Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 2; March 2000

• Victims of Memory
  
• The Strongest of them All- Tales and Music for Young Learners
• How to Teach Primary English

by Mark Pendergraft, Harper Collins, 1998, £9.99
reviewed in epistolary style by Ana Robles

……….Thank you for sending Victims of Memory. I can't stop reading it and that hasn't happened to me in a long time. It is a terrible book and compelling.

I am not trying to sort out the implications; at the moment I am just reading and being inside the story ( I am already half way through) but at the same time thoughts keep popping up as I read.

How able we are to deceive ourselves. All of us.

Terrible warning there.

The importance of perennial enquiry, the value of confusion and doubt.

How able and powerful our minds are to create the world we want or need. In a way this book brings home the power of NLP techniques. I understand now why NLP time-line therapy is so powerful. It has always puzzled me that re-inventing a theory can have such an effect, considering that we all knew we were inventing something that never happened.

Now it makes sense, or at least it makes more sense.

All that Victims of Memory says about memory has implications for learning.

If we recon struct our memories then we do the same when we retrieve facts, vocabulary, not only childhood memories, this is the concern of this book. How we go about reconstructing memories has got to affect learning.

Once again thank you, this is a book I would never have bought on my own.

by Richard Martin and Petra Koch, Cornelsen, Germany,
ISBN 3-464-04006-2
Video, Teacher's book and Cd rom.

This video and the booklet that goes with it will easily lead you into the powerful area of story-telling in the language classroom, one of the very oldest forms of language teaching.

The video audience are people of late primary/elementary age but the techniques you see Richard Martin using are the stock-in-trade of the story teller over the centuries and across the globe.

The teacher's book gives you step-by-step help with how to get going yourself as a story-teller as the aim of this package cannot be that you simply play Richard's work to your classes but that he inspires you to tell your own stories in your own way.

The Strongest of them All is a really welcome addition to the work already available on story telling-

Here are some other titles in the area:

Gianni Rodari: The Grammar of Fantasy

Andrew Wright: Story-telling with Children, Oxford , 1995

Andrew Wright: Creating Stories with Children, Oxford 1997

John Morgan: Once Upon a Time, Cambridge, 1983

Margaret Parkin Tales for Trainers- Using stories and metaphors to facilitate learning.

Kogan Page, London 1998

by Jim Wingate,
5 GBP + 1.5 for postage and packing, from jenniemunro@compuserve.com

When you read Jim Wingate's many very short and idea-packed booklets you realise how hard it is for him to compress his flood of creativity onto tiny pages. You can feel he is in the wrong medium. The real way of accessing Jim's thought and power is by working with him in a group. Try it sometime.

The book's 50 or so pages are packed with ideas ready for use in the primary school classroom, but for me the most interesting section is the one on Discipline and Control. Here is part of what Jim says:

1. Whose problem is it?

Remember, kinesthetic learners can listen while walking round the room. But do you feel disturbed if a learner is walking while you are talking? If so, your feeling is the problem, not your learner walking. Here are some solutions to your problem: close your eyes; get all the learners to walk while listening; give them a choice: "Walk if you like. Sit if you like. Listen!" Ask the walkers to take off their shoes and walk at the back of the class so the audial learners can't hear them and the visual learners can't see them……………………..

6. 'Bad' pupils are wild horses

When a learner is behaving badly, be friendly but firm and put him right at the edge of the class, just as a mare will drive her misbehaving foal to edge of the herd. ( that's where danger from predators is.) " Stay there until you are ready to join us". Look at the learner on the edge of the group frequently so that when he or she is ready they can rejoin the class group……..

8. Make Allies out of Enemies

For example if one learner is very argumentative in a particular lesson say: " John, when I say something, please disagree". Use the learner's strength in the lesson.