Bill Lee Speaks to us from the 1970’s
selected by Mario Rinvolucri, UK
The techniques have been selected by Mario Rinvolucri, a Pilgrims associate, well known as author of Grammar Games, CUP, sparsely known for a book on Story-telling Once Upon A A Time, CUP, co-authored with John Morgan, and 98% unknown for Culture in Our Classroom , written with Gill Johnson, first published by Delta, and now efficiently resuscitated by Klett Verlag, Germany. Mario could be accused of spending too much time dreaming about practical, classroom techniques.
Menu
To “coffee-pot”
Remembering
Lively letters
Going away
Rhymes and songs
About Bill Lee
Ask one student to decide on a verb they want the rest of the class to guess. If this student has decided that “ to coffee pot” means “to sleep”, the questioning could go like this:
Student 1 : Where do you coffee pot?
Student question master: You can coffeepot almost anywhere.
Student 2: Is coffee potting easy?
Question master: Easy for most people........
Student 3: When do you coffee-pot?
Question master: Mostly at night.
Student 4: ..... “ to make love”?
Question master: Nope.......less exciting...... etc..........
This exercise comes from page 43 of Bill Lee’s Language teaching Games and Contests, OUP 1979. His dedication in the book reads: “To all teachers who believe that in foreign language teaching enjoyment and success go together.” Bill Lee has his own easy way of writing exercises. Here is a typical example of his relaxed , by-the- fireside way of suggesting what you might do in the classroom:
Simple sketches are drawn on the board. If you have a long stretch of board there can be several student artists drawing at once. They can be, for instance, three learners from each of two teams. As soon as they have finished, they print neatly under each drawing what it is supposed to be ( a chicken, a tree an, aeroplane etc). The class is given a few moments to look at these pictures and words, then the teacher rubs the words out and the class write them from memory. cued by the drawings.
Then other learners come forward to draw and name other things and the procedure is repeated. With a quick class this can be done three or four times. The team with the most verbs right, legible and correctly spelt, is the winner.
This Bill Lee idea is a way of getting students to begin to make the Western written alphabet their own. To model what you want the students to do write a big S in front of the class and give it snake’s head. Thin k of K as a soldier marching and draw the picture next to the letter. Give a lower case m a sheep’s head . Show capital T as an umbrella.....etc.....
Give out lined paper , put the students in threes and ask them to “picture” as many of the lower and upper case letters as they can. Make clear to them that some letters go on the line and others are both above and below the line.
Round off the exercise by getting students to come together in groups of a six to eight and share their visualisations.
The teacher asks the students to work in pairs and make a list of 12 things they would want to take on a trip to Russia. Tell them to use their dictionaries. Go round the class helping where needed.
Draw the class back together and ask for a volunteer to start with this sentence:
“ On my trip to Russia I’ll take a bag and...............” The student fills in with one of their items.
Ask for a volunteer who repeats the sentence and adds one item of their own . As the sentence gets longer the volunteer will need more prompting from others in the group.
Round off the exercise by getting a student to put the group’s long sentence up so everybody can read it and copy it into their notebooks.
Methodological and emotional question: in one of your classes what would you do about wrong sounds, wrong pitch, wrong rhythm? Would you want to correct or would you want the exercise to take its natural course and why?)
Choose a well known song like:
My bonnie lies over the ocean,
My bonnie lies over the sea,
My bonnie lies over the ocean
Oh, bring back my bonnie to me
Bring back, bring back,
Bring back my bonnie to me, to me;
Bring back, bring back
Oh bring back my bonnie to me.
Dictate the text to the class.
Sing the rhyme through normally with you class a couple of times, so they get the tune.
Help with any unknown words.
Now get everybody to sing it twice, moving mouth and lips but WITHOUT sound
Now sing it twice in a whisper.
Sing it twice in a low, low voice.
Sing it twice with full voice.
Sing tit twice in high falsetto.
Finally. sing it laughingly a couple of times. (sardonically?)
Ask you class to think of other barriers “my bonnie” could be beyond: e.g.: mountains, hills, desert, sand, river, rapids, marshes, bog, etc.
Sing the song with the new “barrier” words but change LIES to IS.
Ask the students if there is a person who is far away and whom they miss. Get the group to sing the ditty replacing “ my bonnie” with the name of this person.
As well as being a thoughtful methodologist Bill Lee was a dedicated language teacher and language learner. He went to Prague, learnt Czech from scratch and his wife was from there.
In 1967 he founded the ATEFL language teachers’ association which we know today as IATEFL , and which annually brings together between 2000 and 3000 teachers from all over the world.
He was the founding editor of Oxford University Press’s ELT Journal.
Bill trained students to teach English as an FL at the Institute Of Education and worked on an MA course at SOAS (School of African and Asian Studies)
Faults? Yes , having founded IATEFL he seemed, like Mugabe and other dedicated dictators, to think he was irreplaceable as the Big Chief. This proved not to be the case when he was ousted by an academic putsch in 1984.
Born 1911
Obit 1996 ......22 years ago. Thank you Bill.
|
