intelligences through the strangest of ways.

Last month I was teaching an Italian executive - an eager, pre-intermediate learner who had received very little formal English training and who had gained most of his knowledge through watching videos – much to the annoyance of his wife who, feeling quite left out, regularly removed the headphones!

F, my Italian student, had made quite good progress on his own but now faced a much greater challenge: He had been asked to give a presentation introducing a new system at an International Medical Congress. His first priority therefore was to work on his presentation and deliver it in such as way as to make it understandable for everyone at the congress. The problem was that his knowledge of English had been had been picked up from films such as “Mission Impossible” and “Forest Gump”, so there was a lot of ground work to do.

It soon transpired that he was a visual/kinesthetic learner who needed to see everything written down and who, in fact, often jumped up without being asked and wrote structures on the board, the correctness of which he then asked me to confirm. F also loved using Cuisenaire rods. At every opportunity he would grab the box and ask me to clarify a structure or some grammar or indeed explain it back to me using the rods. His enthusiasm with regard to the rods alone was quite fascinating. But a far more interesting phenomenon was to come.

The week progressed and F was proving to be a really good student but the text he had to learn for his presentation was way beyond anything he was able to produce himself and had, in fact, been written by his boss. I feared this was going to be an uphill battle but I was to be proved wrong.

One afternoon when the tension and hard work of the past week seemed to be getting the better of F. and he seemed extremely tired, I suggested going out for a walk around the town. I intended to use the time to let him relax and show him a few of the sights in Canterbury. So we walked and talked and F. bombarded me with questions about all the things which were still puzzling him.

When we returned to the classroom F. was feeling a little more awake and seemed to be quite excited. I asked him if I should put the things which had been puzzling him on the board but he replied that there was no need, jumped up and wrote everything on the board… I was astounded, everything he had written was completely correct. He told me that he had finally understood when to use the simple past and when to use the present perfect – in his words “next to Tesco’s” and the difference between going to and will “on the way to Fenwick’s” - he had spatialised the grammar in his head using the different places as memory links!

This immediately opened up a new avenue for his presentation. If F had such a high level of spatial intelligence, then it seemed logical to work in this way on his presentation.

I decided to take a risk by using chunks. I knew that it was generally more difficult to take chunks on board but once learnt they would then be much easier to access at a later date. I also felt that working this way may improve his understanding of the meaning of the language used in the presentation and help him to integrate appropriate pauses and correct intonation.

I started by dictating his own presentation to him in meaningful chunks which he wrote on strips of paper. I then asked him to stick the strips on the walls of the classroom at random. Because he is a kinesthetic learner as well as being a visual learner, he then willingly ran from one strip to the other (which were often at opposite ends of the classroom) to piece his presentation together and in doing to automatically integrating the necessary pauses. After a couple of times of running from one piece to the other, he was able to stand still and mentally call up which strip of paper / phrase came next. The next step was to confirm his understanding by using deletion techniques on the board but that proved to be a piece of cake.

Finally, we projected his slides onto the wall and he gave his presentation in a professional and competent manner – not moving from the spot!

This experience showed me how important it is to use the student’s preferences and strengths, in this case spatial/kinesthetic , to reach the goal and just how powerful and useful this utilization can be.

In future, I will be looking for ways of introducing structures or practicing vocabulary in different locations – other parts of the school, different classrooms, outside - in order to make best use of the experience gained above. I can really recommend it.

Please check the Teaching English Through Multiple Intelligences course at Pilgrims website.